page_title: Sekula Drljević
section_title: Early life and political career
hierarchical_section_title: Sekula Drljević / Early life and political career
caption_attribution_description: Hrvatski: Atentat u Narodnoj skupštini na rukovodioce HSS-a 1928.
context_page_description: Sekula Drljević was a Montenegrin jurist, politician, orator and theoretician.
  Born in the town of Kolašin, he earned a doctorate degree in law and became the Minister of Justice and Finance in the Kingdom of Montenegro before the outbreak of World War I. During the interwar period, he was a leading member of the "Greens", a Montenegrin separatist movement. A proponent of the theory that Montenegrins were an ethnic group distinct from Serbs, he also founded and became the leader of the Montenegrin Federalist Party.
  Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Drljević began cooperating with the Italian authorities occupying Montenegro. In July, he proclaimed the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Montenegro, but his attempt to establish an Axis-aligned puppet state triggered an immediate uprising. That September, Italian authorities sent him to an internment camp in Italy after the outbreak of an anti-fascist revolt. Drljević escaped the camp several months later and made his way into the German-held half of the Independent State of Croatia. In the summer of 1944, he created the Montenegrin State Council in Zagreb.
context_section_description: Sekula Drljević was born on 7 September 1884 in the village of Ravno, near the town of Kolašin. Having finished law school in Zagreb and earned a doctorate degree, he became the Minister of Justice and Finance in the Kingdom of Montenegro in 1910. His brother Janko Drljević was at that time an MP from the loyalist True People's Party. Drljević also became an MP, and also served as a minister in King Nikola's cabinet during the Balkan Wars (1912–13), and was renowned for his rhetorical skills.
  During World War I, he was captured by Austro-Hungarian forces and interned at the Boldagason internment camp in Hungary, where he grew strongly opposed to King Nikola. He was released after the war and moved to Zemun and worked as a lawyer there. He became a leading member of the "Greens" (zelenaši), a Montenegrin separatist movement which sided with the Yugoslav Federalist Party. During this time, he cooperated frequently with Croatian politicians such as Stjepan Radić, Vlatko Maček, and Ante Pavelić, with whom he became good friends. In the mid-1920s, Drljević founded the Montenegrin Federalist Party. He quickly became the party's sole leader and foremost theoretician.
  He expressed support for the unity of Yugoslavia and stressed Montenegro's loyalty to Serbian nationhood, but argued that a nation did not necessarily need to be part of a single state and hinted that he would support the restoration of Montenegro's independence. Consequently, the "Greens" demanded that Yugoslavia's internal boundaries be organized to match the borders of the Balkan states as they were prior to 1918.
  Drljević and Mihailo Ivanović had first attempted to found the Montenegrin Party for the 1920 election of a Constitutional Assembly, but were unable to do so due to a lack of time and resistance by the authorities. Drljević ran unsuccessfully for the Montenegrin Federalist Party in the 1923 elections in both the counties of Nikšić and Kolašin. He ran again in Kolašin in 1925 and was successfully elected to the National Assembly. In 1927, Drljević was elected representative of the Zemun District on the electoral list of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS). Afterwards, he helped solve a political rift between Radić and Serb politician Svetozar Pribićević, resulting in the formation of an HSS–Democratic Party coalition. The following year, Drljević unsuccessfully attempted to dissuade Radić from attending the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes prior to his assassination by Serb politician Puniša Račić.
caption: Drljević attempted to dissuade Stjepan Radić from attending a session of the Yugoslav parliament prior to his assassination there in 1928 (pictured).
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