– Marijan F. Kranjc, Major General (Retired) –
The mysterious death of Colonel-General Arso Jovanović, Chief of the Supreme Headquarters of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (NOVJ), has finally been revealed!
In my book Conspiracies and Assassinations of Tito, Grosuplje, 2004, I wrote the following in a special chapter entitled Military, Military-Security and Generals’ Conspiracies (August 1948 to 1979) on pages 246-247:
“The Mysterious Death of Colonel-General Arso Jovanović — August 1948
“In the book by retired Colonel Ivan Matović, Commander with a Halo of a Martyr, the work and life of Colonel-General Arso Jovanović is presented in vivid detail. Let us recall that in early 1944, Tito sent him to Slovenia along with a group of Serbian and Montenegrin partisan officers as a kind of assistance to the Slovenian partisan army. Although Colonel Arso Jovanović at the time intended to impose order among the Slovenian partisans, he actually only provoked a dispute between Kardelj and Tito. Likely also with Tito himself, although he, as a former Royal Army captain and Chief of the Supreme Headquarters of the NOVJ, became the first partisan general. He was a principled man and did not engage in party factional behaviour. Of course, as a true Montenegrin, he had deep respect for the Soviet Union and for Stalin, and as a strategist, he believed that the Red Army was the first and natural ally in the fight against fascism! He had several serious discussions with Tito on this matter, but Arso Jovanović firmly stood by his beliefs. As Chief of the Supreme Headquarters of the NOVJ and (candidate) Chief of the new General Staff of the Yugoslav Army, he was first on the list for training at the highest Soviet military academy, the ‘Voroshilov’ Academy. When he became an agent of one of the Soviet intelligence-security services is not particularly important, since the then OZNA or military KOS quickly registered General Arso Jovanović’s pro-Soviet views. Naturally, Tito was informed of this. That is why, after returning from Moscow, General Arso Jovanović was appointed head of the Higher Military Academy, which was effectively a demotion.
“After the publication of the Cominform Resolution, General Arso Jovanović clearly and unequivocally took Stalin’s side and stood against Tito! No friendly conversation or advice could sway his conviction, not even a personal talk with Tito at Brdo near Kranj. Because he was also actively carrying out tasks for the Soviet intelligence service, he was arrested on August 4, 1948 and taken to a KOS military prison. What happened there can only be imagined. Based on various details, Colonel Matović gathered numerous facts and even listed 29 possible versions of General Arso Jovanović’s death. Personally, I lean toward the version in which General Arso Jovanović was executed in the military investigation prison. One of the older Slovenian KOS officers, Colonel T., told me in Split in 1964 that Colonel Ilija Kostić, then Deputy Chief of KOS, had boasted that he had managed to ‘break’ General Arso Jovanović — through torture, of course. A trial was out of the question. They had to eliminate him and very likely transported his body to the site of a (staged) escape attempt to Romania! In the book Kill Your Neighbour, Belgrade, 1996, the author, Marko Lopušina, even suggested that the execution may have been personally carried out by Lieutenant General Jefto Šašić, then Chief of the KOS Department of the Yugoslav Army.
“The official version, dated August 18, 1948, stated that General Arso Jovanović was killed during the night of August 11-12, 1948 near Vršac on the Romanian-Yugoslav border, while allegedly trying to flee the country in a Cominformist group with General Branko Petričević and Colonel Vlado Dapčević.
“Colonel Vlado Dapčević attempted to defect from Yugoslavia two more times. The second time he succeeded. For a long time, he led the Cominformist émigré movement, likely with the tacit approval of the Yugoslav Army. I happened to meet him in Brussels in 1971, and later he was ‘transported’ from Romania back to Yugoslavia, where he was sentenced to prison. He died a few years ago as a retired colonel. He took his secret to the grave — including whether General Arso Jovanović reached the border alive or had already been transported there dead! That is why even today, the grave of Arso Jovanović has never been found.”
Therefore, the recent revelation by my former colleague Roman Leljak — that General Arso Jovanović was killed publicly during a personal altercation with General Šašić — is not all that surprising. The news initially seemed shocking, since Mihailo Golob-Mirko, a former UDBA captain, gave sworn court testimony about the dispute and the subsequent staging of the escape at the border itself.1 Personally, I believe that certain other elements of Golob’s testimony still need to be verified for credibility.
Namely, Colonel Matović, in the aforementioned book, on pages 810-834, described in considerable detail as many as twenty-nine different versions of General Arso Jovanović’s death. It will therefore be interesting to briefly summarize them — especially since a few Slovenians are also among the “witnesses and observers”! In fact, my intention is that now, with the crime nearly fully exposed, we examine all presented and possible versions, to determine whether it is truly necessary for researchers to pursue entirely senseless, subjective or even misleading assumptions. Now that we know the eventual outcome, it will be very interesting to see whether the author was close to the truth… Here are the summaries, in brief:
— A senior UDBA officer told the author that he knew who had killed Arso Jovanović in the basement of a house in Banjica, but did not want to provide a written statement.
— A retired senior KOS officer told academician Miomir Dašić from Berane not to receive visits from a KOS captain from that town, who had shot Arso Jovanović in the General Staff office — but Dašić refused to reveal the names of either officer to the author.
— A contributor to Književne novine in Belgrade told academician Dragoslav Mihajlović in 1999 that Arso Jovanović was executed in Belgrade, but he would not reveal the executor’s name or the location of the crime to the author.
— Colonel-General Radovan Vukanović, a friend of Arso’s, told the author that Lieutenant Colonel Savić Mičković, an OZNA agent, had reported to his commander in Belgrade that Arso Jovanović was killed in Belgrade and his body later transported to the border.
— Several KOS officers told the author that Arso Jovanović’s body had either been thrown into the Danube or Sava rivers, or buried on Avala, near the White Palace, or even at Brdo near Kranj (where Tito had his final conversation with General Arso Jovanović).
— Mile Vukmirović, the Party secretary in Vršac in 1948, told his relative General Blažo Jovanović that he had arranged a guide to the border for a group of three Cominformists, where a shooting occurred — making it possible that General Arso Jovanović survived and later returned to Belgrade.
— Colonel Vlado Dapčević, a member of the fleeing Cominformist group, confirmed during both the 1950 and 1999 trials that General Arso Jovanović was killed while attempting to cross the border, but in 1999 he refused to explain several inconsistencies in his testimony! (This supports my earlier remark that Vlado Dapčević took the secret of his death to the grave — and also that, as a KOS collaborator, he “led” the Cominformist émigré movement in the USSR, and later in Belgium and Romania.)
— B. Kovačević, a militiaman, “confessed” in court that he had been at the border on the critical night, had fired at the escapees and killed General Arso Jovanović, but claimed he never saw the body.
— Retired General Boško Todorović, also my acquaintance from the Higher Military School Centre in Pančevo, similarly claimed that he, as a KOS officer on the Vršac border sector, had witnessed the event.
— The author unsuccessfully questioned several senior officers of the People’s Militia about the case in which a militiaman allegedly killed a general, but none of them would speak.
— The author had placed high hopes in Nikola Kmezić, then UDBA commissioner for Vojvodina. Gojko P. Đukić — a Yugoslav Army major and chief of the political department of a division in 1948 — had told him that Nikola Kmezić, in coordination with “Đeđa” (Svetislav Stefanović, deputy to Aleksandar Ranković) and “Jefta” (General Jefto Šašić, head of KOS of the Yugoslav Army), organized the entire staged border incident. However, Kmezić refused to discuss it, claiming the case was of only episodic significance.
— A retired warrant officer, who wished to remain anonymous — a native of Lika — told acquaintances he knew the licence plate number of the military vehicle that transported Arso Jovanović’s body to the border. Some even concluded he may have been the driver. He would say nothing more, claiming he had signed a non-disclosure agreement.
— After the war, General Arso Jovanović had three drivers — all soldiers — and one of them reportedly told Major Božidar Pavičević, a relative of Arso’s, in 1950 that the whole story about a border escape was an outright lie. Interestingly, during the 1950 trial, one of the drivers — soldier Bruno Bensan from Karlovac — appeared as a witness, but the author could not find his name in the list of soldier-drivers assigned to the General Staff.
— Koča Popović, Colonel-General (Retired), was the first to inform Senka, the wife of Arso Jovanović, of his death on August 12, 1948, acting on Marshal Tito’s orders. Later, as Vice President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, he proposed forming a commission to investigate the circumstances of Arso’s death, but the proposal was not accepted.
— In 1959, Prof. Dr. B. Pavičević visited Mitar Bakić, then Secretary of the Federal Assembly, in the hospital. Bakić said he had been unable to help Arso Jovanović because he had been prevented from doing so.
— Mišo Burić, a Yugoslav Army lieutenant, pilot instructor and Cominformist, introduced the author in autumn 1995 in Pančevo to Pero Kumarski, an armourer who claimed to have seen “the body of General Arso Jovanović.” Kumarski said he had spent that night at the border post of Sergeant Stevanović, and that in the morning, Major Kurc, a Slovene and commander of the Vršac border battalion, told him that field guards (civilians) had shot and killed General Arso Jovanović during the night. This conclusion was allegedly confirmed by a joint KOS-UDBA commission. Kumarski further stated that he had indeed seen the general’s body near a jeep and a black car, covered by a military blanket, under which only muddy boots and a general’s cap were visible. The face, of course, he did not see.
— Jagoš Jovanović, a close relative of Arso, told lawyer Milinko B. Stojanović — president of the “Goli Otok” Association of Montenegro — in 1998 that he knew where Arso had been killed and buried, but would not reveal it during his lifetime. The author had previously spoken with Jagoš as well, but had the impression that he did not know the details.
— Slavko Đurić, an 85-year-old farmer from the village of Izbište, wrote in Borba in September 1990 that in 1948 Branko Jeremić, head of the Vršac district, had told him that General Arso Jovanović had been brought to the border in civilian clothing, forced to flee and then shot.
— Milan Vučak from Knin wrote in Politika on September 17, 1994 that in 1952, outside of Vršac, he had seen General Arso Jovanović’s grave, shown to him by Nikola Pavlović, the commander of the school for reserve cavalry officers in Vršac. The author attempted to verify both identities but could not find them in JNA records.
— A retired warrant officer from Pirot informed the author in 1995 that in 1948, while serving as commander of a cavalry platoon in the border zone in Sočica, he had seen a body — he was told it was General Arso Jovanović, who had reportedly bled to death at the border from serious injuries.
— Engineer Milan Egarić told the author in 1995 that the day before his death at the border, General Arso Jovanović had visited the manager of the aviation sports centre in Vršac, and that pilot Pavle Crnjanski had even taken him on a flight to view the panorama of Vršac and the surrounding area.
— The flight story is interesting because rumours had circulated that Arso Jovanović intended to escape using a plane belonging to Ana Pauker, the Romanian Foreign Minister, or something similar. Notably, Arso Jovanović had two relatives who were pilots in the Yugoslav Army, and he would almost certainly have first tried to persuade them to “fly him” abroad.
— During the trial of General Branko Petričević and Colonel Vlado Dapčević in June 1950, it was even said that the three of them initially planned to escape across the border in a tank, supposedly arranged by Arso’s relative Dukljan Vukotić, stationed in Bela Crkva — but they couldn’t find him at home. This was a sheer fabrication: Vukotić was not Arso’s relative, only a neighbour in Belgrade who, on that day, happened to be at his wedding in Budva.
— The “Voroshilovists” — Yugoslav Army generals who studied with Arso Jovanović in the USSR — assured the author that Arso certainly never planned any border escape, nor did they believe he secretly collaborated with Soviet intelligence. He had his own principles, which he advocated publicly, most of all his belief that the Soviet Union was Yugoslavia’s natural ally. And so on.
His disagreements and conflicts with Marshal Tito were not of a nature that would justify his removal from the Yugoslav Army, let alone his liquidation. The turning point seemingly occurred during the “Voroshilovist” training in Moscow. Upon returning, General Arso Jovanović, instead of being appointed Chief of the Yugoslav General Staff as widely expected, was placed in charge of the Higher Military Academy — a clear demotion, which Arso Jovanović himself understood. He held several conversations with Marshal Tito about it — all unsuccessful. This crucial moment was overlooked by the book’s author, Ivan Matović. Thus, the mystery of General Arso Jovanović’s death may lie in the former Soviet or Russian archives. My humble opinion is that General Arso Jovanović, a man of high moral and ethical principles, refused to collaborate secretly with Soviet intelligence against Tito. The sentence was pronounced in Moscow!
Who was the person capable of convincing Marshal Tito that Arso Jovanović had become an enemy of the state and the Party?
The author hinted at Edvard Kardelj, who had had fierce disputes and numerous disagreements with Arso Jovanović during Arso’s time with the Slovenian partisans. Few people know that during a February 1945 debate on the situation at the Syrmian Front, Kardelj demanded Arso’s political punishment and even criminal prosecution. At the time, General Arso Jovanović had been strongly critical of the actions of Peko Dapčević, commander of the 1st Army, who was sending mobilized and untrained young men from Serbia to the front.
Not least, it was General Arso Jovanović who warned Marshal Tito in May 1945 about the mass executions of prisoners of war and collaborators in Slovenia, which led Tito to issue an order prohibiting extrajudicial killings. It is highly likely that Marshal Tito reprimanded Edvard Kardelj for this.
The reaction of hot-headed republican leaders — possibly with assistance from Soviet NKVD instructors in OZNA and KOS — soon bore fruit.
When Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo, Chief of the Political Directorate of the Yugoslav Army, stated in 1948 that General Arso Jovanović had likely sided with Stalin against Tito, the UDBA-KOS apparatus was activated. Baseless suspicions and planted information from Moscow quickly evolved into an investigation modelled on Soviet or NKVD practices, which usually meant not only political but also physical liquidation!
The discovery by my younger colleague Roman Leljak — who recently found a document in the Ljubljana court archives authored by former UDBA captain Mihael Golob-Mirko (b. 1925), confirming that General Arso Jovanović was killed during a meeting at the Yugoslav Army General Staff in Belgrade and that his body was later transferred to the Bela Crkva border sector where UDBA and KOS staged an escape attempt across the national border — is merely confirmation of some of the versions the book’s author uncovered through thorough investigation.
Personally, I believe the case is still not fully closed. Golob’s testimony must be properly verified, and relevant archival documents must be sought in UDBA and KOS archives in Belgrade to confirm his account.
Lastly, I would like to respond to an acquaintance who has long referred to me — including in connection with this article — as a “major of the Serbian KOS.” That, of course, is not true, since I clearly identified myself in Slovenia as an officer of the JNA Security Service (from 1963 to 1987) and a major general (1987-1990), which means I never “served” in KOS of the Yugoslav Army, which ceased to exist in 1955! Moreover, we all know well the author of the phrase “Serbian KOS” — a weekend historian who spreads similar disinformation for certain personal reasons.
He also spreads the blatant falsehood that Colonel Arso Jovanović “personally executed Franc Rozman-Stane” (who was in fact wounded and died on November 7, 1944 near Črnomelj). When he learned from my article that Arso Jovanović had left the Slovenian partisans as early as March 28, 1943, he immediately came up with a new version — namely, that Rozman was killed by Milovan Šaranović, whom Arso Jovanović had brought from Montenegro as “assistance for the Slovenian partisans,” and who was appointed Chief of the Slovenian Partisan General Staff in June 1943 — only to be killed himself on July 30, 1943, a detail our “historian” failed to verify!
That is why I advise the editors of the Primorski panterji website and others to double-check what their various “correspondents” are reporting from the field!
Note
1 This document has been translated and posted here: https://savapress.ca/arso-jovanovic/former-udba-captain-testifies-on-the-fate-of-arso-jovanovic/
(Translated from the Slovenian original)