Ustashe
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The Ustaše (also known as Ustashas or Ustashi) was a Croatian extreme nationalist movement. It engaged in terrorist activity before World War II and ruled, under Nazi protection, in a part of Yugoslavia after that country was occupied by the Axis powers. After German forces withdrew from Yugoslavia in 1945, the Ustaše was defeated and expelled by the communist Yugoslav partisans.
When it was founded in 1929, the Ustaše was a nationalist organization that sought to create an independent Croatian state. When the Ustaše came to power during World War II, its military became the Ustaše Army (Ustaška Vojnica). They claimed that this army had 76,000 troops at its peak in 1944.[citation needed] In the 1990s, during the Yugoslav wars, there was a resurgence of support for the Ustaše. Croatian law currently forbids Ustaše symbols and associated references. As a rule, the enthusiasts of Neo-Nazism in Croatia refer to the Ustaše as their role models.
Their name derives from the verb ustati which means "to rise", hence ustaša would mean an insurgent, a rebel. This name did not have fascist connotations during their early years in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as the term "ustaš" was itself used in Herzegovina to denote the Serb Orthodox insurgents from the Herzegovinian rebellion of 1875.
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[edit] History
In October 1928 , after the assassination of Croatian leader Stjepan Radić in the Skupština by radical Serbian politician Puniša Račić, a youth group named the Croat Youth Movement was founded by Branimir Jelić at the University of Zagreb. A year later, Ante Pavelić was invited by the 21-year-old Jelić into the organization as a junior member. A related movement "Domobranski Pokret" (which had been the name of the legal Croatian army in Austro-Hungary) started publishing "Hrvatski Domobran", a newspaper dedicated to Croatian national matters. The organization around "Domobran" tried to engage with and radicalise moderate Croats, using the murder of a prominent politician in the state Parliament to stir up emotions in the country. By 1929, however, two divergent political streams had formed within Croatia: some supported the Pavelić view that only violence could secure Croatia's national interests; but the Croatian Peasant Party, led at the time by Vladko Maček, a successor of Stjepan Radić, commanded a bit larger popular support in that part of the kingdom.
Various members of the Croatian Party of Rights contributed to the writing of "Domobran", until around Christmas 1928 when the newspaper was banned by the authorities of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In January 1929, the King banned all national parties, and the radical wing of the Party of Rights was exiled, among them Ante Pavelić, Gustav Perčec and Branimir Jelić. This group was later joined by several other Croatian exiles.
On 20 April 1929, Pavelić and others co-signed a declaration in Sofia, Bulgaria together with the members of the Macedonian National Committee, asserting that they would pursue "their legal activities for the establishment of human and national rights, political freedom and complete independence for both Croatia and Macedonia". Because of this, the Court for the Preservation of the State in Belgrade sentenced Pavelić and Perčec to death on 17 July 1929. The exiles never returned to Yugoslavia, and instead started organizing support for their cause among the Croatian diaspora in Europe, South America and North America. They attained support mostly in Belgium, Argentina, and Pennsylvania. In January 1932, they named their revolutionary organization "Ustaša". In November 1932, ten Ustaše led by Andrija Artuković, supported by four local sympathisers, attacked a gendarme outpost at Brušani in the Lika/Velebit area just over the border from Italy. The attack failed with the loss of one assailant killed. The incident has sometimes been glorified as "the Lika Uprising."
Perčec was assassinated by Pavelić in 1933. Due to their previous links with the Macedonian nationalists, the Ustaše were accused of conspiring in the murder the Yugoslav king Alexander in 1934, and Eugen Dido Kvaternik was charged with planning the successful assassination committed by members of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization IMRO. The extent of Ustaše involvement in the assassination remains unknown, it is known for certain only that it was committed by a Macedonian named Vlada Georgiev and not a member of the Ustaše, although the Ustaše provided assistance. Soon after the assassination, all organizations related to the Ustaše as well as the Hrvatski Domobran, which continued as a civil organization, were banned throughout Europe. Pavelić and Kvaternik were detained in Italy from October 1934 until the end of March 1936. After March 1937, when Italy and Yugoslavia signed a pact of friendship, many Ustaše in Italy were extradited to Yugoslavia.
However, these events not only did not destroy the Ustaša organization, it even attracted sympathizers among the Croatian youth, especially among university students. In February 1939, two of these returnees, Mile Budak and Ivan Oršanić, became editors of the newly published magazine Hrvatski narod ("The Croatian nation"), which supported the Ustaše ideas of Croatian independence.
[edit] World War II
The Axis invaded Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941. Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) which was the most influential party in Croatia at the time, rejected offers by the Nazi Germany to lead the new government. On 10 April the most senior home-based Ustaša, Slavko Kvaternik, took control of the police in Zagreb and in a radio broadcast that day proclaimed the formation of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). The name of the state was an obvious but unsuccessful attempt at capitalizing on the Croat struggle for independence. Maček issued a statement that day, calling on all Croatians to co-operate with the new authorities.[1]
Meanwhile Pavelić and several hundred fellow-exiles embarked from their camps in Italy for Zagreb, where Pavelić set up his government on 17 April. He accorded himself the title of "Poglavnik," - a Croatian approximation to "Führer" and translating to something like "Headman" in English. The territory over which he ruled comprised all of Bosnia-Herzegovina; most of Croatia except the Dalmatian coast and the littoral, and parts of Serbia (Syrmia and Sandžak regions). Many Croatians, including Kvaternik and other "home Ustaše" were dismayed to discover that Pavelić had agreed to cede Dalmatia to Italy in exchange for financial and other support provided to the Ustaše by Mussolini. It was the first sign of what was to become a serious rift between Pavelić and Kvaternik later in the war. Because the Ustaše did not have a capable army or administration necessary to control the territory, the Germans and the Italians split the NDH into two zones of influence, one in the southwest controlled by the Italians and the other in the northeast controlled by the Germans.
The atrocities started on 27 April 1941, when a newly formed unit of the Ustaše army killed members of the largely Serbian community of Gudovac (near Bjelovar). Eventually all who opposed and/or threatened the Ustaše were outlawed. The HSS was banned on 11 June 1941, in an attempt by the Ustaše to take their place as the primary representative of the Croatian peasantry. Vladko Maček was sent to Jasenovac concentration camp, but later released to serve a house arrest sentence due to his popularity among the people. Maček was later again called upon by the foreigners to take a stand and counteract the Pavelić government, but refused.
Pavelić first met with Adolf Hitler on June 6, 1941. Mile Budak, then a minister in Pavelić's government, publicly proclaimed the violent racial policy of the state on 22 July 1941. Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić, one of the chiefs of the secret police organizations, started building concentration camps in the summer of the same year. The Ustaše gangs ravaged villages across the Dinaric Alps to the extent that the Italians and the Germans started expressing their horror[2]. By 1942, General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau had written several reports to his Wehrmacht commanders in which he expressed his dismay at the extent of the Ustaša atrocities,[3] some of which took place before the Nazis had embarked on their Final Solution. His reports were corroborated by those of Field Marshal Wilhelm List.
Italian troops in the field were increasingly disinclined to cooperate with the Ustaše and frequently cooperated with Chetnik units operating in the southern areas that they controlled. Hitler tried to insist that Mussolini should have his forces work with the Ustaše, but senior Italian commanders such as General Mario Roatta ignored such orders.
By the end of 1942, the news about the Ustaša atrocities in Jasenovac and elsewhere had also spread among the Croatian population. Noted writers Vladimir Nazor and Ivan Goran Kovačić escaped from the Ustasha-held territory to join the Partisans, and were followed by others.
The regular army of the NDH, the Home Guard (Domobrani), was composed of enlisted men who were barely combat-ready and did not participate in the atrocities. The members of the Ustaša party were part of the paramilitary units that committed the crimes. Pavelić had claimed that over 30,000 people had joined the party during this time, although the more neutral reports concluded that their number was less than half of that.
In 1943, the Germans suffered major losses on the Eastern Front and the Italians started massively defecting, leaving behind even more armament the rebels used against the Ustaše. The Partisans soon became the main rebel force in all of Yugoslavia, having started accepting both Domobran and Četnik defectors, and getting help from the western Allies in the form of airdrops.
[edit] After the war
Eventually the Partisans took control of Yugoslavia, and the Ustaše were defeated. They continued fighting for a short while after the German surrender on May 7, 1945, but were soon overpowered. The Battle of Poljana was the last battle of World War Two on European soil. A large column of Ustaše, along with Domobran soldiers and many civilians, tried to flee for Austria and Italy later in the same month but were handed over to the partisans on the Austrian border and were subsequently either executed or sent on a "death march" back into the country: an episode known as the Bleiburg massacre. Pavelić however, with the help of associates among the Franciscans, managed to escape and hide in Austria and Rome, later fleeing to Argentina.
After World War II, the remaining Ustaše went underground or fled to countries such as Canada, Australia, Germany and South America, with the assistance of Roman Catholic churches and their grassroots supporters. Some of them persisted in their crusade against Yugoslavia. Yugoslav intelligence agents shot Ante Pavelić in Buenos Aires, inflicting injuries from which he later died. In 1972, the Ustaše were blamed for the bombing of JAT Flight 364, which killed 27 people. However, it was later determined that the flight was downed by a pair of SA-12 missiles fired from Czechoslovakia.
[edit] Ideology
The Ustaše aimed at an ethnically "pure" Croatia, and saw the Serbs that lived in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina as the their biggest obstacle. Thus, Ustaše ministers Mile Budak, Mirko Puk, and Milovan Žanić declared in May 1941 that the goal of the new Ustaše policy was an enhnically clean Croatia. They also publicly announced the strategy to achieve their goal:
The Ustaše persecuted the Serbs who were mostly Orthodox Christians yet they rationalized that the Bosnian Muslims were actually Muslim Croats merely because those Croats were Muslim and so did not persecute them. Some of these Muslim Bosnians joined in the Nazi and Ustaše forces as part of Waffen-SS divisions 13th SS Mountain Division Handschar in Bosnia (led by Amin al-Husayni) and 23rd SS Grenadier Division Kama advised by Edmund Glaise von Horstenau (the representative of the German military in Croatia) and led by Colonel Ivan Markulj, who was later replaced by Colonel Viktor Pavicic. Lt-Col. Marko Mesic commanded the artillery section. The state even converted a former museum in Zagreb for use as a mosque. The Ustaše were against industrialization and democracy. The basic principles of the movement were laid out by Pavelić in his 1929 pamphlet "Principles of the Ustaše Movement".
A problem with the Nazi ideology was that the Croats are Slavs and were considered inferior by Nazi standards. Ustaša ideologues thus created a theory about a pseudo-Gothic origin of the Croats in order to raise their standing on the Aryan ladder.
