– From Cominformist: I, Vlado Dapčević –
Bakić? He didn’t do anything because I had somehow offended him in the meantime. I always operated on the principle, as I thought was right, that we were all comrades and it was normal to tell a comrade what you thought, especially if something was wrong. I was naive. In the Livanjsko Polje, in the village of Čelebić, where everyone had been slaughtered by the Ustaše and thrown into a large pit, Mitar Bakić gave a speech to the villagers. His speech was full of foreign words and bombastic phrases. At one point, he said, “Whoever slaughtered will be slaughtered!” Afterwards, he asked me what I thought of the speech. I told him, in front of the other comrades, that he could have prepared a bit and that the speech was not entirely appropriate, referring to the part about slaughtering. We always talked about brotherhood and unity, separating the killers from the people, and now suddenly, “Whoever slaughtered will be slaughtered!” And in a village with mixed populations!
(From “Cominformist: I, Vlado Dapčević,” 2nd Eng. ed., Toronto 2025, pp. 92-3)