Croatian Radical Separatism and Diaspora Terrorism During the Cold War

Mate Nikola Tokić

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9789633862063
• eBook ISBN: 9781557538925
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Croatian Radical Separatism and Diaspora Terrorism During the Cold War examines one of the most active but least remembered groups of terrorists of the Cold War: radical anti-Yugoslav Croatian separatists. Operating in countries as widely dispersed as Sweden, Australia, Argentina, West Germany, and the United States, Croatian extremists were responsible for scores of bombings, numerous attempted and successful assassinations, two guerilla incursions into socialist Yugoslavia, and two airplane hijackings during the height of the Cold War. In Australia alone, Croatian separatists carried out no less than sixty-five significant acts of violence in one ten-year period. Diaspora Croats developed one of the most far-reaching terrorist networks of the Cold War and, in total, committed on average one act of terror every five weeks worldwide between 1962 and 1980.

Toki? focuses on the social and political factors that radicalized certain segments of the Croatian diaspora population during the Cold War and the conditions that led them to embrace terrorism as an acceptable form of political expression. At its core, this book is concerned with the discourses and practices of radicalization—the ways in which both individuals and groups who engage in terrorism construct a particular image of the world to justify their actions. Drawing on exhaustive evidence from seventeen archives in ten countries on three continents—including diplomatic communiqués, political pamphlets and manifestos, manuals on bomb-making, transcripts of police interrogations of terror suspects, and personal letters among terrorists—Toki? tells the comprehensive story of one of the Cold War's most compelling global political movements.

Chapter 1

There Can Be No More
Discussion, 1948–1956

The Križari had predicated their incursions on the belief that Marshal Tito and his communist regime enjoyed—at best—minimal support among Croats in the new state and that a popular uprising was imminent. This expectation proved to be mistaken.¹ Through a combination of violence, authoritarianism, and—most importantly—genuine appeal, Tito and the communists had consolidated power by the summer of 1948, reducing substantially the number of active Ustaše in the country. The few stalwart devotees who had not left the country or died at the hands of Partisan forces were, after the war, systematically hunted and persecuted by the Yugoslav authorities, leaving the domestic movement shattered and in ruins. Opposition to Tito and the communists certainly existed in both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, as did sympathy for the NDH and Pavelić (although less so for the latter). But both were forced to retreat from public political life.

This said, however devastated the Ustaše were by 1948, they were far from eradicated. In the immediate aftermath of the war, upward of 250,000 individuals from Croatian areas fled Yugoslavia. This included not only quislings, collaborators, and their families but also non-fascist anticommunists, war refugees, and displaced minorities, most notably ethnic German Donauschwaben.² Of these, up to one-fifth—between 30,000 and 50,000—were former Ustaše.³ The majority ended up in refugee and displaced persons camps in bordering Austria and Italy. From there, they moved on to countries traditionally welcoming of immigrants, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, or countries with regimes more sympathetic to the plight of wartime fascists, such as Argentina, Uruguay, and Spain. Additionally, approximately 12,000 Ustaša émigrés ultimately settled in West Germany.

Unlike 1929 and the period after the proclamation of the royalist dictatorship in Yugoslavia, the Croatian diaspora following World War II was dispersed, disjointed, disoriented, and lacking any real unity. The remnants of the Ustaše sought to rebuild the movement where it had arisen—namely, in exile. But unlike the first half of the 1930s, the situation both in Yugoslavia and on the larger international stage—along with other factors—encouraged deep cleavages and political infighting among exiled Croatian nationalists and anti-Titoists abroad. These rifts, in turn, led to a splintering of the émigré separatist movement, as rivals for control of the diaspora community fought one another for authority over the remnants of the wartime Ustaša movement. This infighting ultimately led to a general deradicalization of Croatian émigré separatism, even if both the aims and rhetoric of the postwar movement remained as radical as ever. Essentially, even if the Ustaše survived after 1945 (albeit under different guises), terrorism and political violence ceased to be central to the movement—at least until the 1960s.

The Ustaše in Exile

Croats who found refuge in the West included some of the highest-ranking ministers, officials, and military officers of the NDH. The general commander of the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp, General Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburić, for instance, settled in Franco’s fascist Spain. Another Jasenovac commander, Dinko Šakić, lived for nearly half a century in Argentina. Rafael Boban, commander of the Black Legion (Crna legija)—perhaps the most notorious military unit in the NDH—disappeared after the war, but at least some evidence suggests he served in the United States Army during the Korean War.⁴ Andrija Artuković, who had served in the NDH as both minister of the interior and minister of justice and religion and was known as the “Himmler of the Balkans,” ultimately found a new life in Southern California. Other ministers who managed to evade capture and find their way to the West included Vjekoslav Vrančić, minister of craftsmanship and trade; Džafer-beg Kulenović, deputy prime minister; and Stijepo Perić, minister of foreign affairs.

But unquestionably the most prominent Ustaša to forge a new life abroad was the poglavnik himself, Ante Pavelić. After escaping first to Austria and then to Italy, Pavelić ultimately found sanctuary in Juan Perón’s Argentina. Like many Ustaše who found their way overseas, Pavelić secured passage to Argentina through the infamous ratlines run by the Croatian Franciscan priest Krunoslav Draganović.⁵ Draganović had been sent to Rome in 1943 to serve officially as secretary of San Girolamo degli Illirici, a Croatian seminary college dating back to 1453. Unofficially, Draganović acted as Pavelić’s representative to the Holy See.⁶ In the half decade following the end of World War II, Draganović became the leading organizational figure in the escape from Europe not only of Croatian Ustaša leaders but also of German Nazis and other east European quislings. While it is impossible to determine precisely how many Nazi and fascist fugitives Draganović and his network managed to smuggle out of Europe, at least one estimate puts the number at thirty thousand.⁷

Newly based in Buenos Aires, Pavelić attempted to reassert his authority over the Ustaše in exile and reanimate the Croatian separatist movement. As one contemporaneous Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) source in the Argentine capital stated succinctly: “Pavelić’s first steps upon arrival in Argentina indicate that he plans to become politically active…. Pavelić is convinced that he has a mission to perform, and … he and his followers still regard him as the ‘Poglavnik.’”⁸ This mission, simply, was the reestablishment of an independent Croatian state. Shortly after his arrival in Argentina, Pavelić founded a new political party, the Croatian State-Forming Party (HDS; Hrvatska državotvorna stranka), chaired by the former NDH commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Oskar Turina.⁹ The HDS was for all intents and purposes the Ustaše in different garb, seeking to make the movement more palatable to Western political leaders. To the public, Pavelić trumpeted the democratic and anticommunist character of the HDS, even while maintaining an authoritarian grip over the party, its members, and its ideology.¹⁰ To sustain contact with his followers, Pavelić founded the émigré periodical Hrvatska (Croatia), which was published in Italy for distribution primarily in refugee and displaced persons camps there and in Austria.¹¹

Underlying the HDS was the assertion that the Independent State of Croatia continued to exist, but that it was being occupied by an enemy force—namely, Tito and the communists.¹² Working from this premise, Pavelić established a Croatian government in exile based in Buenos Aires. This government was founded on April 10, 1951, the tenth anniversary of the proclamation of the NDH in Zagreb, a date clearly chosen to demonstrate the continuity of the two administrations. The government’s structure further reinforced this connection. Džafer-beg Kulenović, who had fled to Syria after the war, was promoted from vice president of the NDH to president of the government in exile. The minister of internal affairs was Vjekoslav Vrančić, Pavelić’s right-hand man in Argentina. Other officials included Marko Pejačević as foreign minister and Ilija Andrić as minister of culture, both of whom resided in England. Finally, the newly appointed war minister was General Rafael Boban, whose (unconfirmed) whereabouts were given as inside Croatia, where he was supposedly organizing armed resistance to Tito’s regime.¹³

Pavelić also reestablished the Croatian Armed Forces (HOS; Hrvatske oružane snage) in exile. The HOS was originally formed in late 1944 in order to bring all military forces in the NDH under direct control of the poglavnik’s inner circle following the failed Mladen Lorković-Ante Vokić coup against Pavelić earlier that year.¹⁴ In May 1945, much of the HOS was destroyed by Tito’s Third Yugoslav Army after the repatriation of fleeing Croatian soldiers and others back into Yugoslavia by British forces at Bleiburg. The HOS in exile was conceived less as a unified force than as a network of “legions” spread out across the globe. As reconstituted in 1951, the HOS included four geographic divisions, each commanded by a trusted Pavelić underling. The South American unit was led by Ivan Asančaić, the North American by Rudolf Erić, the Australian by Srećko Rover. and the European by Maks Luburić. The cornerstone of the HOS was comprised of members of the Argentina-based Hrvatski domobran (Croatian Home Guard), a paramilitary organization founded in 1928 in royalist Yugoslavia and reconstituted in 1931 in South America. Elsewhere, the HOS consisted almost exclusively of émigrés who had left Croatia after the end of World War II, many of whom had served in the HOS during the war.¹⁵

Fundamental to Pavelić’s political machinations was the belief—held by many Croatian political leaders since the nineteenth century—that Great Power patronage was the key to Croatian independence.¹⁶ Such protective relationships had allowed the Ustaša’s rise first to prominence in the 1930s and then to actual power in 1941. By 1948, however, the Grand Alliance among Hitler’s enemies was a distant memory, replaced by a new global conflict whose foci were Washington and Moscow. With an eye to this new geopolitical landscape, Pavelić sought to reposition the Ustaša movement so that it had something to offer the Great Powers—namely, military assistance in the anticipated global struggle between communism and liberal democracy. All that would be asked in return were assurances that once the struggle for global hegemony had been won, an independent Croatian state would be accorded a place in the new world order. Of course, the immediate postwar political circumstances did not especially favor Pavelić and his followers, who had taken the side of the defeated Nazis during the war. But if two decades of international political activity had taught Pavelić anything, it was that opportunism and expediency, more than principles, drove Great Power strategic thinking.

Importantly, this perception did not necessarily mean dealing only with the Western Powers. In the dying days of World War II, the Ustaša leadership considered a plan to pursue a separate peace with the Soviets in exchange for guarantees that any new Soviet Croatian state would remain independent of Serbia or any new Yugoslav state.¹⁷ Three years later, in 1948, elements of this plan were actively pursued following Stalin’s expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform and the widespread belief that a Soviet-led Eastern Bloc invasion of Yugoslavia was imminent.¹⁸ Many émigré Croatian separatists—their fierce Catholicism and anticommunism notwithstanding—viewed the Tito-Stalin rift as an opportunity to actively push for Croatian independence. Prominent members of the Ustaša leadership, chief among them Vjekoslav Vrančić, purportedly approached Soviet officials in Buenos Aires and Vienna with a proposition for mutual assistance against the common “Serbo-communist” enemy. Should the Soviets decide to invade Yugoslavia to remove Tito from power, the Croats offered, Ustaša military forces abroad would return to Yugoslavia to fight alongside the Red Army. All that was requested in exchange was that, following their victory over Tito’s army, the Soviets would dismantle the federal Yugoslav state and establish a socialist but independent Croatia.¹⁹ To demonstrate the seriousness of this offer, at least according to some sources, Vrančić ordered the Križari forces operating out of Austria to begin coordination of their efforts with Soviet military and diplomatic officials in order to lay the groundwork for a large-scale Soviet invasion.²⁰

In the end, Stalin refrained from invading Yugoslavia, and nothing came of the Croats’ offer. But the shelving of plans for a Soviet-Yugoslav war did not mean that the Croats had no role to play in the machinations of Great Power politics—at least in their own imaginations. By the early 1950s, as the contours of the Cold War began to take shape, Pavelić and his followers reached the same conclusion that many political observers of the day did—namely, that the expansionist nature of Soviet Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism would inexorably lead to a confrontation between East and West.²¹ Rather than fearing the potential catastrophe of such a conflict, however, many émigré Croatian separatists welcomed the idea of a direct confrontation between Moscow and Washington. As they saw it, only a war could save either those already or those soon to be oppressed by the forces of communism. In a 1953 interview published in Hrvatska under the title “The Only Solution: A War,” Pavelić asserted: “The liberation of East and Southeastern Europe can only come with war, a war waged by the still free peoples of the West against Bolshevik Russia and against World Bolshevism. There can be no more discussion of some kind of “inner” Communist Revolution, as some people would like to believe. The opinion that the people of the free-world have nothing invested in the destiny of those already oppressed by communism is akin to suicide, as communism is not simply international, but in fact universal, with its aim not simply power in Russia and the occupied lands.”²² Such a war, Pavelić continued, would not only undoubtedly be won by the West but would result in a smashing of the prevailing political landscape in Europe. In such a brave new post-communistic world, there would be no more need to prop up an artificial multiethnic state like Yugoslavia, thus leaving the Croats free to pursue their dream of an independent state.

Émigré Croatian separatists sought to position themselves as crucial allies of the West in the struggle against global communism, aiming thereby to ensure that their interests would be considered in the aftermath of the coming war. Pavelić and other exiled separatist leaders spent their energies redefining themselves as steadfast democrats and model, loyal citizens in the hope that the Croats would be embraced as a “deserving” and “worthy” nation in the future reorganization of post-communist Europe. Indeed, they imagined an active role for Croats in the global struggle against state socialism. Pavelić himself revealed this aspiration in a letter to the signatories of the NATO pact in 1957, declaring:

The Croat nation, and particularly the former officers and ranks of the Croatian armed forces now living abroad, are experienced in … anti-partisan warfare. In fact, during the last war, Communists from all Balkanic lands had been thrown on their territory and the Croatian army was engaged in fighting them. Thanks to these facts, the Croatian Liberation Movement has been in a position to elaborate plans for an efficient antiguerrilla warfare and has at its disposal the necessary personnel for the training of the corresponding cadres, with which we are willing to contribute to the liberation of the Croat nation and all other enslaved peoples, as well as the defense of the free world.²³

The Croatian struggle for independence was not simply about the “enslaved” peoples of Croatia or even eastern Europe. Rather, the very survival of the democratic world was at stake. The battle against communism was a common one, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction: Our Position Is Clear
• Chapter 1: There Can Be No More Discussion, 1948–1956
• Chapter 2: In Contradiction to Sociopolitical Norms, 1956–1960
• Chapter 3: The Facts as They Exist, 1960–1962
• Chapter 4: All Accounts Have Not Yet Been Settled, 1962–1969
• Chapter 5: We Have Chosen No One but Ourselves, 1969–1972
• Chapter 6: Simply, It Comes Down to This, 1972–1980
• Epilogue: Fixated for Many Years on This Day, 1980–1991
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author