Talk:Momčilo Đujić

Gata

This is in the lead: "Chetniks under his command perpetrated a massacre of nearly 100 Croat civilians in the village of Gata".

In the body of the article is this:

On 1 October, Italian units, accompanied by units of the Dinara Division under the command of Đujić, Mane Rokvić and Veljko Ilijić conducted an operation in and around the village of Gata near Split.

It is mentioned again later.

The Chetniks were certainly under the immediate command of Rokvić. Was Ilijić also there? I know of no evidence that Dujić knew about this attack before it happened, is there any? Moonraker (talk) 11:02, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

We use what the reliable sources say about it, not what evidence you "know of". Slobodna Dalmacija mentions all three men, saying they were from Đujić's division, and that the commanders of the perpetrators were Rokvić and Ilijić. Jutarnji list says the troops that perpetrated the massacre were under the command of Dujić and that Rokvić was directly responsible. Presumably you can read Serbo-Croatian? There links are there. The episode is also covered by Tim Judah who says that the troops were under the command of Dujić. Given that, what reliable sources do you have that say he wasn't in command of the troops responsible. The article doesn't say he knew about it beforehand in any case. Have you heard of command responsibility? It's been around since the 19th century. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 12:55, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Those reliable sources are fine, but they only say that the Chetniks at Gata were Dujić’s, viz. they were from his division, and that Rokvić was “directly responsible”. That implies that Dujić was indirectly responsible, but command responsibility applies to well-organized armies with good communications, not to irregular forces fighting outside territory they control. You say “The article doesn't say he knew about it beforehand in any case”, and I agree, but by using Gata as a stick to beat Dujić with it strongly implies it. To accuse a priest of ordering (or even condoning) murders like this, some kind of evidence is needed. Moonraker (talk) 19:39, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

The said sources implicate Đujić, not the Wikipedia article. Since many of them here are less than stellar newspaper articles, I actually went looking for scholarly ones, and it was reasonably easy to find references to the massacre in Gata in e.g. the works of Yugoslav historians like Fikreta Jelić-Butić and Drago Gizdić, as well as others. While my quick online search didn't find specific discussions of Đujić's responsibility for that one incident, in all of the works the context is very clear - Đujić and Rokvić were both paramilitary commanders in the same area and in the same Chetnik structure. It's not really an extraordinary claim that Đujić was implicated in the actions of his paramilitary unit. Not unlike with Filipović, the person's clerical origin was a widely known fact, yet their role in the war was what is relevant, not their position in a religious hierarchy. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 20:19, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Command responsibility definitely is not limited as you describe. It applies to civil wars as well as to irregular forces. This was made clear in the Čelebići case at the ICTY. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 07:05, 3 October 2022 (UTC)