Yugoslav government-in-exile

The Yugoslav government-in-exile was an official government of Yugoslavia, headed by King Peter II. It evacuated from Belgrade in April 1941, after the Axis invasion of the country, and went first to Greece, then to Palestine, then to Egypt and finally, in June 1941, to the United Kingdom.

According to economics professor and historian Jozo Tomasevich, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was politically weak from the moment of its creation in December 1918, and remained so during the interwar period mainly due to rigid centralism combined with strong ethno-religious identities. In particular, the religious primacy of the Serbian Orthodox Church in national affairs and discrimination against Roman Catholics and Muslims compounded the dissatisfaction of the non-Serb population. The kingdom's internal politics became ethnically polarised, a phenomenon that has been referred to as the "national question" in Yugoslavia.

Until 1929, this state of affairs was maintained by subverting the democratic system of government. In 1929, democracy was abandoned and a royal dictatorship was established by King Alexander. The king attempted to weaken the ethnic divisions in the country by creating administrative divisions (Serbo-Croatian: banovine) based on rivers rather than traditional regions. By 1933, however, discontent in the largely Croat-populated Sava Banovina had developed into full-blown civil disorder, which the regime countered with a series of assassinations and arrests of key Croatian opposition figures. When Alexander was assassinated in Marseille in 1934 by the Croatian nationalists, his cousin Prince Paul took over the regency, ruling on behalf of Alexander's 11-year-old son, Peter II. In the aftermath of Alexander's assassination, Yugoslavia was isolated both militarily and diplomatically.

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