World War II guerrilla factions in Yugoslavia were organized along religious and ethnic lines.

Evidence

In 1941 the Ustashe began to “cleanse” Croatia of Serbs either by forcing them to convert to Roman Catholicism or by killing and expelling them. Various groups of Serb fighters organized themselves as a nationalist guerrilla force, called the “Chetniks,” loyal to the Serb royal dynasty. Some Chetniks espoused the idea of a “Greater Serbia” and carried out atrocities against non-Serbs. Tito’s army of Partisans, on the other hand, was made up of people from all the major Yugoslav religious and ethnic groups and fought for a unified Yugoslavia under communist rule. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 66

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes the long-running template of ‘cleansing’ and ‘Greater Serbia’/‘Greater Croatia’ ideologies that resurfaces in the 1990s — the vocabulary of the Ustashe ‘cleanse’ reappears nearly verbatim in the chapter’s 1990s material, a linguistic thread worth tracing.