1918 protest in Zagreb

1918 protest in Zagreb
1918 protest in Zagreb
	Contemporary newspaper coverage
Date	5 December 1918
Location	Zagreb, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; 45°48′47″N 15°58′38″E / 45.81306°N 15.97722°E
Caused by	Method of unification of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs with the Kingdom of Serbia or the unification itself
Goals	Establishment of a republic
Resulted in	Protest suppressed
Parties
Parts of: 25th Regiment (Home Guard); 53rd Regiment (former Common Army);	National Guards of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs; Sokol volunteers;
Lead figures
	Rudolf Sentmartoni Budislav Grga Angjelinović; Lav Mazzura;
Number
≈ 400	160
Casualties and losses
15 dead (incl. 2 civilians), 10 wounded	2 dead
	1 Royal Serbian Army soldier killed

On 5 December 1918, the National Guards (an armed force of the National Council of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs) and Sokol volunteers suppressed a protest and engaged in an armed clash against the soldiers of the 25th Regiment of the Royal Croatian Home Guard and the 53rd Regiment of the former Austro-Hungarian Common Army on 5 December 1918, four days after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. National Guardsmen stopped the soldiers at the Ban Jelačić Square in Zagreb.

Reasons for the protest and the conflict are not very well documented, but the soldiers who marched down Ilica Street from the Rudolf barracks towards the central city square shouted slogans against the King Peter I of Serbia and in support of republicanism and the Croatian People's Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić. Once the soldiers reached the Ban Jelačić Square, brief negotiations took place, and then an armed clash afterwards. Most of the eighteen people killed in the clash were soldiers, and the dead protesters were dubbed December Victims (Croatian: Prosinačke žrtve). Perceiving them unreliable, the National Council first disbanded the two regiments and later all former Austro-Hungarian units based in the new state. The National Council then relied on the Royal Serbian Army to establish units to replace the recently disbanded ones.

The Frankist faction of the Party of Rights used the event to portray creation of a common South Slavic kingdom and other events of 1918 as national humiliation claiming it fostered "culture of defeat" among Croats. The Frankists claimed that the "culture of defeat" was the result of a series of political failures and that the Frankists would give the disenchanted people and ignored former Austro-Hungarian officers a chance to redeem themselves for their defeats. Thus the "culture of defeat" contributed to the rise of Ustaše as far-right paramilitaries and later Nazi collaborators during the World War II occupation of Yugoslavia.