Post by Novus Dis on Apr 15, 2009 6:11:02 GMT -5
The Poglavnik's Family Tree.
FIFTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, THE poglavnik, or fuehrer of the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, Ante Pavelic, arrived in Buenos Aires, into the welcoming arms of the Peronistas and a large contingent of his former underlings. Though he was a wanted man for war crimes and atrocities carried out on his orders in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatske, or NDH), Pavelic had eluded arrest for more than three years with the assistance of a network of Catholic priests dedicated to preserving the remnants of Hitler's New Order, with the approval and often collaboration of the British and American authorities. [1.]
Pavelic was one of the last but most important leaders of the NDH to arrive in a country which was already achieving notoriety as a safe-haven for Nazi fugitives. Other Ustase officials had escaped to Spain and Portugal; more would travel onward to democratic countries such as Sweden, Norway, Australia, Canada and the United States. They brought with them the kernels of a new movement and the tacit blessing of several Allied intelligence agencies who saw the blood-covered Ustase as useful tools in the coming war against Communism. [2.]
The ideological base of the Ustase exiles was unchanged from what it had been before the war: virulent anti-Semitism surpassed only by their anti-Serbianism, and the celebration of a personality cult dedicated to Pavelic and a select group of "martyrs," which no living Croat could penetrate. Though the rhetoric of the more loquacious Ustase spokesman would give the movement a varnish of democratic and pro-Western appeal, a quick perusal of any of the literature or statements they later produced indicates that the Ustase movement in exile retained it's neo-fascistic core, lacking the dullest gleam of self-examination or repentance. [3.]
Unlike many other exile movements which formed as the Iron Curtain descended across Eastern Europe, the NDH fugitives could look within the Ustase's own history for a model of organization and tactics as an exile movement. The Ustase had been an exile movement before the war, operating training camps for assassins and terrorists to be unleashed on the Royal Yugoslav government under the House of Karadjordjevic. Indeed, as their catastrophic recklessness and mismanagement of the NDH illustrates, Pavelic and the Ustase were far better suited plotting and conspiring on the fringe of the political landscape than coping with the day-to-day banalities of statecraft. The return to their roots as an exiled terrorist organization was a natural succession, and a comparatively easy one as nearly all of the political organizers and ideologists of the movement had by hook or crook evaded arrest when Hitler's European satellites collapsed with the Third Reich.
The Ustase would make this transition rather successfully, enjoying a greater longevity than almost any other ethnic-based movement in Europe and the West [4.], and becoming one of the most persistent extremist groups of its kind. Founded as a terrorist organization by Ante Pavelic in Vienna after he went into exile in 1929, the Ustase had been placed atop a Croatian puppet state of the Axis Powers in April, 1941 thanks to Pavelic's long-standing contacts with Benito Mussolini. The party then consisted of, at most, a few hundred disaffected Croats, "representing the lunatic fringe of Balkan life" according to one post-war investigator [5.] The movement mushroomed in the ferment of wartime hysteria and atrocity, growing to include several thousand Croats and Bosnian Muslims [6.]. By war's end, many lukewarm members of the Ustase had deserted, but thousands of other Croats joined in a greater exodus from Yugoslavia in fear of Communist persecution. It was this field of new arrivals that Pavelic exploited above all, drawing on their poverty and bitterness to refurbish the ranks of his reborn Ustase, and carry the movement through three successive generations.
THE NEW CRUSADE
Three years before Ante Pavelic landed in Argentina, the Ustase were already in the process of shedding their skin as bureaucrats and ministers and reorganizing along their former lines [7.]. Most of the Ustase die-hards had fled as part of a large column which crossed the Austrian border at Bleiburg. British authorities in the area first interned them, then turned most - but not all - of the column back into Yugoslavia. Scores died at the hands of the Communists on forced marches and the like, with expectedly harsher sentences meted out to members of the Ustase Army and party activists and officials as compared to conscripts in the Domobrans, the NDH's regular army. As for their leaders, most of the Ustase party officials who had fallen into British custody - including Ante Pavelic - escaped (or "escaped") before the mass was turned back into Yugoslavia.
In one of his last official acts before Zagreb was declared an Open City and he and his closest collaborators joined this dash for the border, Pavelic named his long-time associate, Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburic, head of all armed forces of the Independent State of Croatia. It is known that Luburic and his remaining charges followed the column headed toward Bleiburg, conducting rear-guard skirmishes with the Communist army, ordering the liquidation of the remaining inmates at the Jasenovac concentration camp (which Luburic had designed himself), and executing two former Ustase ministers who had been arrested after conspiring to overthrow Pavelic in 1944. At some point, however, they fell back, establishing hideouts in the cities and country, just as the Communists had done before.
Pavelic was undoubtedly hiding while he was in Austria - a separation from his family, who hid at a separate address, suggests as much. But he was also working - reorganizing these Ustase refugees with a stomach to keep fighting into a guerrilla army, which in characteristic fashion he named the Krizari, or "Crusaders".
This was the first reincarnation of the Ustase in the post-war period. For more than three years the Krizari conducted raids into Yugoslav territory from Austrian bases. However, most of the missions failed to link up with Luburic's forces inside the country. The commando units were quickly neutralized or arrested by OZNA, the Yugoslav secret police, shortly after arriving crossing the border and unwittingly leading Yugoslav Counterintelligence to their contacts inside the country. The operational planning of the entire operation leaked like a sieve, thanks to aggressive OZNA counter-espionage measures, including the use of double-agents, and a Soviet spy who was involved in the highest levels of American and British intelligence, Kim Philby.
The Krizari Campaign, ineffective as it was, didn't suffer from lack of leadership. Luburic was operational coordinator of the units left behind inside Croatia and any commandos from Austria who managed to evade the OZNA dragnet. Major Ljubo Milos, previously an Ustase commandant at the Jasenovac and Lepoglava camps, served as a commander up until his capture by Yugoslav authorities in 1947. Overall planning for the Krizari Campaign rested with Pavelic. After his departure from the American Zone of Austria to Italy in late 1945 or '46, he remained in contact by wireless set operated by his secretary, former Ustase minister Vjekoslav Vrancic. [8.]
The Yugoslav authorities decimated the new Krizari arrivals, and resistance inside the country was gradually snuffed out. Ljubo Milos was tried with a few dozen other Krizari and gave a lurid confession from the dock, making reference to Vatican spies, British secret agents and an enormous treasure lode of gold looted from Ustase victims that was paying for the Krizari Campaign. Maks Luburic quietly slipped out of the country, reappearing in Spain a few years later.
That this anti-Communist operation - designed to destabilize the country that was then referred to in the press as "Soviet Satellite Number One" - had American backing is not surprising. Similar operations were underway in other Balkan countries, such as Albania. (Philby betrayed this operation as well, passing on information about the missions to the Soviet authorities, who in turn informed their Albanian counterparts of the commando units' place and time of arrival.) [9.]. However, the operatives trained by American and British intelligence for the Albanian campaign were members of a movement known as Balli Kombetar, which as a whole had none of the baggage of men like Luburic or Pavelic or their bloody underlings. The Americans and British were essentially sponsoring the men who had orchestrated and carried out the murder of at least several hundred thousand civilians over the previous four years through the most abominable means of execution they could devise.
The Krizari Campaign was the last time the old leaders of the NDH were physically together, though, as we shall see, they never entirely split from each other in spirit. Instead, a legion of acronyms, movements and publications followed in their wake as the Ustase reorganized themselves into cells spanning four continents and more than two dozen countries.
DEJA VU: THE HOP
Upon his arrival in Argentina, the Poglavnik was met by his loyal secretary, Vjekoslav Vrancic, former Ustase minister Ivica Perovic, and a dozen other ministers and important figures in the NDH, as well as several Croatian Catholic priests active in or sympathetic to the Ustase movement [10.]. He wasted little time in orientating himself to his new surroundings before issuing the first public declaration the world had heard from Ante Pavelic since the end of the war. The Ustase was a force which was, he said, irrevocably opposed to Bolshevism. Since the Croat nation had not voted for Bolshevism (neither, can it be said, had they voted for Pavelicism), the new regime would naturally be overthrown from within.
To that end, the years 1948-1955 were chiefly concerned with the continued organization of commando-style operations inside Yugoslavia with their legacy in the Krizari Campaign, and internally with building a worldwide Croatian movement in emigration, with the exiled Ustase at the center. The pre-war Croatian leaders in exile who had managed to remain relatively free of taint from the Ustase were either unable or unwilling [11.] to form organizations which would repudiate the NDH in favour of a democratic and free Croatia, opposed to Ustasism as well as Communism. The exiled Ustase stepped into the chasm.
Internationally, Pavelic's government-in-exile made little headway in the late 1940s and early 1950s. More time would have to pass, and new leaders would have to replace the hangmen at the top of the organization before the West would publicly deal with the Ustase, regardless of whatever relationships and cooperation existed behind the scenes. A series of organizational names and publications were christened with august reverence and buried without rites. From the claims of his intimates, Pavelic had expected quick, pre-emptive war by the Americans against the Soviets which would restore the Ustase in Croatia, and the Ustase leader was off-balance when such a mighty conflagration never materialized [12.]. It was not until the founding declaration of the Hrvatski Oslobodilacki Pokret (Croatian Liberation Movement - the original name Pavelic gave to the Ustase in the 1930s) was released on June 8, 1956 that a definitive and official successor movement to the Ustase was proclaimed.
The founding declaration of the HOP is notable for a number of reasons, first for what it says - defining Croatia not in the rhetoric of the pre-war era, as a "historical continuity," a kingdom hundreds of years old, but as a state with the same physical boundaries as the NDH - and second for what it does not. It is undeniable that the HOP, founded as it was by the Poglavnik of the NDH and calling for a return to the NDH's boundaries, and making no reference to or distancing itself from the nightmare of concentration camps and massacres that the Independent State of Croatia represented, is both the organizational and the ideological successor to the Ustase. In spite of later claims [13.] that most of the Ustase were killed after the British turned back the refugees from Bleiburg, the HOP's founding declaration is signed by twelve of them, all ministers or other high officials in the wartime NDH, in their name as ministers of the NDH, and does not include a dozen other high officials in the Ustase who had evaded justice after the war and were then at liberty, including Maks Luburic, Interior Minister Andrija Artukovic, Jasenovac commandant Dinko Sakic, or even Pavelic's son-in-law and future leader of the HOP, Srecko Psenicnik.
The HOP was led by Pavelic until his death three years later, from complications of a mysterious assassination attempt in Argentina as well as old age (the Poglavnik was seventy years old when he died). His appointed successor was Stjepan Hefer, a former deputy from the Croatian Peasant Party of Vladko Macek. Hefer took Macek's declaration of support for the Ustase in 1941 to heart, abandoning the Peasant Party for the Ustase and holding several minister-level portfolios in the last three NDH governments. Hefer had the demeanor of an intellectual, but his books on what he called "the Croatian Problem" are little more than half-baked propaganda tracts in which he makes such claims as that the Ustase was a "progressive, liberal" movement which would have bowed down to the forces of democracy in April, 1941 had it not been for the Chetnik and Communist revolts. Ante Bonifacic took control of the HOP in the mid-1970s and moved the organization's base to North America. The HOP enjoyed the unqualified support of certain American conservatives [14.], even as the Croatian emigrant community was torn apart by Ustase-led violence against moderate Croats and a string of terrorist incidents which somehow left Bonifacic's reputation unblemished. Bonifacic was followed by Pavelic's son-in-law, Srecko Psenicnik, in 1981.
LICENSE TO KILL: MAKS LUBURIC AND THE HNO
There has been some confusion over the connection between acts of terrorism committed by Croat extremists and the political movements set up by the principle Ustase exiles. Given the flexibility of the terrorists themselves in assigning one or several organizations' names to their deeds after the fact, it's counterproductive to separate the different groups between solid partitions. There was constant movement of activists between them, and papers aligned with one movement would invariably praise and commend acts undertaken by the others.
Maks Luburic was the driving force behind the Ustase's return to high-profile violence of the sort which put them on the map in 1934 with the assassination of Yugoslav King Alexander and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles, France. He was also the one responsible for creating the maze of organizations, movements, operations groups and acronyms which litter the texts of most post-war Ustase studies. By his own hand, Luburic formed the Hrvatski Narodni Odpor, or Croatian National Resistance, also known by various translations as the Croatian Popular Resistance, the Croatian People's Resistance, and within the movement itself as Odpor or Otpor. Principles from the HNO later went on to form the Hrvatski Drzavotvorni Pokret (HDP), or the Croatian Statehood Movement, and seed a dozen other organizations from West Germany to Australia, such as the United Croats of West Germany (UHNj), Croatian Youth (HM), and eventually an umbrella of neo-Ustase terrorism in the 1970s, the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (CRB).
The HNO published a magazine called Drina and a newspaper called Obrana. In the latter, alongside screeds that called for the violent destruction of Yugoslavia, the editors included helpful instructions on bomb-making and sabotage, descriptions of the firing range of several shoulder-held rifles, and advice on the optimal location to plant a bomb in a public building in order to cause the most structural damage.
Luburic and HNO agents set up cells in Switzerland, Italy and Glasgow, but Australia and West Germany became their true strongholds. In 1962, twenty-five HNO commandos occupied a Yugoslav consulate in Bad-Godesberg, led by Josep Stjepan Bilandzic. The HNO also conducted numerous raids into Yugoslav territory, the extent of which are not known and probably won't be until full access is granted to UDBA (the Yugoslav security agency and successor to OZNA) archives in Belgrade.
Luburic's HNO set the tone for the Croatian extremist movement as a whole, in that they declared that they "consider[ed] every direct or indirect help to Yugoslavia as treason against the Croat Nation." [15.] This included anyone doing business with the Yugoslav government, foreign embassy staff, and all Croats who were sympathetic to the Communist government or simply disagreed with the tactics of the HNO and its alter ego organizations. This strain of intolerance among other Croats (including the novel distinction between "real Croats" - i.e., those who support the Ustase - and, presumably, false ones) can be traced back to the pre-war Ustase movement when disputes within the organization were settled quickly and violently, as in the case of the former commandant of the Ustase training camp at Janka Puszta who was executed when a jilted lover became an informer for the secret police. A precursor to their intolerance of competitors, real or imagined, can be seen in the wartime treatment meted out to Vladko Macek of the Croatian Peasant Party, who had been regarded as too much of a potential threat by Pavelic to be allowed his freedom, despite of his public support for the Ustase and the Independent State of Croatia. Macek was sent to the Jasenovac concentration camp before being remanded to house arrest, and left a chilling description of his time there in his memoirs.
Luburic's body was found in his villa in Spain on April 20, 1969. His skull had been crushed by repeated blows to the head with a blunt object, and his chest lacerated by more than a dozen stab wounds. Yet the grisly death of one of the most noxious killers of the 20th century did little to change attitudes among the Ustase exiles and their younger proteges. If anything, the violence became even worse.
THE CROATIAN (R)EVOLUTIONARY BROTHERHOOD
The differences between the HNO and the HOP were geographic rather than ideological. The oath taken by HNO recruits included a commitment of allegiance to the HOP's founder, a pledge to "remain loyal to... the principles of the Ustase movement of the Poglavnik, Dr. Ante Pavelic." [16.]
This is a crucial point: though HNO and HOP were separate organizations operating on opposite sides of the world, they both considered themselves - and recognized each other - as Ustase. There was nothing which ideologically distinguished HNO from HOP, and in tactical matters there was only HNO's slightly more effervescent praise for the use of explosives in pursuit of their political goals. Luburic split from Pavelic toward the end of the latter's life on minor ideological grounds, but their organizations continued to cooperate.
The 1970s completely obliterated the already opaque lines between the two organizations. HNO's Australian branch evolved into the Croatian Statehood Movement (HDP), while it's West German members shifted to the United Croats of West Germany. Meanwhile, new acts of terrorism in Australia, Europe, the United States and South America occurred with appalling regularity. No study has tabulated the precise number of Ustase terrorist incidents in the decade, but a fair-minded estimate would reveal at least 50 attempted assassinations, 40 successful bombings of public buildings or monuments, two successful airplane hijackings and another in which an airliner was destroyed in mid-flight by detonation - just under one incident every month of every year over the course of the decade. Many of the attacks were attributed to a shadowy, hither-to unknown group which called itself the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (CRB).
Several HDP-connected journals claimed that the CRB emerged in response to the Yugoslav suppression of the "Croatian Spring," a flowering of nationalistic politics and culture in Zagreb in the first two years of the 1970s. In fact, the leaders of the Croatian Spring distanced themselves at every opportunity from the extremist movement and explicitly condemned the neo-fascist pageantry of the emigre organizations, including the continuation of Pavelic's personality cult and the marking of April 10th - the day the NDH was founded after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia - as Croatia's independence day. Less symbolic activities which the Croatian Spring activists condemned included the murder of the Yugoslav Ambassador to Sweden, Vladimir Rolovic; the subsequent hijacking of a Swedish SAS jetliner by Ustase demanding the release of Rolovic's assassins; and the murder and extortion of scores of moderate Croats who refused to pay "contributions" to fund Ustase violence. [17.]
Today, there is some speculation that the Brotherhood was fictional front and a convenient cover to shield the by-now more respectable HDP and HOP from direct links with terrorists. This alibi was essential, as a fair share of Ustase crimes were now taking place on Western European and American soil, including the Statue of Liberty. There was seamless cooperation between one-time members of the HOP and HDP working under the guise of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood - or, just as often, working under no guise at all, and only claiming responsibility in the name of the CRB after a successful operation. [18.]
By willful blindness or cynical politics, the ruse worked. The HOP under Ante Bonifacic, who presided over the Croatian extremist movement at a time when a group of Croats organized from Chicago were convicted of more than fifty counts of extortion, racketeering, murder, attempted murder, and using the United States Postal Service for sending bombs in hollowed out books to dissident Croats, including a Catholic priest [19.], was classified by the FBI as a benevolent, non-violent political organization - certainly the only party founded by a World War II war criminal to earn such a distinction. [20.] The United States government was unmoved by the convicted defendants' connection with international terrorist Miro Baresic, and the fact that a mysterious Croatian group in Chicago - where Bonifacic and the HOP were now based - made a monthly payment to Baresic, who was then an international fugitive from justice that had entered the United States with forged documents before he was eventually arrested and deported back to Sweden to serve out the rest of his sentence for the murder of Ambassador Rolovic in Stockholm. [21.]
Similarly, in Australia, HDP officials like Nikola Stedul and Spremnost publisher Fabian Lovokovic found themselves courted by members of the left and the right of Australian politics, even as the police uncovered three separate Ustase training camps over the course of three years where lessons were given on long-range shooting and bomb-making and -handling. Stedul, who had emigrated from Yugoslavia to Germany in the 1950s, is alleged to have been an HNO representative in Australia from 1966 to 1971 before becoming a high official in the "new" HDP. [22.]
THE RED REPUBLICANS
Of the Ustase leaders abroad, mention should be made of Branimir (Branko) and Ivan Jelic, two brothers involved in the pre-war Ustase movement who later parted ways with their fellow exiles. Branko had occupied one of the highest positions in the pre-war Ustase, and headed a radical Croat youth organization before Pavelic had even formed the Ustase. He was arrested with Eugen-Dido Kvaternik and Ante Pavelic in Turin in connection with the assassination of King Alexander in Marseilles in 1934. Jelic was interned in England during the war, thus escaping scrutiny as he was in no way implicated in the atrocities of the NDH. He emigrated to Germany afterward, and headed the Croatian Committee and the Croatian Socialist Party, which published the journal Hrvatska Drzava (The Croatian State).
The Jelic brothers differed radically from other post-war Ustase-led movements in that they allied themselves with the Soviet Union, offering the Red Army access to naval and air bases in a free and independent Croatia, whereas Tito allowed them none in Federal Yugoslavia. [23.] "Finlandization" was a word on the lips of Czech democrats, Polish intellectuals and Latvian dissidents, and the Jelic brothers too believed a Soviet alliance against the Socialist heretic Tito would create an opportunity for Croatia's independence. Treating the Croatian situation in the context of a national liberation struggle, the Jelic brothers were able to gain some sympathy for Croatian independence among left-leaning editors, publicists and political activists. Nevertheless their movement was the weakest of those mentioned here, partially due to a bizarre competition spread by the HDP when the Jelic brothers attempted to expand the Croatian Socialists from their West German base. [24.]
THE POGLAVNIK'S FAMILY TREE
All of the various Croat extremist organizations mentioned herein, both real and sham, can trace their lineage back to the NDH and, further, to Ante Pavelic himself. Clear branches of descent can be drawn from the furthest extremity - Pavelic's founding of the Ustase movement in Vienna in 1929-30 - through era of pre-war terrorism, through the NDH and the Krizari Campaign and finally to the two progenitors of all subsequent Croatian extremist organizations, Pavelic and Luburic.
Croatian terrorist groups never truly "split" from the Ustase or from one another, in the sense of the violent fragmentation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Abu Nidal, or the two factions of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) in Lebanon after 1983. The difference between Pavelic's HOP and Luburic's HNO, whose members paid homage to Pavelic in their loyalty oath, could not be measured by ideology or tactics, but only in geography: one operated in the Americas, the others primarily in Europe with an outpost in Australia. By the time the two principles were dead, the groups had spun off "respectable" fronts for political agitation and presentation to the anti-Communist international community, while continuing to nurture an even more radical, violent and reckless element within. There were moments of blatant collaboration between members of the separate groups in terrorist acts and, after 1972, the total evaporation of any distinction between them.
The attention of the reader is drawn to the scope of this brief inquiry, but one shouldn't lose sight of the uncertain terminus of the Ustase movement abroad. Indeed, the racketeering trial against several Croatian extremists in the United States was concluded only in 1983 when appeals by the defendants were rejected. In recent years, right-wing Croatian organizations in Zagreb have called for the defendants release from prison as patriots, in spite of their record of extorting, threatening, and attempting to kill other Croats in the United States.
Another prominent Croatian terrorist, Miro Baresic, unindicted co-conspirator in the racketeering trial mentioned above, the assassin of Ambassador Vladimir Rolovic and later advisor to the military death squads of Paraguan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, was paroled in Stockholm in 1987 and three years later enlisted in a paramilitary unit fighting for Croatia against the Krajina Serbs. His conspirators in the Rolovic assassination bypassed Interpol warrants and also returned home to enlist in the Croatian War. Nikola Stedul is now president of the HDP, based in Zagreb. Without submitting the reader to bathos, it is worthwhile to point out that the crimes of the Ustase-led extremist organizations against individuals, both Croat and Serb, communist, nationalist or apolitical, are not relics of ancient history, but are fixed within the living memory of most people alive today.
FIFTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, THE poglavnik, or fuehrer of the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, Ante Pavelic, arrived in Buenos Aires, into the welcoming arms of the Peronistas and a large contingent of his former underlings. Though he was a wanted man for war crimes and atrocities carried out on his orders in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatske, or NDH), Pavelic had eluded arrest for more than three years with the assistance of a network of Catholic priests dedicated to preserving the remnants of Hitler's New Order, with the approval and often collaboration of the British and American authorities. [1.]
Pavelic was one of the last but most important leaders of the NDH to arrive in a country which was already achieving notoriety as a safe-haven for Nazi fugitives. Other Ustase officials had escaped to Spain and Portugal; more would travel onward to democratic countries such as Sweden, Norway, Australia, Canada and the United States. They brought with them the kernels of a new movement and the tacit blessing of several Allied intelligence agencies who saw the blood-covered Ustase as useful tools in the coming war against Communism. [2.]
The ideological base of the Ustase exiles was unchanged from what it had been before the war: virulent anti-Semitism surpassed only by their anti-Serbianism, and the celebration of a personality cult dedicated to Pavelic and a select group of "martyrs," which no living Croat could penetrate. Though the rhetoric of the more loquacious Ustase spokesman would give the movement a varnish of democratic and pro-Western appeal, a quick perusal of any of the literature or statements they later produced indicates that the Ustase movement in exile retained it's neo-fascistic core, lacking the dullest gleam of self-examination or repentance. [3.]
Unlike many other exile movements which formed as the Iron Curtain descended across Eastern Europe, the NDH fugitives could look within the Ustase's own history for a model of organization and tactics as an exile movement. The Ustase had been an exile movement before the war, operating training camps for assassins and terrorists to be unleashed on the Royal Yugoslav government under the House of Karadjordjevic. Indeed, as their catastrophic recklessness and mismanagement of the NDH illustrates, Pavelic and the Ustase were far better suited plotting and conspiring on the fringe of the political landscape than coping with the day-to-day banalities of statecraft. The return to their roots as an exiled terrorist organization was a natural succession, and a comparatively easy one as nearly all of the political organizers and ideologists of the movement had by hook or crook evaded arrest when Hitler's European satellites collapsed with the Third Reich.
The Ustase would make this transition rather successfully, enjoying a greater longevity than almost any other ethnic-based movement in Europe and the West [4.], and becoming one of the most persistent extremist groups of its kind. Founded as a terrorist organization by Ante Pavelic in Vienna after he went into exile in 1929, the Ustase had been placed atop a Croatian puppet state of the Axis Powers in April, 1941 thanks to Pavelic's long-standing contacts with Benito Mussolini. The party then consisted of, at most, a few hundred disaffected Croats, "representing the lunatic fringe of Balkan life" according to one post-war investigator [5.] The movement mushroomed in the ferment of wartime hysteria and atrocity, growing to include several thousand Croats and Bosnian Muslims [6.]. By war's end, many lukewarm members of the Ustase had deserted, but thousands of other Croats joined in a greater exodus from Yugoslavia in fear of Communist persecution. It was this field of new arrivals that Pavelic exploited above all, drawing on their poverty and bitterness to refurbish the ranks of his reborn Ustase, and carry the movement through three successive generations.
THE NEW CRUSADE
Three years before Ante Pavelic landed in Argentina, the Ustase were already in the process of shedding their skin as bureaucrats and ministers and reorganizing along their former lines [7.]. Most of the Ustase die-hards had fled as part of a large column which crossed the Austrian border at Bleiburg. British authorities in the area first interned them, then turned most - but not all - of the column back into Yugoslavia. Scores died at the hands of the Communists on forced marches and the like, with expectedly harsher sentences meted out to members of the Ustase Army and party activists and officials as compared to conscripts in the Domobrans, the NDH's regular army. As for their leaders, most of the Ustase party officials who had fallen into British custody - including Ante Pavelic - escaped (or "escaped") before the mass was turned back into Yugoslavia.
In one of his last official acts before Zagreb was declared an Open City and he and his closest collaborators joined this dash for the border, Pavelic named his long-time associate, Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburic, head of all armed forces of the Independent State of Croatia. It is known that Luburic and his remaining charges followed the column headed toward Bleiburg, conducting rear-guard skirmishes with the Communist army, ordering the liquidation of the remaining inmates at the Jasenovac concentration camp (which Luburic had designed himself), and executing two former Ustase ministers who had been arrested after conspiring to overthrow Pavelic in 1944. At some point, however, they fell back, establishing hideouts in the cities and country, just as the Communists had done before.
Pavelic was undoubtedly hiding while he was in Austria - a separation from his family, who hid at a separate address, suggests as much. But he was also working - reorganizing these Ustase refugees with a stomach to keep fighting into a guerrilla army, which in characteristic fashion he named the Krizari, or "Crusaders".
This was the first reincarnation of the Ustase in the post-war period. For more than three years the Krizari conducted raids into Yugoslav territory from Austrian bases. However, most of the missions failed to link up with Luburic's forces inside the country. The commando units were quickly neutralized or arrested by OZNA, the Yugoslav secret police, shortly after arriving crossing the border and unwittingly leading Yugoslav Counterintelligence to their contacts inside the country. The operational planning of the entire operation leaked like a sieve, thanks to aggressive OZNA counter-espionage measures, including the use of double-agents, and a Soviet spy who was involved in the highest levels of American and British intelligence, Kim Philby.
The Krizari Campaign, ineffective as it was, didn't suffer from lack of leadership. Luburic was operational coordinator of the units left behind inside Croatia and any commandos from Austria who managed to evade the OZNA dragnet. Major Ljubo Milos, previously an Ustase commandant at the Jasenovac and Lepoglava camps, served as a commander up until his capture by Yugoslav authorities in 1947. Overall planning for the Krizari Campaign rested with Pavelic. After his departure from the American Zone of Austria to Italy in late 1945 or '46, he remained in contact by wireless set operated by his secretary, former Ustase minister Vjekoslav Vrancic. [8.]
The Yugoslav authorities decimated the new Krizari arrivals, and resistance inside the country was gradually snuffed out. Ljubo Milos was tried with a few dozen other Krizari and gave a lurid confession from the dock, making reference to Vatican spies, British secret agents and an enormous treasure lode of gold looted from Ustase victims that was paying for the Krizari Campaign. Maks Luburic quietly slipped out of the country, reappearing in Spain a few years later.
That this anti-Communist operation - designed to destabilize the country that was then referred to in the press as "Soviet Satellite Number One" - had American backing is not surprising. Similar operations were underway in other Balkan countries, such as Albania. (Philby betrayed this operation as well, passing on information about the missions to the Soviet authorities, who in turn informed their Albanian counterparts of the commando units' place and time of arrival.) [9.]. However, the operatives trained by American and British intelligence for the Albanian campaign were members of a movement known as Balli Kombetar, which as a whole had none of the baggage of men like Luburic or Pavelic or their bloody underlings. The Americans and British were essentially sponsoring the men who had orchestrated and carried out the murder of at least several hundred thousand civilians over the previous four years through the most abominable means of execution they could devise.
The Krizari Campaign was the last time the old leaders of the NDH were physically together, though, as we shall see, they never entirely split from each other in spirit. Instead, a legion of acronyms, movements and publications followed in their wake as the Ustase reorganized themselves into cells spanning four continents and more than two dozen countries.
DEJA VU: THE HOP
Upon his arrival in Argentina, the Poglavnik was met by his loyal secretary, Vjekoslav Vrancic, former Ustase minister Ivica Perovic, and a dozen other ministers and important figures in the NDH, as well as several Croatian Catholic priests active in or sympathetic to the Ustase movement [10.]. He wasted little time in orientating himself to his new surroundings before issuing the first public declaration the world had heard from Ante Pavelic since the end of the war. The Ustase was a force which was, he said, irrevocably opposed to Bolshevism. Since the Croat nation had not voted for Bolshevism (neither, can it be said, had they voted for Pavelicism), the new regime would naturally be overthrown from within.
To that end, the years 1948-1955 were chiefly concerned with the continued organization of commando-style operations inside Yugoslavia with their legacy in the Krizari Campaign, and internally with building a worldwide Croatian movement in emigration, with the exiled Ustase at the center. The pre-war Croatian leaders in exile who had managed to remain relatively free of taint from the Ustase were either unable or unwilling [11.] to form organizations which would repudiate the NDH in favour of a democratic and free Croatia, opposed to Ustasism as well as Communism. The exiled Ustase stepped into the chasm.
Internationally, Pavelic's government-in-exile made little headway in the late 1940s and early 1950s. More time would have to pass, and new leaders would have to replace the hangmen at the top of the organization before the West would publicly deal with the Ustase, regardless of whatever relationships and cooperation existed behind the scenes. A series of organizational names and publications were christened with august reverence and buried without rites. From the claims of his intimates, Pavelic had expected quick, pre-emptive war by the Americans against the Soviets which would restore the Ustase in Croatia, and the Ustase leader was off-balance when such a mighty conflagration never materialized [12.]. It was not until the founding declaration of the Hrvatski Oslobodilacki Pokret (Croatian Liberation Movement - the original name Pavelic gave to the Ustase in the 1930s) was released on June 8, 1956 that a definitive and official successor movement to the Ustase was proclaimed.
The founding declaration of the HOP is notable for a number of reasons, first for what it says - defining Croatia not in the rhetoric of the pre-war era, as a "historical continuity," a kingdom hundreds of years old, but as a state with the same physical boundaries as the NDH - and second for what it does not. It is undeniable that the HOP, founded as it was by the Poglavnik of the NDH and calling for a return to the NDH's boundaries, and making no reference to or distancing itself from the nightmare of concentration camps and massacres that the Independent State of Croatia represented, is both the organizational and the ideological successor to the Ustase. In spite of later claims [13.] that most of the Ustase were killed after the British turned back the refugees from Bleiburg, the HOP's founding declaration is signed by twelve of them, all ministers or other high officials in the wartime NDH, in their name as ministers of the NDH, and does not include a dozen other high officials in the Ustase who had evaded justice after the war and were then at liberty, including Maks Luburic, Interior Minister Andrija Artukovic, Jasenovac commandant Dinko Sakic, or even Pavelic's son-in-law and future leader of the HOP, Srecko Psenicnik.
The HOP was led by Pavelic until his death three years later, from complications of a mysterious assassination attempt in Argentina as well as old age (the Poglavnik was seventy years old when he died). His appointed successor was Stjepan Hefer, a former deputy from the Croatian Peasant Party of Vladko Macek. Hefer took Macek's declaration of support for the Ustase in 1941 to heart, abandoning the Peasant Party for the Ustase and holding several minister-level portfolios in the last three NDH governments. Hefer had the demeanor of an intellectual, but his books on what he called "the Croatian Problem" are little more than half-baked propaganda tracts in which he makes such claims as that the Ustase was a "progressive, liberal" movement which would have bowed down to the forces of democracy in April, 1941 had it not been for the Chetnik and Communist revolts. Ante Bonifacic took control of the HOP in the mid-1970s and moved the organization's base to North America. The HOP enjoyed the unqualified support of certain American conservatives [14.], even as the Croatian emigrant community was torn apart by Ustase-led violence against moderate Croats and a string of terrorist incidents which somehow left Bonifacic's reputation unblemished. Bonifacic was followed by Pavelic's son-in-law, Srecko Psenicnik, in 1981.
LICENSE TO KILL: MAKS LUBURIC AND THE HNO
There has been some confusion over the connection between acts of terrorism committed by Croat extremists and the political movements set up by the principle Ustase exiles. Given the flexibility of the terrorists themselves in assigning one or several organizations' names to their deeds after the fact, it's counterproductive to separate the different groups between solid partitions. There was constant movement of activists between them, and papers aligned with one movement would invariably praise and commend acts undertaken by the others.
Maks Luburic was the driving force behind the Ustase's return to high-profile violence of the sort which put them on the map in 1934 with the assassination of Yugoslav King Alexander and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles, France. He was also the one responsible for creating the maze of organizations, movements, operations groups and acronyms which litter the texts of most post-war Ustase studies. By his own hand, Luburic formed the Hrvatski Narodni Odpor, or Croatian National Resistance, also known by various translations as the Croatian Popular Resistance, the Croatian People's Resistance, and within the movement itself as Odpor or Otpor. Principles from the HNO later went on to form the Hrvatski Drzavotvorni Pokret (HDP), or the Croatian Statehood Movement, and seed a dozen other organizations from West Germany to Australia, such as the United Croats of West Germany (UHNj), Croatian Youth (HM), and eventually an umbrella of neo-Ustase terrorism in the 1970s, the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (CRB).
The HNO published a magazine called Drina and a newspaper called Obrana. In the latter, alongside screeds that called for the violent destruction of Yugoslavia, the editors included helpful instructions on bomb-making and sabotage, descriptions of the firing range of several shoulder-held rifles, and advice on the optimal location to plant a bomb in a public building in order to cause the most structural damage.
Luburic and HNO agents set up cells in Switzerland, Italy and Glasgow, but Australia and West Germany became their true strongholds. In 1962, twenty-five HNO commandos occupied a Yugoslav consulate in Bad-Godesberg, led by Josep Stjepan Bilandzic. The HNO also conducted numerous raids into Yugoslav territory, the extent of which are not known and probably won't be until full access is granted to UDBA (the Yugoslav security agency and successor to OZNA) archives in Belgrade.
Luburic's HNO set the tone for the Croatian extremist movement as a whole, in that they declared that they "consider[ed] every direct or indirect help to Yugoslavia as treason against the Croat Nation." [15.] This included anyone doing business with the Yugoslav government, foreign embassy staff, and all Croats who were sympathetic to the Communist government or simply disagreed with the tactics of the HNO and its alter ego organizations. This strain of intolerance among other Croats (including the novel distinction between "real Croats" - i.e., those who support the Ustase - and, presumably, false ones) can be traced back to the pre-war Ustase movement when disputes within the organization were settled quickly and violently, as in the case of the former commandant of the Ustase training camp at Janka Puszta who was executed when a jilted lover became an informer for the secret police. A precursor to their intolerance of competitors, real or imagined, can be seen in the wartime treatment meted out to Vladko Macek of the Croatian Peasant Party, who had been regarded as too much of a potential threat by Pavelic to be allowed his freedom, despite of his public support for the Ustase and the Independent State of Croatia. Macek was sent to the Jasenovac concentration camp before being remanded to house arrest, and left a chilling description of his time there in his memoirs.
Luburic's body was found in his villa in Spain on April 20, 1969. His skull had been crushed by repeated blows to the head with a blunt object, and his chest lacerated by more than a dozen stab wounds. Yet the grisly death of one of the most noxious killers of the 20th century did little to change attitudes among the Ustase exiles and their younger proteges. If anything, the violence became even worse.
THE CROATIAN (R)EVOLUTIONARY BROTHERHOOD
The differences between the HNO and the HOP were geographic rather than ideological. The oath taken by HNO recruits included a commitment of allegiance to the HOP's founder, a pledge to "remain loyal to... the principles of the Ustase movement of the Poglavnik, Dr. Ante Pavelic." [16.]
This is a crucial point: though HNO and HOP were separate organizations operating on opposite sides of the world, they both considered themselves - and recognized each other - as Ustase. There was nothing which ideologically distinguished HNO from HOP, and in tactical matters there was only HNO's slightly more effervescent praise for the use of explosives in pursuit of their political goals. Luburic split from Pavelic toward the end of the latter's life on minor ideological grounds, but their organizations continued to cooperate.
The 1970s completely obliterated the already opaque lines between the two organizations. HNO's Australian branch evolved into the Croatian Statehood Movement (HDP), while it's West German members shifted to the United Croats of West Germany. Meanwhile, new acts of terrorism in Australia, Europe, the United States and South America occurred with appalling regularity. No study has tabulated the precise number of Ustase terrorist incidents in the decade, but a fair-minded estimate would reveal at least 50 attempted assassinations, 40 successful bombings of public buildings or monuments, two successful airplane hijackings and another in which an airliner was destroyed in mid-flight by detonation - just under one incident every month of every year over the course of the decade. Many of the attacks were attributed to a shadowy, hither-to unknown group which called itself the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (CRB).
Several HDP-connected journals claimed that the CRB emerged in response to the Yugoslav suppression of the "Croatian Spring," a flowering of nationalistic politics and culture in Zagreb in the first two years of the 1970s. In fact, the leaders of the Croatian Spring distanced themselves at every opportunity from the extremist movement and explicitly condemned the neo-fascist pageantry of the emigre organizations, including the continuation of Pavelic's personality cult and the marking of April 10th - the day the NDH was founded after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia - as Croatia's independence day. Less symbolic activities which the Croatian Spring activists condemned included the murder of the Yugoslav Ambassador to Sweden, Vladimir Rolovic; the subsequent hijacking of a Swedish SAS jetliner by Ustase demanding the release of Rolovic's assassins; and the murder and extortion of scores of moderate Croats who refused to pay "contributions" to fund Ustase violence. [17.]
Today, there is some speculation that the Brotherhood was fictional front and a convenient cover to shield the by-now more respectable HDP and HOP from direct links with terrorists. This alibi was essential, as a fair share of Ustase crimes were now taking place on Western European and American soil, including the Statue of Liberty. There was seamless cooperation between one-time members of the HOP and HDP working under the guise of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood - or, just as often, working under no guise at all, and only claiming responsibility in the name of the CRB after a successful operation. [18.]
By willful blindness or cynical politics, the ruse worked. The HOP under Ante Bonifacic, who presided over the Croatian extremist movement at a time when a group of Croats organized from Chicago were convicted of more than fifty counts of extortion, racketeering, murder, attempted murder, and using the United States Postal Service for sending bombs in hollowed out books to dissident Croats, including a Catholic priest [19.], was classified by the FBI as a benevolent, non-violent political organization - certainly the only party founded by a World War II war criminal to earn such a distinction. [20.] The United States government was unmoved by the convicted defendants' connection with international terrorist Miro Baresic, and the fact that a mysterious Croatian group in Chicago - where Bonifacic and the HOP were now based - made a monthly payment to Baresic, who was then an international fugitive from justice that had entered the United States with forged documents before he was eventually arrested and deported back to Sweden to serve out the rest of his sentence for the murder of Ambassador Rolovic in Stockholm. [21.]
Similarly, in Australia, HDP officials like Nikola Stedul and Spremnost publisher Fabian Lovokovic found themselves courted by members of the left and the right of Australian politics, even as the police uncovered three separate Ustase training camps over the course of three years where lessons were given on long-range shooting and bomb-making and -handling. Stedul, who had emigrated from Yugoslavia to Germany in the 1950s, is alleged to have been an HNO representative in Australia from 1966 to 1971 before becoming a high official in the "new" HDP. [22.]
THE RED REPUBLICANS
Of the Ustase leaders abroad, mention should be made of Branimir (Branko) and Ivan Jelic, two brothers involved in the pre-war Ustase movement who later parted ways with their fellow exiles. Branko had occupied one of the highest positions in the pre-war Ustase, and headed a radical Croat youth organization before Pavelic had even formed the Ustase. He was arrested with Eugen-Dido Kvaternik and Ante Pavelic in Turin in connection with the assassination of King Alexander in Marseilles in 1934. Jelic was interned in England during the war, thus escaping scrutiny as he was in no way implicated in the atrocities of the NDH. He emigrated to Germany afterward, and headed the Croatian Committee and the Croatian Socialist Party, which published the journal Hrvatska Drzava (The Croatian State).
The Jelic brothers differed radically from other post-war Ustase-led movements in that they allied themselves with the Soviet Union, offering the Red Army access to naval and air bases in a free and independent Croatia, whereas Tito allowed them none in Federal Yugoslavia. [23.] "Finlandization" was a word on the lips of Czech democrats, Polish intellectuals and Latvian dissidents, and the Jelic brothers too believed a Soviet alliance against the Socialist heretic Tito would create an opportunity for Croatia's independence. Treating the Croatian situation in the context of a national liberation struggle, the Jelic brothers were able to gain some sympathy for Croatian independence among left-leaning editors, publicists and political activists. Nevertheless their movement was the weakest of those mentioned here, partially due to a bizarre competition spread by the HDP when the Jelic brothers attempted to expand the Croatian Socialists from their West German base. [24.]
THE POGLAVNIK'S FAMILY TREE
All of the various Croat extremist organizations mentioned herein, both real and sham, can trace their lineage back to the NDH and, further, to Ante Pavelic himself. Clear branches of descent can be drawn from the furthest extremity - Pavelic's founding of the Ustase movement in Vienna in 1929-30 - through era of pre-war terrorism, through the NDH and the Krizari Campaign and finally to the two progenitors of all subsequent Croatian extremist organizations, Pavelic and Luburic.
Croatian terrorist groups never truly "split" from the Ustase or from one another, in the sense of the violent fragmentation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Abu Nidal, or the two factions of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) in Lebanon after 1983. The difference between Pavelic's HOP and Luburic's HNO, whose members paid homage to Pavelic in their loyalty oath, could not be measured by ideology or tactics, but only in geography: one operated in the Americas, the others primarily in Europe with an outpost in Australia. By the time the two principles were dead, the groups had spun off "respectable" fronts for political agitation and presentation to the anti-Communist international community, while continuing to nurture an even more radical, violent and reckless element within. There were moments of blatant collaboration between members of the separate groups in terrorist acts and, after 1972, the total evaporation of any distinction between them.
The attention of the reader is drawn to the scope of this brief inquiry, but one shouldn't lose sight of the uncertain terminus of the Ustase movement abroad. Indeed, the racketeering trial against several Croatian extremists in the United States was concluded only in 1983 when appeals by the defendants were rejected. In recent years, right-wing Croatian organizations in Zagreb have called for the defendants release from prison as patriots, in spite of their record of extorting, threatening, and attempting to kill other Croats in the United States.
Another prominent Croatian terrorist, Miro Baresic, unindicted co-conspirator in the racketeering trial mentioned above, the assassin of Ambassador Vladimir Rolovic and later advisor to the military death squads of Paraguan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, was paroled in Stockholm in 1987 and three years later enlisted in a paramilitary unit fighting for Croatia against the Krajina Serbs. His conspirators in the Rolovic assassination bypassed Interpol warrants and also returned home to enlist in the Croatian War. Nikola Stedul is now president of the HDP, based in Zagreb. Without submitting the reader to bathos, it is worthwhile to point out that the crimes of the Ustase-led extremist organizations against individuals, both Croat and Serb, communist, nationalist or apolitical, are not relics of ancient history, but are fixed within the living memory of most people alive today.