Ustaše

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The Ustaše (often spelled Ustashe in English; singular Ustaša or Ustasha) was a Croatian far-right organisation put in charge of the Independent State of Croatia by the Axis Powers in 1941, in which they pursued nazi/fascist policies. The Ustaše were subsequently expelled by the communist Yugoslav partisans in 1945.

At the time of their founding in 1929, the Ustaše were nationalist political organisations that committed terrorist acts. When they came to power in WWII, they also had military formations (Ustasha Army/Ustaška Vojnica) that later numbered some 76,000 strong at their peak in 1944. After the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, there was a certain resurgence of Ustaše ideology and some paramilitary units claimed the mantle of the name.

Contents

History

Before WWII

In October 1928, after the assassination of Stjepan Radić, a radical youth group named Hrvatski Domobran started publishing an eponymous newspaper dedicated to the Croatian national matters. Various members of the Croatian Party of Rights contributed to the writing, until around Christmas 1928 when the newspaper was banned by the authorities of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In January 1929, the King banned all national parties, and radical wing of the Party of Rights was exiled, among them Ante Pavelić, Gustav Perčec, Branimir Jelić. This group was later joined by several other Croatian exiles.

On April 20, 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 of both Croatia and Macedonia". Because of this, the Court for the Preservation of the State in Belgrade sentenced Pavelić and Perčec to death on July 17, 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 1932 some Ustaša members led by Andrija Artuković also attempted to stage an uprising in the Lika/Velebit area, but failed, and retreated for northern Italy where they formed a training camp near Brescia.

The origin of their name is in the noun "ustaš" which means "insurgent". Their name didn't have fascist connotations during their early years in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as it was used throughout Hercegovina to denote (Serb Orthodox) insurgents from the 1875 Hercegovinian rebellion. Later, the name would acquire its pejorative connotation, particularly among the Hercegovinian Serbs who would be hardest hit by the atrocities.

Perčec was later assassinated by Pavelić in 1933. Due to their previous links with the Macedonian nationalists, the Ustaše were accused in conspiring to murder the Yugoslav king Alexander in 1934, and Eugen Kvaternik was charged with planning the successful assassination committed by members of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization IMRO. The extent of the Ustaša involvement in the assassination remains unknown, it is only known for certain that it was committed by a Macedonian named Vlada Gheorghieff and not a member of the Ustaše.

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 between October 1934 until the end of March 1936. After March 1937, when Italy and Yugoslavia signed a pact of friendship, most of the Ustaše members were extradited to Yugoslavia.

However, this did not destroy their organization, it only made them gain more sympathy among the Croatian youth, esp. among the 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 people"), which supported the Ustaša ideas of Croatian independence.

World War II

The Ustashe flag of Croatia, 1941-1945
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The Ustashe flag of Croatia, 1941-1945
The letter U and the Coat of Arms of Croatia can be seen behind the Ustaša soldier to the left, while to the right there is a map painted over with the Ustaša flag symbolizing the great Croatia according to the ideology of the Ustaše including the entire territories of present-day Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sandžak (region in Serbia and Montenegro), and a great part of Vojvodina with the motto Za Dom Spremni  below the map (trans. For Our Homeland Ready)
The letter U and the Coat of Arms of Croatia can be seen behind the Ustaša soldier to the left, while to the right there is a map painted over with the Ustaša flag symbolizing the great Croatia according to the ideology of the Ustaše including the entire territories of present-day Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sandžak (region in Serbia and Montenegro), and a great part of Vojvodina with the motto Za Dom Spremni below the map (trans. For Our Homeland Ready)

The Axis invaded Yugoslavia on April 6, 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. Ustaše took the opportunity and with the help of the foreign armies installed their regime on April 14th 1941. A group of several hundred of them infiltrated from Italy, their commander Slavko Kvaternik took control of the police in Zagreb and proclaimed the formation of the "Independent State of Croatia" (Croatian Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, acronym "NDH"). The name of the rogue state was an obvious and successful attempt at capitalizing on the Croat people's desire for independence, which had been unfulfilled since 1102.

Vladko Maček called on people to obey and cooperate with the new government the same day. Ante Pavelić arrived on April 20th to become the head of government, poglavnik (führer), of the state that would soon encompass most of today's Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of Serbia (Srem and Sandžak regions). Because the Ustaše did not have a capable army or administration necessary to control the territory, the Germans and the Italians split up 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 against non-Croats started on April 27, 1941 when a newly formed unit of Ustaša army massacred the largely Serbian thorp of Gudovac (near Bjelovar).

Eventually all who opposed and/or threatened the Ustaše were outlawed. The HSS was banned on June 11, 1941 in an attempt of 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 minister in Pavelić's government, publicly proclaimed the violent racial policy of the state on July 22, 1941. Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić, one of the chiefs of secret police organizations, started building concentration camps in the summer of the same year.

As early as June, 1941, rebels started to organize in response to Ustaša atrocities. There were two factions among them: the Partisans, who were guerillas composed of all nations with a common cause to fight the fascists and were mostly led by communists, and Chetniks who were ultra-nationalist Serbian monarchist who opposed the Ustašas.

The first Partisan armed unit was formed on June 22nd in Brezovica near Sisak, and the Partisans first engaged in combat on June 27th in Srb in Lika. The first Chetnik armed unit in Croatia was formed on June 28 (also St. Vitus' Day, an Eastern Orthodox holiday).

Shortly after the Communists started their uprising, the Ustaše rounded up and incarcerated much of the left-wing inteligentsia in Zagreb, and in an oft-quoted incident of July 9th, 1941, killed Božidar Adžija, Otokar Keršovani, Ognjen Prica and other Croatian communists.

The Ustaša gangs ravaged villages across the Dinaric Alps to the extent that the Italians and the Germans started expressing their horror. 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, which actually preceded the Final Solution. These were corroborated by those of field marshal Wilhelm List.

The Italians also became disinclined to cooperate with the Ustaše and would soon come to cooperate with the Chetniks in the southern areas that they controlled. Although Hitler insisted that Mussolini should have his forces work with the Ustaše, the Italian general Mario Roatta, among others in the field, ignored those 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 many more. In 1943, the Partisans formed new political councils ZAVNOH and ZAVNOBiH (the "state anti-fascist council of people's liberation" of Croatia and of Bosnia and Herzegovina) that would later function as the interim government.

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.

The Home Guard served more as a supply depot for the resistance movement: many units would surrender or defect so that the Partisans and the Chetniks would obtain weaponry and other supplies. The Chetniks under the command of pop Momčilo Đujić grew in power and regularly retaliated against the Ustaše detachments in Bosnia. The Partizans under Josip Broz Tito also made many inroads and had started to control sizeable patches of superficially NDH territory by 1943.

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 Partizans 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.

The power of the Chetniks eventually faded due to two things: their retaliations against the Ustaša had transformed into massacres of their own (such as that in Foča against Bosnian Muslims), and the fact that they lost support from the Allies. One large group of Chetniks was led by Đujić to Italy, and another group led by Draža Mihailović moved to Serbia, only to be caught and executed by the partizans.

Ustaše
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Ustaše

After the war

Eventually the Red Army and partisans liberated Yugoslavia and the Ustaše were utterly defeated as well. They continued fighting even a bit after the German surrender on May 9th, 1945, but were soon overpowered. A large column of Ustaša and some Domobran soldiers, as well as many civilians, tried to flee for Austria and Italy later in the same month, but was handed over to the partizans on the Austrian border and subsequently either executed or sent at a "death march" back into the country, the so-called Bleiburg massacre. Pavelić managed to escape, hid in Austria and Rome for a while with the help of his associates among the Franciscans, and then fled to Argentina.

After World War II, the remaining Ustaše went underground or fled to foreign countries. Some of them persisted in their crusade against Yugoslavia: Ustaše were implicated in over two dozen terrorist acts following the post-war period. They were generally unsuccessful due to lack of domestic support and actions of the Yugoslav intelligence agencies (i.e. UDBA/KOS), whose agents, notably, shot Ante Pavelić in Buenos Aires, inflicting injuries that would later prove to be fatal.

Victims

Two Ustaše soldiers holding a non-Croat civilian while the third one behind the civilian is getting ready to stab him with a knife.
Two Ustaše soldiers holding a non-Croat civilian while the third one behind the civilian is getting ready to stab him with a knife.

The Ustaše tried to exterminate Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and basically all others that opposed them, including some Communist Croats. Once they came to power during World War II, they founded several concentration camps, the most notorious of which was the Jasenovac complex.

Exact numbers of victims are not known, only estimates exist, however it is certain that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were rounded up and killed in concentration camps and outside of them. The number of murdered Jews is fairly reliable: around 32,000 Jews were killed during WWII on NDH territory. Yugoslav Roma (Gypsies) numbered around 40,000 less after the war. The numbers of murdered Serbs are much larger, but estimates tend to vary.

The history textbooks in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had included 700,000 as the number of victims of Ustaše at Jasenovac. This was promulgated from a 1946 calculation of the demographic loss of population (the difference between the actual number of people after the war and the number that would have been, had the pre-war growth trend continued). After that, it was used by Edvard Kardelj and Moše Pijade in the Yugoslav war reparations claim sent to Germany.

According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center (based on Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, by Israel Gutman):

"Ustasa terrorists killed 500,000 Serbs, expelled 250,000 and forced 250,000 to convert to Catholicism. They murdered thousands of Jews and Gypsies." [1]

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says:

"Due to differing views and lack of documentation, estimates for the number of Serbian victims in Croatia range widely, from 25,000 to more than one million. The estimated number of Serbs killed in Jasenovac ranges from 25,000 to 700,000. The most reliable figures place the number of Serbs killed by the Ustaša between 330,000 and 390,000, with 45,000 to 52,000 Serbs murdered in Jasenovac." [2]

The Jasenovac Memorial Area, currently headed by Slavko Goldstein, keeps a list of 59,188 names of Jasenovac victims that was gathered by government officials in Belgrade in 1964. Because the gathering process was imperfect, they estimated that the list contains between 60 and 75 percent of the total victims, putting the number of killed in that complex at about 80,000 - 100,000. The previous head of the Memorial Area Simo Brdar estimated at least 365,000 dead at Jasenovac.

The analyses of the statisticians Vladimir Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović were similar to those of the Memorial Area. In all of Yugoslavia, the estimated number of Serb deaths was 487,000 according to Kočović, and 530,000 according to Žerjavić, out of a total of 1,014,000 or 1,027,000 deaths (resp.). Žerjavić further stated that there were 197,000 Serb civilians killed in NDH (78,000 as prisoners in Jasenovac and elsewhere) as well as 125,000 Serb combatants.

The Belgrade Museum of Holocaust compiled a list of over 77,000 names of Jasenovac victims. It was previously headed by Milan Bulajić, who supported the claim of a total of 700,000 victims. The current administration of the Museum has further expanded the list to include a bit over 80,000 names.

During WWII, various German military commanders gave different figures for the number of Serbs, Jews and others killed on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. They circulated figures of 400,000 Serbs (Alexander Lehr); 350,000 Serbs (Lothar Rendulic); between 300,000 (Edmund Glaise von Horstenau); more than "3/4 of million of Serbs" (Hermann Neubacher) in 1943; 600-700,000 until March 1944 (Ernst Fick ); 700,000 (Massenbach).

Out of around 39,000 Jews that lived on the territory that became the Independent State of Croatia, only around 20% survived the war. The total number of Serbs in Croatia decreased by around 93,000 after the war.

Ustaše with the head of a Serb Orthodox priestDrakulići, Feb 7, 1942
Ustaše with the head of a Serb Orthodox priest
Drakulići, Feb 7, 1942

Concentration camps

The first group of camps were formed in the spring of 1941. These included:

These six camps were closed by October 1942.

The Jasenovac complex was built between August 1941 and February 1942. The first two camps, Krapje and Bročica, were closed in November 1941. The three newer camps continued to function until the end of the war:

  • Ciglana (Jasenovac III)
  • Kozara (Jasenovac IV)
  • Stara Gradiška (Jasenovac V)

There were also other camps in:

Numbers of prisoners:

  • from 80,000-100,000 across 300,000-350,000 up to 700,000 in Jasenovac
  • around 35,000 in Gospić
  • around 8,500 in Pag
  • around 3,000 in Đakovo
  • 1,018 in Jastrebarsko
  • around 1,000 in Lepoglava

Ideology

The Ustaše embraced the Nazi ideology of the time. They 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 Ustaše was:

  1. One third of the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) to be catholicized
  2. One third of the Serbs to be expelled out of ISC
  3. One third of the Serbs in the ISC to be liquidated

A small problem with the Nazi ideology was that the Croats are Slavs and thus themselves "inferior" by Nazi standards. The Ustaša ideologues thus created a theory about a pseudo-Gothic origin of the Croats in order to raise their standing on the Aryan ladder.

Jews and Serbs who were family members of Ustaše leadership were granted titles of "honorary Aryans". It is known that Ustaše of lesser rank proved their loyalty by killing their Serb wives and children.

Ustaše held that Bosnian Muslims are Muslim Croats. Unlike Orthodox Serbs, Muslims were not persecuted by them and a few joined in the Nazi and Ustaše forces as part of Waffen-SS divisions SS Handschar in Muslim Bosnia (led by Amin al-Husayni) and SS Kama adviced 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 transferred a former museum in Zagreb to be used as a mosque.

On other subjects, Ustaše were against industrialization and democracy.

The basic principles of the movement were laid out by Pavelić in his 1929 pamphlet "Principles of the Ustase Movement".

Symbols

The symbol of Ustaše is a wide capital letter U with pronounced serif. This symbol can easily be spraypainted. A slight variation of it includes a small plus inserted at the top, symbolizing a cross. In on-line communication it is sometimes written as =U=.

The U

Their hat insignia was the shield of Coat of Arms of Croatia surrounded or embossed with the U.

The flag of the Independent State of Croatia was a red-white-blue horizontal tricolor with the shield of the Coat of Arms or Croatia in the middle and the U in the upper left. Its money was the kuna.

The Ustaše greeting was "Za dom - Spremni":

Salute: Za dom! For home(land)!
Reply: Spremni! (We are) ready!

This greeting is used instead of the Nazi greeting Sieg - Heil. In on-line communication, it is often abbreviated as ZDS.

While the greeting appears to be invented in the 19th century by Croatian ban Josip Jelačić, today it is generally associated only with the Ustashas.

Connections with the Catholic Church

Main article: Involvement of Croatian Catholic clergy with the Ustasa regime

Crucifix with weaponry
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Crucifix with weaponry

The Ustaša policies against the Eastern Orthodoxy are called "Uniatism" in some Eastern Orthodox circles. This is a term never used by the Roman Catholic Church, except Vatican condemnation of the idea in 1990[3]. Still it is a, generally perjorative, description of the Catholic Church's efforts to convert large numbers of Orthodox Christians through aggressive evangelism or the creations unions with them.

That said the Ustaše would represent an extreme example of "Uniatism." They supported violent aggression or force in order to convert Orthodox believers. Despite forced conversion being condemned by St. Augustine, Pope Leo XIII, and others it has been accepted by Catholic extremists during some eras. The Ustaše held the extreme position that Eastern Orthodoxy was their greatest foe. This was also out of the mainstream as Papal encyclicals, at this point, traditionally deemed the Orthodox to be the only valid Christians outside the Catholic Church. Further the Ustaše never once recognized the existence of a Serb people on the territories of Croatia or Bosnia — they only recognized "Croats of the Eastern faith". They also termed Bosnian Muslims to be "Croats of the Islamic faith", but they had a stronger ethnic dislike of Serbs. Catholic priests among the Ustaše supported their hostility by carrying out forced conversions of Serbs to Catholicism throughout Croatia.

Some former priests, mostly Franciscans, particularly in, but not limited to, Herzegovina and Bosnia, took part in the atrocities themselves. Miroslav Filipović was a Franciscan friar (from the Petrićevac monastery) who joined the Ustaša army on February 6, 1942 in a brutal massacre of 2730 Serbs of the nearby villages, including 500 children. He was subsequently dismissed from his order and defrocked. He then became a member of the Ustaše and also Chief Guard of Jasenovac concentration camp where he was nicknamed "Fra Sotona".

Forced conversion of Serbs in Slavonian village Mikleuš by Fra.Vlaho Margetić (Margeretić), 1942
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Forced conversion of Serbs in Slavonian village Mikleuš by Fra.Vlaho Margetić (Margeretić), 1942

For the whole duration of the war, the Vatican kept up full diplomatic relations with the Ustaša state, with its papal nuncio in the capital Zagreb. The nuncio was briefed on the efforts of religious conversions to Catholicism, without recognizing the fact these conversions were often forced and part of the pogrom.

After the Second World War was over, the Ustaše who had managed to escape from Yugoslav territory (including Pavelić) were smuggled to South America. It is widely alleged that this was done through rat lines operated by members of the organization who were Catholic priests and had previously secured positions at the Vatican. Members of the Illyrian College of San Girolamo in Rome were reputedly involved in this: friars Krunoslav Draganović, Petranović and Dominik Mandić.

The Ustaša regime had sent large amounts of gold that it had plundered from Serbian and Jewish property owners during WW II into the Swiss banks. Of the total of 350 million Swiss Francs, about 150 million was seized by British troops, however the remaining 200 million (ca. 47 million dollars) reached the Vatican. Allegations exist that it's still being kept in the Vatican Bank. This was reported by the American intelligence agency SSU in October 1946. This issue is the theme of a recent class action suit against the Vatican Bank and others.

Church and state: leaders of church and the state together, in the Croatian Nazi puppet state
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Church and state: leaders of church and the state together, in the Croatian Nazi puppet state

Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, Archbishop of Zagreb during the Second World War, was accused of supporting the Ustaše, and exonerating those in the clergy that collaborated with the Ustaše of complicity in forced conversions. On the other hand, he himself reportedly helped victims of the Ustaša terror at the same time. The cardinal was criminally prosecuted and convicted after the war by the new Communist authorities of Yugoslavia. In 1998, Stepinac was beatified by Pope John Paul II.

On June 22, 2003, John Paul II visited Banja Luka. During the visit he held a mass at the aforementioned Petrićevac monastery. This caused public uproar due to the connection of the Petrićevac monastery with the crimes of former friar Filipović. At the same location the pope also proclaimed the beatification of the Catholic layman Ivan Merz (1896-1928) who was the founder of the "Association of Croatian Eagles" in 1923.

Defenders of the Pope's actions point out that the convent at Petricevac was one of the places that went up in flames causing the death of 80-year-old Friar Alojzije Atlija. Further that the war had produced "a total exodus of the Catholic population from this region," that the few who remained were "predominantly elderly," and that the church in Bosnia then risked "total extinction" due to the war. Therefore supporters state that the focus on the tragedy presently occurring was more important than focussing on one of 60 years ago.

Neo-Ustašism

Nomenclatorial note: the term neo-Ustaše itself is an external designation; those in question refer to themselves simply as Ustaše, as in the 1940s. The claim that the Ustaše as an organization have a continuity between WWII and the present time is moot.

In the 1990s, modern independent Croatia was formed and Croats and Serbs again waged war. There was no official connection between the Ustaše ideology and the new government that made the country independent of Yugoslavia. President Tuđman had controversial views on the topic, claiming that the Ustaša state was indeed an expression of the Croat state tradition, which may be considered true to a limited extent in view of Croatia's long historical struggle for independence. But because Croatia was a puppet-state of Hitler in the second world war, that position is hard to defend.

Some Ustaša emigrants freely returned to Croatia in the 1990s, although after 45 years, few actual active Ustaše were still among the active population (most were rather elderly). There were factions that wished to restore the Ustaše ideology and iconography, mostly among the resident Croatian population, and even though they weren't successful, they were never banned by the government. During the Yugoslav wars, these committed war crimes against the Serb population on several occasions.

The right-wing parties often attracted votes by promoting extreme nationalism. The rightist parties such as the Croatian Party of Rights and the Croatian Democratic Union permeated in their support for extremism; particularly in the latter, which had a large membership and voter base, it was unclear whether actions of party members were part of actual party policy or result of factioning.

The Croatian singer Mišo Kovač, who rose to prominence as an evergreen singer of the 1970s, once sported an exact replica of an Ustaša uniform during a concert. Pop/folk singer Marko Perković-Thompson has made a career for himself by singing patriotic tunes, but this has sometimes resulted in singing borderline fascist lyrics praising WWII criminals, and he is not afraid to display his Ustaša sentiment. Supported by right-wing politicians, his concerts attracted support from tens of thousands of people based on this sentiment.

The neo-Ustaše, however, didn't and don't have grass roots support among the Croatian people. The parties like the Croatian Party of Rights which are most commonly associated with Ustašism generally aren't able to attract support from more than a few percent of the population. In recent times, the Party's image of "pro-Ustaša" was repetitively shunned by its leaders in an attempt to sway more votes.

With respect to war crimes, both in WWII and in the Croatian war of independence, the Croatian Government has had a rather spotty, but generally positive record for processing war crimes committed by Croats. In 1999, Croatia had Argentina extradite Dinko Šakić, one of the commanders of the Jasenovac concentration camp, and he was subsequently tried and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Croatia has been cooperating with the ICTY in the legal prosecution of all war criminals, which has included Croatian officers.

Croatian-Serbian animosity during the recent war in Croatia is sometimes mislabeled in an unsophisticated way as Ustasha-Chetnik rivalry. To some extent, it is a consequence of wartime propaganda, in the course of which moralistic debasement is usual.

The effort to return Serbian refugees to their homes in Croatia has also been hampered by Ustaša-related issues - the fear of harassment and/or retribution at the hand of the "Ustaše" persists, and it (among other things) has prevented the majority of Serbs from returning, a situation that the Croatian government is attempting to rectify.

In 2004, in a telephone straw poll conducted during the "Nedjeljom u dva" talk show at the Croatian Radiotelevision, more than 17,000 calls, or 58% of callers, expressed positive attitude towards Ustashas and the ISC. Due to the nature of the poll, where each call was charged approx. half a euro and the system made no effort to remove duplicate callers, this result may not be indicative.

Bibliography

  • Aarons, Mark and Loftus, John: "Unholy Trinity: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets". New York: St.Martin's Press, 1992. 372 pages. ISBN 0312071116
  • Paris, Edmond: "Genocide in Satellite Croatia 1941- 1945". (First print: 1961, Second: 1962), The American Institute for Balkan Affairs, 1990.
  • Manhattan, Avro: "The Vatican's Holocaust". Ozark Books, 1986.

External links

Ustaša sites

Outside views

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