POWERFULLY PROTECTED - the Ustasha in Australia

I was a political child. In 1972 during the campaign that toppled twenty-three years of Australian Liberal governments, I wore my It's Time badge faithfully to Sunday School every week - It's Time For A Change. I rejoiced when in December Gough Whitlam and the Labor Party roared into office and, even today, I can still sing the song that encapsulated that exciting time in Australian politics. 'The Adventures of Edward Gough Whitlam. Dinki Di tales of an Aussie Boy.'  

From 1952 to 1978 Whitlam held the safe Labor seat of Werriwa in southwest Sydney which contained a substantial migrant community from the former Yugoslavia. 

Unlike their Liberal predecessors, the new Labor Government was not frightened of the Yugoslav communist government or communism in general. They did not permit the freedom of terrorist groups in Australia merely because they weren't communist and therefore not considered a threat. One such group that they banned were the Croatian terrorists, the Ustasha. 

Who were the Ustasha?

They were fascists, which means right wing ultra-nationalists, the opposites and opponents of communism. Fascism flourished in Europe in the interwar years under Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, the Ustasha in Croatia and many others. 

In my 1915 atlas (right) there is no Croatia. It forms part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Various factors, including the fear of land claims from Italy, resulted in Croatia being incorporated into Yugoslavia in 1918 under a Serbian monarchy. The Ustasha were founded in 1929 with the aim of achieving Croatian independence. 

Following the German invasion of Yugoslavia 6th April 1941, Hitler put the Ustasha in charge of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) which included Bosnia and 1.8 million ethnic Serbs (5). The Croatian historian, Slavko Goldstein (2) acknowledges that, although the Serbian monarchy had been guilty of the suppression of Croatia, the punishment the Ustasha meted out to the Serbs was out of all proportion to the crimes.

Estimates of the genocide of Serbs by the Ustasha during World War 2 vary. Hubert Butler (3), the Irish essayist who lived in Croatia before and after the war quotes half a million, while other sources suggest even more. Marcus Tanner (4) writes 'the figure of 600,000 Serb deaths in the NDH is probably much too high as it does not tally with the ethnic composition of Croatia and Bosnia after the war...[but] there is no doubt that the NDH intended to exterminate the Serb population and failed only because it lacked the means.' The Ustasha also killed 75% of the Jews, all the Gypsies, any antifascist who crossed their line of vision, and a cousin of my mother's.

In an attempt to explain the fanatical hatred with which the Ustasha slaughtered Serbs, that even shocked the Nazis, Goldstein quotes the commander of Jasenovac death camp, Ljubo Miloš, 'I know I will burn in hell for what I have done, but I will burn for Croatia.' (2)

The Ustasha find protection in Australia.  

'Like many refugees from countries in Eastern Europe who had collaborated with Hitler and Mussolini,' writes Gough Whitlam, 'and who therefore could not return to their countries of birth, the Ustasha formed close ties with the Liberal Party.' 

'In 1954, I had brought to the notice of the Minister for Immigration [Holt] the distress which had been caused to many migrants in my electorate by a program on a Sydney commercial radio station on the Sunday nearest to 10th April to celebrate "the Croatian National Day" This was the anniversary of the establishment of the Ustasha puppet regime under Ante Pavelić in 1941.' (1)  

In September 1963, the following article appeared in the Tribune (6), the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia.

The Wodonga incident had been staged by the Ustasha, filmed then splashed across the world to demonstrate the 'help' they were receiving from Australian authorities. An embarrassed Minister for the Army 'pleaded that the officer commanding was not aware of the composition of the [Ustasha] 'picnic group' and had merely regarded them as potential recruits'. (1)  

Some selected Ustasha bombings                 Quotes are from (1) unless otherwise stated.

1964 May, Sydney - a supporter is seriously injured by his own bomb. 

1965 February, Geelong - Yugoslav dance.

1967 April, Melbourne - two separate residences.

1967 January, Sydney - Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1967 November, Richmond VIC - Yugoslav function.

1968 November, Melbourne - bombs thrown into a residence.

1968 November, Sydney -    Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1969 April, Sydney - residence. 

1969 June - Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1969, October, Canberra - USSR Embassy.                                         

1969, November, Canberra - Yugoslav Embassy.

1970, October, Melbourne - Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1971, January - USSR consulate.

1971, February, Sydney airport - bomb threat against Yugoslav musicians.

1971, November, Sydney - Yugoslav agency.

1971, December, Suburban Sydney - Yugoslav film show. 
1972, February, Canberra - Serbian orthodox church. 

1972, April, Melbourne and Canberra - residence and an exhibition.

1972, September, Sydney -- Yugoslav premises. 

The Tribune was not impressed. 

October 28th 1970 - 'There appear to be several flocks of guardian angels watching over the Ustashi. Firstly, there are the Liberal and Democratic Labor Parties. Top Liberals, including Gorton, McMahon and Snedden, have either praised them or defended them. Liberal politicians such as Federal Minister Mr W C Wentworth and NSW Parliamentarian have appeared and spoken at their rallies.  Apparently, the fanatical anti-communist and anti-labor attitudes of the Ustashi make them a valued ally.' (7)

Gough Whitlam agreed. 'The Ustasha had enjoyed immunity under [successive Liberal prime ministers] Menzies, Holt, Gorton and McMahon...If communist rather than anti-communist organizations had been thought responsible for [the terrorist incidents in Australia] all the Liberal Attorneys-General would have been active in pursuing and prosecuting the perpetrators.' (1)

But was it only to do with the fear of Communism? 

While I might rant and rage at the injustice of allowing a persecuted ethnic group to enter Australia only to permit the persecution to continue here, it is true that post war Australia was essentially British and not concerned about migrants it didn't understand and whose language it couldn't speak. 'By focusing their attacks on the Yugoslav community, the Ustaša avoided provoking general outrage and public censure,' writes Kristy Campion (8). 'The violence was considered a Yugoslav migrant problem. It was not until the tourism centre bombings injured sixteen random civilians that decisive political action was taken.'  She notes that contributing factors were the fear the victims had of retribution and the fear of deportation back to the communist Yugoslavia they had left.  

It is fortunate that Gough Whitlam held an electorate with a Yugoslav community. With the Labor party at last in office, the long run of government permissiveness to the Ustasha came to an end and the community had a few short years of peace until the breakup of Yugoslavia during the wars of the 1990's. Writing many years after he was an eyewitness to the Ustasha crimes, Slavko Goldstein concluded that Ustasha intellectuals believed that 'if you loved Croatia very much, you must be forgiven completely even if in its name... you persecuted people, drove them into prisons and camps, killed them, or had them killed on a massive scale. If you have expressed remorse with a few general phrases, you have been “purified" and you will receive the honour that you deserve.' (2)

Sources

(1) Whitlam, Gough     The Whitlam Government 1972-1975   Penguin Books 1985

(2) Goldstein, Slavko    1941: The Year Tthat Keeps Returning  NY Review of Books 2007

(3) Butler, Hubert   The Balkan Essays.  Irish Page Press 2016.

(4) Tanner, Marcus     Croatia   Yale UP 1997.

(5) Nationalities and Minorities in the Independent State of Croatia | Nationalities Papers | Cambridge Core

(6) 18 Sep 1963 - "Poem" for terrorism - Trove

(7) 28 Oct 1970 - Powerful protectors of the Ustashi bomb terrorists - Trove

(8) The Ustaša in Australia: A Review of Right-Wing Ustaša Terrorism from 1963-1973, and Factors that Enabled their Endurance Kristy Campion.

researchoutput.csu.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/29095069/28757579_Published_article.pdf/

The Holy Land - from old maps and literature.

The modern Middle Eastern crisis began, in part, because Turkey was on the losing side in World War 1. For six hundred years the Ottoman Turks had supported Islam across North Africa, through the Levant and into Europe where their wave of success was finally brought to a halt at the gates of Vienna in 1683 – note the date, September 11th. The long slow decline had begun. The red, green, black and white 'Flag of the Arab Revolt', replicated in many forms throughout the Middle East today, originated in 1916 when the Arabs were trying to leave the failing Empire. Instead, they found themselves in a more dismal situation. By the time the Ottoman Empire was finally dissolved in 1922, two of the victors of World War 1 had claimed much of its remaining territory, France in Syria and Lebanon, and Britain in Iraq, Jordan, Kurdistan, Israel and the territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

I am the proud possessor of a 1915 Australian Atlas, and an AMP Map of the World published shortly before the outbreak of World War 2. I am including them in my blog 'War in the Balkans' because the task of reconstructing the Middle East following the anticipated fall of the Ottoman Empire was a problem much considered by the West throughout the nineteenth century and particularly after the First and Second Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. Why the West should have embraced it as their problem says a lot about the thinking of the time. It was also due to the discovery of oil in the Middle East in 1908 by the British and their establishment of oil fields during the 1920's and 30's. 

        The Middle East in1915

   

1939

The Middle East in 1939

The British Mandate of Palestine 1920 - 1948

Palestine compared with Tasmania, Australia

In 1922, Winston Churchill gave away 75% of the British Mandate of Palestine to create the modern Arab nation of Jordan.

In 1948, the remaining land was partitioned to create the State of Israel. 

In 1867, Mark Twain made his famous visit to the Holy Land

A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one understand how small it is… The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants...The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic assail you on every hand. To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here


Herodotus – The Histories (c. 446 BC)

The Syrians of Palestine (and the Phoenicians) have a tradition that in ancient times they lived on the Persian Gulf, but migrated to the Syrian coast where they are found today. This part of Syria, together with the country that extends southward to Egypt, is all known as Palestine…They practise circumcision…[and] the custom is evidently a very ancient one.

 Suetonius – The Twelve Caesars

An ancient superstition was current in the East, that out of Judea at this time would come the rulers of the world…The rebellious Jews read it as referring to themselves, murdered their Governor, routed the Governor of Syria when he came down to retore order, and captured an Eagle. To crush this uprising the Romans needed a strong army under an energetic commander…The choice fell on Vespasian (66AD).

Pliny the Elder – Natural History (AD 23 – 79)

On the west side of the Dead Sea, away from the cost, lives the solitary tribe of the Essenes…Below them was the town of Engeda (Joshua 15,62), second only to Jerusalem in the fertility of its soil and in its groves of palm trees but now, like Jerusalem, another heap of ashes

SOME DAMN FOOLISH THING IN THE BALKANS - how Britain, Germany and Austria started World War 1

GAVRILO PRINCIP is famous for Gavrila Princip Street in Belgrade, home to my favourite restaurant Zavičaj's, where I have enjoyed three times now the best craft sausage, roast potatoes, cabbage salad, mustard and a memorable house red.

GAVRILO PRINCIP is also famous for assassinating, in Sarajevo Bosnia, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and starting World War One.

"Assassinate" is too strong a word. I believe he was provoked. 

The underdog is the eternal scapegoat, and Gavrila Princip was a Bosnian Serb, an excellent example of the species because he and his friends were poor, passionate nationalists in a world of rich, arrogant empires. Had he been British or German or even a disgruntled Austrian or Turk, would the notion that one young man could be the cause of such a cataclysmic catastrophe have been quite so popular with our history books?

Serbs had lived in Bosnia for thirteen hundred years and at the time Gavrila fired the fatal shot (or shots, actually, because he killed the Archduchess as well) there were 800,000 Serbs living in Bosnia out of a population of 1.9 million.

Why were the Balkans the underdogs, and why Bosnia in particular?

To answer that question, here is what the Germans thought of the Balkans.

“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” -

Otto von Bismarck 1888, founding Chancellor of Germany and wealthy aristocrat.

And here is what the British thought.

"All these Balkan peoples are trash" -

Alexander Cadogan 1941, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and wealthy aristocrat.

I haven't tracked down the originator of the phrase describing the Balkans as "the powder keg of Europe" but it would have to have been a member of one of the many empires that taxed them, exploited their natural resources and used their populations for military service - the Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Ottoman Turks, Venetians, Italians, the British or the Russians - and who discovered the hard way that the Balkans didn't appreciate being exploited. 

Here is what Gavrila Princip thought. "I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria."

Why did Austria get control over Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the first place?

[In April 1877] Russia went to war with the Turks...Such a general conflagration was just what European Diplomats feared. It was the dreaded Eastern Question, or what to do with Turkey's European possessions once the [Ottoman} Empire collapsed...At the Congress of Berlin in 1878...the Balkans states were not invited to participate beyond presenting their views. The decisions of the Congress were to have tremendous historical impact...In a great blow to Serbia, the provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina were given to Austria-Hungary to adminsister...[This occupation] contained within it the seeds of the First World War. (2)

Those seeds were fertilized and watered with the connivance of Britain and Germany.

In the war of 1877 Serbia allied with Russian against the Turks, during which the Serbs 'reoccupied the whole of Southern Serbia . [but] the agreement that had been reached by the Russians and the Turks ...did not suit Britain or Germany, who feared that they would mean Russian control of the Balkans through a puppet state in Bulgaria. [So] at the Treaty of Berlin Serbia and Montenegro acquired almost complete independence from Turkey but Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. ...Bismarck insisted on this to offset what he regarded as the undue support for Turkey given at the Congress by the British Government. The Austrian garrisons stationed throughout the territories were bitterly resented by the Serbian population...as was the separation of Serbia and Montenegro ...by a fortified strip of territory under Austrian control.'(3)

Bosnia is a country of three faiths but two of these have strong ties to Croatia and Serbia. Austria's actions in Bosnia only amplified Serbian and Croatian nationalism.

'In 1878 the Austro-Hungarian Empire occupied Bosnia...until it was formally annexed in 1908. Fearing general unrest, Austria initially maintained the Ottoman laws, including the agrarian privileging of Muslim landholders. Gradually, however, the new colonial government began establishing control over the three religious communities [Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox] with the aim of curbing political and ideological ties between Bosnia and the neighboring Croatia and Serbia...It tried to promote a sense of unified Bosnian identity [and] it tried to cut off religious ties with the immediate neighbours [Croatia and Serbia]. As education and literacy among the local populations improved, so did their ties with national movements in Serbia and Croatia.[There was a] zeal of national awakening pouring in from Serbia and Croatia.(4)

And then in 1914 on the 28th June, the most sacred day in the Serbian calendar, Archduke Franz Ferdinand chose to parade Austrian imperialism through the streets of Sarajevo.

'Why ever did the royal visit take place on Vidovdan, a great day of mourning for the defeat of the Serbs by the Turks in the fourteenth century?...Was the visit a provocation? Did the Vienna government want some incident to occur that would give an excuse for the subjugation of Serbia?' (1)

I would like to say that Empires have the best interests of their territories at heart but that would be naive. Empires want resources and here are just a few examples of many.

Immediately after it took control in 1878 Austria began to construct a narrow-gauge railway system in BiH to transport Bosnian timber, bauxite, coal, iron ore, zinc and lead. Although the country in World War 2 was supposedly divided by the Vienna Line into Croatian and Italian sections, Hitler helped himself to the bauxite mines near Mostar for aeroplane manufacture. 'In 1900, [in] the rural economy of Croatia-Slavonia 56% of the direct taxes … went to Hungary' (6) and countries under Ottoman Turkey were so heavily taxed that whenever people could leave, they did. Most couldn't, and in Serbia the Ottomans harvested local boys every five years, forcing them to convert to Islam and using them as troops called Janissaries. Between the wars Britain posted mining engineers in Belgrade to help Britain, not Serbia, and was widely believed to have manipulated Serbian politics in order to precipitate the coup d’etat that led to the disastrous invasion of Belgrade in 1941.

After World War 2 a political agitator from Jerusalem named Al Husseini was wanted by Tito’s Yugoslav government as a war criminal, so it is worthwhile taking a look at Britain’s relationship with the Arabs. A day after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, five Arab states invaded in a joint land grab. The evangelist Derek Prince was living in Jerusalem when ‘a fragment [of a shell] flew through an open window…When it was cool enough to handle, I picked it up and examined it…Neatly imprinted on it were the words “Made in Britain”’. (7)

That the British Empire was a cruel colonizer is well known but it seems to have enjoyed better relations in the Middle East. The explanation can be long and convoluted but, put simply, it was due to oil. Britain had established oil supplies in Iraq and Iran during the 1920’s and 30’s, having discovered oil in Iran in 1908. 'Iranian popular opposition to the ... royalty terms [where Iran received only 16% of the profits] was widespread and created political discontent throughout the country' (5). In 1921 Britain gave two thirds of the Holy Land to Jordan in order to protect British interests and the British oil pipeline that ran through it. The action pacified the Arabs alarmed by the arrival of Jewish settlers from Europe. In the remaining land west of the Jordan River, Al Husseini incited violence against the Jews and in 1921, Britain made him grand mufti of Jerusalem in the hope of calming him down. Instead, it made him more violent and, as the official leader of Muslim Arabs he later moved to Berlin to assist Hitler in carrying out the Holocaust. In BiH he formed three SS divisions of Muslim soldiers who committed atrocities against Jews and Serbs, and attracted the ire of Tito.

So, go to Sarajevo and stand in the footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, but don't blame him for starting World War 1. As Tito said: foreign land we don't want, our land we don't give.

1. Balkan Essays of Hubert Butler. The Irish Pages Press 2016

2. The Serbs by Tim Judah

3. Conflict in the Balkans by Malcolm Booker. Catalyst Press Sydney 1994.

4. Good People in an Evil Time by Svetlana Broz. Other Press, New York 2004. 

5. The Discovery of Oil in the Middle East | World History

6.  Rural Women in Croatia/Slavonia in 1900 Elinor MURRAY DESPALATOVIC   14421755.pdf 

7. The Key to the Middle East by Derek Prince. Thomas Nelson 1982.