Founded after his defection to extreme, chauvinistic nationalism, Starcevic's Party of Right defined itself chiefly by what it opposed: the dominance of the Austrian bureaucracy as well as the Hungarian gentry of the Hapsburg state; the Yugoslavist idea promoted in the Croatian lands by Bishop Josip Strossmayer; and, most of all, the Serbian nation, including the thousands of Serbs who had settled at the Emperor's invitation along the Empire's southwestern flank, forming a military bulwark against Turkish expansion. Starcevic postulated that the Croats, unlike the "slave-Serbs," were a lost tribe of Goths who had somehow fallen into a Slavic language, customs and identity.
The Party of Right was doomed to remain on the fringe of Croatian national politics within the Empire. But it was an attractive ideology when it was discovered by a young lawyer from Bradina, a small village in present-day Bosnia-Hercegovina, named Ante Pavelic.
Ante Pavelic rose through the ranks of the Party of Right after the incorporation of Croatia into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later to be renamed Yugoslavia. He led the far right-wing of what was already a right-wing party - the "Frankist" faction, so named after Josip Frank, a singularly intolerant man despite his ethnic background as an assimilated Jew.
Party of Right membership in the 1920s was dwarfed by that of a more moderate Croat-based opposition, called the Croatian Peasant Party. Led by the brothers Stjepan and Ante Radic, the Peasant Party rejected the formation of Yugoslavia as illegitimate. Stjepan Radic was an intellectual with a soft touch for the peasantry of his party's name, and a wily, charismatic politician. Avowedly anti-clerical, in the summer of 1924 Radic visited the USSR and affiliated the Peasant Party with the Communist Peasant International, or Krestintern. After a long parliamentary boycott and several spells as a political prisoner, Radic did leave for Belgrade to form a united opposition with Serbian deputies opposed to the ruling elite. On June 20, 1928, a Montenegrin deputy drew a revolver and shot Radic and two other deputies on the floor of parliament itself; he died of his wounds on the eighth of August.
THE FORMATION OF THE USTASE
On January 6, 1929, King Alexander Karadjordjevic declared his personal dictatorship. Among those who sought refuge abroad was Ante Pavelic. After drifting rather aimlessly through Vienna, he established a relationship with Ivan "Vancia" Mihailov's faction of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), a terrorist organization founded more than thirty years before aimed at establishing Bulgarian hegemony in Macedonia. It is believed that Mihailov recommended Pavelic to Italian duce Benito Mussolini, who soon became patron, providing funds and training at a camp near Siena to what Pavelic christened his ustase.
As Italian support was uncertain and often wavered (Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and Italy's Foreign Minister after 1937, did not meet with Pavelic until more than two years after assuming office), the Ustase sometimes supported the movement through racketeering, extortion, black marketeering, and other criminal activities. The primary victims in these activities were their fellow Croat emigres, a trend which would occur again during their second exile.
It is probable that Mussolini had no prior notice when several Ustase thugs, led by Vancia Mihailov's former driver and bodyguard, followed up on several farcical attempts by the Ustase in Zagreb and succeeded in assassinating King Alexander along with French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles, France on October 7, 1934. An investigation by French authorities indicated that the plan had originated with Pavelic and his loyal lieutenant, Eugen "Dido" Kvaternik, who were both tried in absentia and sentenced to death by a French court after Mussolini refused to permit their extradition.
From the beginning, Pavelic had quite naturally adopted Starcevic and Frank's ideology for his own movement. As with the Italian Fascists, the Ustase was at its origins xenophobic, and author Stella Alexander's description of some articles in the Croatian Catholic press from this time as "unpleasantly anti-Semitic but in a traditional, pre-Hitlerian way" fits the Ustase as well. Ante Pavelic's own wife, Mara Lovrencic, came from a family of assimilated Viennese Jews, and his chief aide in exile, Dido Kvaternik, was related to Josip Frank. Nevertheless, the movement became both overtly and violently anti-Semitic when the center of gravity for the militant right shifted from Rome to Berlin and Hitler's Nazi Party.
THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA
Ustase terrorist attacks inside Yugoslavia accelerated as conditions for Croats at home became, on the whole, more tolerable. Following the murder of King Alexander, the Regent, Prince Paul, personally took in hand the process of negotiating an acceptable settlement between the most prominent Serb and Croat leaders. In 1939 they initialed the Sporazum, or "Agreement" between Dragisa Cvetkovic and Radic's successor in the Peasant Party, Vladko Macek. Croatia was given a broad autonomy in all matters but for foreign affairs, monetary policy and the military. The Ustase, whose first credited terrorist attack in Yugoslavia killed most of a large family when a bomb was planted on a railway in a suburb of Belgrade, launched a furious series of reprisals, targeting both the Peasant Party as well as the government and, of course, civilians.
On March 24, 1941, Hitler obtained the signature of the Yugoslav government on the Tripartite Pact. He intended to break the first provisions within weeks by "requesting" his new allies to allow his troops to use the Nis-Thessaloniki Railway to invade Greece, where the Italians were suffering a catastrophic series of defeats following their invasion. On the night of March 26, a group of junior officers in the Air Force overthrew the Yugoslav government and the Regency, placing themselves in office and the 17 year old heir, King Peter II, on the throne. His reign lasted all of two weeks as the Germans invaded the country on April 6.
Four days later, Slavko Kvaternik - Dido Kvaternik's father and the elder statesman of the Ustase movement - declared the Independent State of Croatia in the name of the poglavnik (a Croatian equivalent of duce or fuehrer) Ante Pavelic. Consolidated by Italian and German troops, Pavelic established himself in Zagreb and immediately unleashed a column of fire on the Serbian population. Aspiring to form an ethnically pure paradise out of a state in which Croats were, in fact, a minority, he was advised by Hitler not to show too much pity. "If the Croat state wishes to be strong," he told his pupil, "a fifty year policy of intolerance must be pursued, because too much tolerance on such issues can only do harm."
Within weeks, Pavelic's bloodiest henchman, Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburic, began laying the groundwork for Jasenovac, the largest concentration camp in Southern Europe. Peasant Party leader Vladko Macek, who had originally welcomed the Ustase's formation of the Independent State of Croatia, found himself among the first internees at Jasenovac and watched as Croatia's Jewish population along with untold numbers of Serbs, Roma, and political dissidents passed through the gates on their way to extermination. Macek was later released to serve under house arrest.
On July 22, 1941, doglavnik or deputy leader Mile Budak crystallized the Ustase ideology with a statement, later carried in the official press, that "We shall kill one part of the Serbs. We shall transport another third, and the rest of them will embrace the Roman Catholic religion... Our Croatia will become Catholic within ten years."
Ustase atrocities provoked the Serbian population of the Independent State of Croatia to rise in arms, flooding the ranks of the monarchist Chetnik and the Communist-led Partizan armies. The state was soon torn apart by internal revolt, and the Ustase, for all of their gore, were never able to establish full control over their mountainous territory. Their shocking behavior exasperated many hardened German officers, including General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, who peppered his reports to Berlin with denunciations of the Ustase and "unspeakable swineishness of this gang of murderers and criminals."
Mussolini, too, soon turned against his former proteges, and after an initial withdrawal, ordered his army to reoccupy Hercegovina, the birthplace of many of the Ustase chieftains and stamped in blood by the Ustase Terror. Two junior ministers, Mladen Lorkovic and Ante Vokic, were planning a coup against Pavelic in 1944 when their machinations were discovered. Both were arrested and sent to the camp at Lepoglava, where they were murdered in an act of spite on Maks Luburic's orders in May of 1945.
The final count of victims of the Ustase (not just within concentration camps such as Jasenovac, but also from massacres throughout the country) will probably never be known. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC estimates between 330,000 and 390,000 Serbian victims across the NDH. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has estimated that at least 30,000 Jews (75% of the pre-war population), 29,000 Roma (97%) and 500,000 Serbs - or about one-third of the pre-war population - were murdered in the four years of the Independent State of Croatia's existence. Yet there was no equivalent of Nuremburg for the Ustase.
THE RATLINE
Pavelic, Budak, Interior Minister Andrija Artukovic, and a horde of other Ustase ringleaders donned disguises and concealed themselves among 50,000 Croatian refugees fleeing for Austria. Pursued by the Partizans, they reached the city of Bleiburg before the British turned them back. Or some of them, for nearly all of the political leaders, and a good number of military leaders who were in the column of refugees had somehow disappeared while in British custody. The rest were sent to Yugoslav internment camps, marched until collapse, or shot by firing squads.
Pavelic made his way from Austria to Italy, where he and many other high-ranking Ustase sought shelter in the Monastery of San Girolamo degli Illrici under the protection of a former Ustase official and priest, Father Krunoslav Draganovic. Agents at American Army's Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) tracked Pavelic's movements and prepared for his arrest before they were, inexplicably at the time, ordered to cease and desist by their superiors. It is clear from reading their reports today, particularly those written by the only surviving member of the Rome CIC team, William Gowen, that the Americans had taken over what was termed the "Ratline" (after the highest point on a mast where sailors would seek shelter on a sinking ship) from the Vatican. Draganovic became a precious American asset and most of the Ustase who made it as far as Italy were able to escape to South America, Spain and, in Artukovic's case, to the United States. In one of his final reports before being transferred from the Rome branch of the CIC, Gowen wrote that "Pavelic's contacts are so high and his present position is so compromising to the Vatican, that any extradition of Subject would deal a staggering blow to the Roman Catholic Church."
THE REBIRTH OF THE USTASE
Luburic meanwhile had been placed in command of the remaining Ustase forces inside Yugoslavia and led a low-level insurgency until at least 1948. Several groups of Ustase fugitives in Austria, who called themselves Krizari or "Crusaders," infiltrated the country in an attempt to link up with Luburic's guerrillas. This too has was an American operation, with Pavelic kept apprised of the developments via wireless radio contact through his loyal secretary, former minister in the Independent State of Croatia Vjekoslav Vrancic. The Krizari Campaign was betrayed by Soviet double-agent Kim Philby, who also informed Moscow of a similar operation to infiltrate monarchist Albanians into that country, though the program later served as a model for CIA insurgency campaigns in South America and the Caribbean.
Safely ensconced in Buenos Aires with other Ustase leaders (another Draganovic benefactor, Klaus Barbie, was in Bolivia), Pavelic spent the next few years establishing the dominance of his own and the other Ustase successor organizations. In 1956 he established the Croatian Liberation Movement (one of the original names used by the Ustase during his first exile). The HOP's founding declaration is a rambling manifesto, though its list of signatories includes both Pavelic and 12 other ministers of the Independent State of Croatia and goes a long way towards illustrating both the extensive reach and the overwhelming success of the Ratline program. One of those who did not sign, Maks Luburic, had meanwhile escaped to Spain after the failure of the Krizari Campaign and there established the HOP's sister organization, the Croatian National Resistance, colloquially known as "Otpor" or "Odpor."
Eventually the two leaders would have a falling out, though both the HOP and Otpor survived their leaders' passing. Pavelic died as a result of old age and injuries sustained in an attempted assassination in Argentina, while Luburic's body was found in his villa in Valencia on April 20, 1969 with a fractured skull and several stab wounds, presumably delivered by Yugoslav dictator Tito's secret police. The organizations however remained under the command of leaders dating back to the Independent State of Croatia and soon became textbook examples of what the US intelligence community refers to as "blowback" - the unintended negative consequences of an intelligence operation. Otpor in particular became a singularly terroristic organization, engaging in the attempted assassination of dozens of Yugoslav diplomats and bombings on a massive scale (including a crowded theater in Belgrade, an airliner in mid-flight over Czechoslovakia, and LaGuardia Airport which blinded a police officer).
The Ustase successor organizations also returned to their roots in blackmail and racketeering, as they began to intimidate and assault other Croatian emigres in the United States and elsewhere who condemned violence, refused to offer "donations," or otherwise failed to support their extremist platform. In two New York trials, nearly the entire leadership of Otpor in North America was convicted of more than 50 counts of racketeering, hiring two members of the Chicago mafia to kill the president of the umbrella Croatian Fraternal Union, and mailing bombs concealed in hollowed-out books to the Croatian editor of the CFU's journal and a Croatian Catholic priest in Milwaukee. The Otpor members were convicted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which was devised to assist law enforcement against the Italian La Cosa Nostra crime families.
CONCLUSIONS
The myth of the Ustase as benign "founding fathers" of Croatian statehood was resurrected in the 1990s. The most prominent Croat militia in the Bosnian civil war consciously displayed Ustase regalia, and two relics of the Independent State of Croatia, Vinko Nikolic and Ivo Rojnica, were nominated to prominent positions by Croatia's first president, Franjo Tudjman. (Croatia's current president, Stipe Mesic, supported a law to ban the display of all neo-fascist symbols, including the Ustase letter "U" insignia.) Amid the turmoil of war, conscious efforts were made to play down Ustase atrocities of the past, in large part by organizations such as the HOP or their splinter groups, many of which scorn modern Croatia's Independence Day and instead mark April 10th - when Slavko Kvaternik proclaimed the Independent State of Croatia in the name of Ante Pavelic - as the day they celebrate their national heritage.
In truth, the Ustase were at least the equal to the Nazis in brutality, though not in efficiency. A disproportionately large number of Ratline refugees were members of the Ustase, among them some of the most sinister and sadistic officers of the state security agencies, concentration camp guards and others directly responsible for the mass murder which will forever dominate any impartial view of the ephemeral, violent construct known as the Independent State of Croatia.
