By Simone Fox Koob and Ben Schneiders
An online store has been openly selling key rings, T-shirts, beanies and stickers themed on the murderous Ustasha regime of World War II, as well as prints of wartime Croatian dictator, Ante Pavelic, a close ally of Adolf Hitler.
An investigation by this masthead has uncovered how mainstream the celebration of the Ustasha regime that slaughtered Serbs, Jews and Romani people between 1941 and 1945 is in key institutions of the Australian-Croatian community.
A Ustasha T-shirt for sale on an Australian website.
The Sydney-based website, which this investigation has chosen not to name, promotes itself and its sale of Ustasha-themed memorabilia through paid advertisements on social media and at stalls at Croatian community functions. It offers free shipping on orders over $100 worldwide.
The website has no contact numbers or names and is registered through a US company that hides the identity of its owner. But our investigation has established, through Australian business records, that it was created by Monika Hecimovic, a young Sydney woman.
Soon after Hecimovic was contacted by this masthead, most of the Ustasha-themed memorabilia was removed from the website. She did not respond to requests for comment.
The online store has regularly run stalls at the Croatian Club Bosna, in west Sydney, which flies the Ustasha flag above its building and celebrates fascist anniversaries. Club president Adam Glavas did not respond to requests for comment.
The sale of Ustasha themed memorabilia at the Croatian Club Bosna in western Sydney
Croatia’s ambassador to Australia, Betty Pavelich, said in response to the investigation that there was no place in society for the “glorification of totalitarian regimes, extremism or intolerance”.
On April 10, six men were filmed at the Melbourne Knights soccer club performing stiff-armed salutes as they sang a song extolling the Ustasha.
“The battle is being fought, Ustase flag is fluttering,” they sang as they performed a fascist salute. “For the freedom and for home, Croatian home!” they sang, according to a professional translation of the song. A second translation of the same video was substantially similar.
Those in Australia who celebrate April 10 – the anniversary of the creation of the Nazi-backed Croatian state in 1941 – or the Ustasha often describe it as an expression of Croatian independence rather than fascism.
But the open celebration of this fascist past – Croatian clubs in Sydney and Melbourne often have portraits or in one case, even a bust of Ustasha dictator Pavelic – raises questions about how broad state and federal bans on the celebration of fascism and nazism should be.
Representatives of the Jewish community in Australia want authorities to have more ability to crackdown on Nazi-linked symbols, including Ustasha ones.
Ustasha-themed memorabilia for sale on the website.
There are different laws across Australia. In NSW, the laws are the broadest, allowing discretion to courts to define what a Nazi symbol is. Laws in Victoria, and ones to be introduced to federal parliament this week, are narrower, proscribing a limited number of Nazi hate symbols.
Australia – along with Canada, Spain, Argentina and the United States – became a post-war haven for people with Ustasha links fleeing communist Yugoslavia.
Mark Biondich, a Canadian historian who has studied Croatian fascism and nationalism, says parts of the Croat diaspora have cultivated a memory of World War II that downplays the atrocities committed by the Ustasha.
The Croatian role in the Holocaust is minimised, he says, with focus placed on nationalism and the creation of the independent Croatian state.
He said there were two broad categories of political emigrants after the war: those linked to the Croatian Peasant Party – who were anti-communist but not fascist – and those with Ustasha links. They shared a sense that Croatians had been victimised.
The memorabilia also includes keyrings.
“It’s my opinion that this widespread and deeply ingrained belief in victimisation prevented the politically engaged Croat diaspora community from condemning Ustasha crimes,” he said. “The struggle for independence took precedence over all else.”
Biondich said the celebration of fascist anniversaries and symbols in the Australian diaspora was “frankly much harder to comprehend, let alone explain”.
“I suspect that for many Croats who emigrated to Australia – or Canada, the US or Western Europe between the 1950s and 1970s – time basically stood still from the day they left the former Yugoslavia,” he said.
“Even if they were primarily economic migrants, many of them harboured resentments for their circumstances, blaming Yugoslavia, or communism, or Serbs. These resentments became intergenerational – shared by some third-generation Australians, as you note – and political, as they were nurtured by community associations, churches and so on.”
For many of these people, “the Ustashas were not so much fascists as nationalist fighters for Croatian statehood. This became one of their myths”, Biondich said.
He said Croatian authorities, since the country became an independent state, had not done enough to “systematically condemn Ustasha crimes or ban symbols of the Ustasha regime”.
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