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| 1929: Head of the Croat Party of Rights Ante Pavelic goes into exile following the murder of Croatian politician Stjepan Radic and the imposition of the royal dictatorship under King Alexander. |
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1932: After a series of failures with other movements (all with himself at the head), Pavelic founds the ustase (from ustanak or "uprising"). Benito Mussolini provides training and sanctuary in Fascist Italy for the movement; Pavelic will pay him back when he cedes the entire Dalmatian coast to Italy in 1941. |
| 1934: King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou are assassinated in Marseilles, France. The plot was formulated by Pavelic and carried out by a zealot "loaned" to the Ustase by their collaborators from the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). Pavelic and Dido Kvaternik are placed under arrest in Italy but allowed to go free, despite being sentenced to death in absentia in France. |
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1939: Following an agreement essentially between the establishment and the Croatian Peasant Party, parliamentary rule is restored in Yugoslavia and Croatia is granted autonomy. The Ustase intensify bombings inside the country and call for the heads of the Peasant Party leaders, hoping to upset the fragile state of peace. Mussolini bankrolls growing agitation by Ustase agents. |
| 1941: After a coup topples the government in Belgrade, Nazi Germany unleashes a massive bombardment of the city as a prelude to the invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia. Pavelic arrives from exile and is installed as Poglavnik ("fuehrer" or "duce") of the Independent State of Croatia. All parties by the Ustase are banned.
April 27: Massacre in Gudovac, signalling the start of the Croatian Holocaust of Serbs, Jews and Roma.
July 22: Doglavnik (deputy leader) Mile Budak states in a speech the Ustase's goal to murder a third, expel a third, and convert to Catholicism a third of the Serbian population. |
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1942: Italian and even German troops intervene to arrest the Ustase bloodletting in the Independent State of Croatia. Two guerrilla movements, the Communists and the Serbian Chetniks, liberate large swathes of Ustase territory. Death camps such as Jasenovac, supervised by Ustase militants and run with the assistance of several Croat Franciscan monks, kill untold thousands by means so barbaric that the senior German commander in the Balkans described the camps as "the peak of abomination." |
| 1943: Mussolini is deposed and Italy surrenders, leaving thousands of civilians unprotected from Ustase violence. Villages in the Krajina and Hercegovina (where Pavelic and other Ustase leaders hailed from) are set aflame once more. Thousands are executed and thousands more flee to Serbia. |
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1944: Pressed by the Soviets from the East, the British from the West and Communists and Chetniks from within, the Independent State of Croatia begins to disintegrate. Yet the trains to Jasenovac continue to run, and elements of the Croatian Catholic Church continue to give enthusiastic support to the Ustase regime. |
| 1945: In May, Pavelic and the Ustase ringleaders flee for the Austrian border. Per the Communist Yugoslav government, the final death toll from the war in all of Yugoslavia is 1.8 million. The Independent State of Croatia, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is responsible for the murder of 30,000 Jews, 29,000 Roma and 500,000 Serbs in less just over four years. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum places the number of Serbian victims between 330,000 and 390,000.
August: Pavelic is believed to be hiding in the American occupation zone in Austria. |
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1946: Pavelic's presence in Italy is confirmed. He is living in secret under the protection of the Vatican, at the monastery of San Girolamo. US Army intelligence in Rome notes his presence and monitors his movements but does not arrest him or most of the other Ustase executioners hiding in Occupied Italy.
Spring: The Krizari or "Crusaders" begin a three-year campaign of commando raids inside Yugoslavia. They fail to link up with sympathizers in the country, not realizing that the entire movement has been compromised by informers. Concentration camp commandant Ljubo Milos is among the leaders arrested and sentenced to death by the Communist authorities. |
| 1947: Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac is found guilty and sentenced for treason and other crimes relating to the Church's support for the Ustase. Among the convicted clergy is the notorious Father Filipovic-Majstorovic, a Jasenovac executioner known as Fra Sotona or "Brother Devil" to the death camp's survivors.
Spring: Andrija Artukovic, the "Yugoslav Himmler," and supreme overseer of the Ustase Terror, arrives in Ireland. He will eventually settle in California, unmolested by the authorities until pressure by Jewish organizations in the 1980s forces his extradition on war crimes charges to Yugoslavia. |
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1948: Following in the footsteps of Eichmann, Barbie, and other war criminals, Ante Pavelic arrives by way of the infamous "Ratline" in Argentina, courtesy of notorious Ratline operative and Catholic priest Father Krunoslav Draganovic. |
| 1949: Pavelic lives openly in Buenos Aires. He forms a new exile movement, the Hrvatska Drzavotvorna Stranka, led by former Ustase, which aspires to be the leading Croat emigre organization and a government-in-exile. Hundreds of accused Ustase war criminals are now living in South America, the United States, Canada and Australia. |
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1956: Pavelic forms the Croatian Liberation Movement. The extent of just how many Ustase leaders have escaped to South America is shown by the co-signers to the founding manifesto, to which 12 former ministers in the Independent State of Croatia have affixed their signature. |
| 1957: In April an attempt on Pavelic's life in Argentina prompts his flight to Franco's Spain, where former Jasenovac commandant Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburic has founded the HOP's European equivalent, the Croatian Resistance Movement. |
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1959: Pavelic dies in the German hospital in Madrid on December 28. His place at the head of the Croatian Liberation Movement is taken by Stjepan Hefer, former minister in the NDH. Pavelic's long-time secretary and assistant Vjekoslav Vrancic disputes Hefer's leadership and forms a splinter organization.
July: Former Ratline operative Father Krunoslav Draganovic begins his second stint as a US agent, overseeing a network of informers inside Yugoslavia. Accusations will later surface that he was already at this point employed as a double-agent by the Yugoslav security service. |
| 1962: Croatian extremists connected with Maks Luburic's organization attack a Yugoslav consulate in Germany; one diplomatic worker is killed. |
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1966: The third Yugoslav diplomat in four years is killed in Germany by neo-Ustase from Maks Luburic's organization. |
| 1967: On September 10, Krunoslav Draganovic walks over the Yugoslav-Italian border and surrenders to the custody of the Yugoslav security service. His defection has never been definitively explained. |
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1968: Ustase terrorists plant a bomb inside a movie theatre in Belgrade. One person is killed and 85 are injured in the attack. |
| 1969: Maks Luburic's body is found in his villa in Valencia, Spain. His body is lacerated by more than a dozen stab wounds and his skull fractured by repeated blows from a blunt instrument, probably a crowbar. |
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1971: Yugoslav Ambassador to Sweden Vladimir Rolovic is assassinated by neo-Ustase terrorist Miro Baresic after gunmen force their way into the embassy in Stockholm. |
| 1972: In one of the first crimes of its kind to hit the airline industry, Ustase terrorists hijack a Swedish airliner and demand Baresic's release and a cash ransom. Both demands are met. Later in 1972, members of an Ustase successor organization claim responsibility for planting a bomb on board a Yugoslav airliner which explodes in the sky, killing 26 people. |
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1975: A bomb explodes in a storage locker in New York's LaGuardia Airport, killing 11 and injuring 75 people. The attack has long been attributed by the police and investigative journalists to the Ustase. |
| 1976: Four Ustase hijack an American TW plane. One police officer is killed. One of the co-conspirators will in the 1990s be exposed by the New York Times' David Binder as an employee at the Croatian embassy in Washington. |
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1978: Two Croats are killed and scores wounded across the United States as Ustase begin intimidating and extorting "donations" from Croatian-Americans. Six members of Maks Luburic's Croatian Resistance Movement will be convicted two years later under the RICO Act statutes for the attempted assassination of the leader of the moderate Croatian Fraternal Union, a journalist and a Catholic priest, as well as more than fifty counts of extortion across the United States. |
| 1980: A bomb is planted in the Statue of Liberty, though no one is injured. All told there have been more than twenty terrorist incidents on US soil attributed to the Ustase in the previous five years alone, and close to a hundred worldwide. |
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1982: Miro Baresic is back in a Swedish prison following extradition from the United States, after he was found working as a bodyguard and driver for a South American diplomat in Washington. Baresic, who was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the RICO trials of Croatian extremists in New York, becomes a martyr to his comrades. |
| 1986: Minister of the Interior in the Independent State of Croatia Andrija Artukovic is finally extradicted from the United States nearly four decades after his illegal entry, following extreme pressure by Jewish organizations and Holocaust survivors. Suffering from advanced senility, he dies a year after his trial in a Yugoslav prison hospital. |
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