MONTENEGRO & DALMATIA: New Puppets

Last week the Axis carved two more satrapies out of conquered Yugoslavia and announced their puppet leaders. As in the case of the new “independent” Croatia, Adolf Hitler let the announcements come from a man who needs all the seeming importance he can get—Benito Mussolini.

Montenegro is to return to the map as a “principality” of about the size of Montenegro in 1914. That craggy land just north of Albania and east of the coastal city of Dubrovnik covered 5,600 square miles. The territory today holds some 500,000 people. So stonily bleak is the land that legend says that God carried a sack of stones in making the world and that it burst asunder over Montenegro.

Behind their mountain bastions the gaunt, weather-beaten, philosophic Montenegrins, mostly shepherds and tillers of sparse, rock-bound little fields, staved off the furious Turks for 500 years. Following Russia’s Pan-Slav appeals for centuries, Montenegro in World War I joined Serbia and Russia against the Central Powers.

But, fearing absorption by Serbia, Montenegro’s patriarchal King Nicolas (Nikita) Petrovitch and his son Crown Prince Danilo dickered unsuccessfully with Austria and finally fled to Italy, whose Queen Elena is Nikita’s daughter. Montenegro thereafter deposed the Petrovitch dynasty, became part of Yugoslavia.

Montenegro’s new puppet ruler, announced last week, will be King Nikita’s 32-year-old grandson Michael, only surviving male Petrovitch, son of Nikita’s second son Mirko, nephew of Italy’s Queen Elena. In recent years tall, delicate, sober Michael, King in Exile of Montenegro, has had an allowance from Yugoslavia to encourage his exile, has spent much time on the French Riviera, leading a cautious sporting life out of respect for the tuberculosis which killed several of his brothers and sisters.

Dalmatia was the second satrapy announced last week. It will be an Italian “governorship” of the provinces of Zara Split and Cattaro stretching down the Adriatic s eastern shore some 210 miles and 4,900 square miles between the puppetality of Croatia and Albania. Its population of 900,000 is only about a quarter Italian, mostly in the seaboard cities, and three-quarters Croat, mostly in the back country. The Dalmatian sliver is also split geographically, north and south, by the Dinaric Alps, which rise from the shores of the Adriatic. Never independent, Dalmatia’s fishermen and farmers were for centuries under Venice, from which they got an exquisite architectural heritage. They were ruled by Austria from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 until after World War I.

The puppet Governor of Dalmatia, directly responsible to the Duce, will be sleek, sartorial Giuseppe Bastianini, 42, early Fascist street fighter and Party official who became the great friend of Count Galeazzo Ciano and rose to be Italy’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.

Fortnight ago the Axis learned a lesson in the possible dangers of Balkan partitioning. On a tour of the Albanian battlefields went Italy’s and Albania’s little 71-year-old King Vittorio Emanuele III. While he was motoring toward the Tirana airport with Albanian Premier Shefket Verlaci, a 19-year-old Greek named Vasil Laci Mihailoff fired four wild pistol shots at the King’s car. On Mihailoff’s person the police later found “futuristic poems” dealing with “love and hatred among farm animals.” The Italians promptly dubbed Mihailoff a “poetic maniac” and further claimed that his target had been not the King, but Premier Verlaci.