Zdravka Bušić and the long shadow of the Ustaše
The visit to Aotearoa by a Croatian MP with links to extremist nationalist groups has gone unremarked on, despite her meeting with the deputy Prime Minister
This past September New Zealand’s deputy Prime Minister met with Zdravka Bušić, a member of the Croatian Parliament and Chair of the Parliamentary Committee for Croatians Abroad. She was in New Zealand for the Australia and New Zealand Croatian Women in Leadership Conference, where NZ First MP Tanya Unkovich also spoke. On Facebook, Unkovich posted “Today it was a privilege to accompany Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Winston Peters as we welcomed Croatian MP Zdravka Bušić and H.E Betty Pavelich, Croatian Ambassador to Australia and New Zealand.”
Bušić first became an MP in newly independent Croatia following the breakup of Yugoslavia. She represents the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ).
Her background, however, is more extreme. In the 1970s Bušić became involved with the Croatian National Resistance (HNO), also known as Otpor. Otpor was founded by General Vjekoslav Maks Luburić, a military commander known as the warden of the Jasenovac extermination camp during World War II. Croatian historian Ivo Goldstein estimates that 90,000 to 100,000 people died at Jasenovac, the largest concentration camp complex not operated by the Nazi regime.
After the defeat of the fascist Ustaše by the Yugoslav Partisans led by Josip Tito, who would become prime minister and later president of post-war Yugoslavia, many sympathisers of the regime fled into the diaspora communities of Western Europe, North America and Australia. In Yugoslavia during the 1960s and 70s, Croatia (along with Bosnia and Herzegovina) underwent unprecedented economic transformations that resulted in citizens, especially in urban areas, enjoying standards of living comparable to much of Western Europe. It was in the diaspora where Croatia came to be seen as a nation oppressed by Yugoslav socialism. In his 2003 book Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars, Paul Hockenos writes:
“Only among the diaspora rightists, obsessed with historical conflicts and isolated from the reality of contemporary Yugoslavia, could such symbolic matters serve to justify armed rebellion. Whatever the radical Croat ex-emigres may claim, theirs was never a popular movement enjoying even moderate support either in Croatia or among the diaspora. Although in hindsight the former emigres contrive to give their struggle a democratic veneer, it was, in fact, deeply undemocratic, nationally exclusive, and profoundly authoritarian.”
In the environment of Cold War anticommunism, the fascist sympathies of Croatian nationalists were often overlooked. Emigres in Ohio began to commemorate April 10, the date German and Italian invaders of Yugoslavia set up the Independent State of Croatia (Serbo-Croatian: Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) and put in place the Ustaše regime as ‘Croatia Day’. In 1968 Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes endorsed the day, even flying the WWII era regime flag in the city. He proclaimed “This date marks the anniversary of the beginning of the gallant struggle of the Croatian people which, in 1941, was successful in bringing freedom after 850 years of foreign domination”. The following year Ohio Governor James Rhodes called for a "determined fight for the reinstatement of an independent, free and democratic Croatian state which was declared on April 10, 1941.”
The Yugoslav embassy in Washington DC voiced their objections to the state department. The Yugoslav Consul General also wrote to mayor Stokes, reminding him that the Independent State of Croatia which existed briefly in the 40s had been aligned with Nazi Germany, and had declared war on the United States. Stokes disregarded the letter and continued to observe Croatia Day for another two years before the state department leaned on the Cleveland City Council to show better judgement.
In the mid 1970s Nikola Majstrović, a Croatian journalist who lives and works in Sweden was hired by Swedish national television to shoot a documentary film titled Croats: terrorists or freedom fighters. "There was a larger community of Croatian emigrants in Cleveland. I remember Zdravka Bušić.” Majstrović told Bosnian investigative journalist Avdo Avdić for Žurnal.info. “She and her friend put on uniforms and we went to a forest to film their military training. Then you could shoot wherever you wanted," She photographed Bušić and another woman practising shooting handguns.
In 1976, Bušić’s brother Zvonko Bušić, along with his American wife Julie Bušić (née Schultz), hijacked a plane heading from New York to Chicago. In the cockpit Zvonko told the crew that if his orders were not followed, he would detonate the explosives taped to his torso. In addition, should their demands not be met, a hidden bomb would go off in a "highly busy location" in the United States. The explosives strapped to their bodies were fake, but a real bomb, with instructions on how to defuse it, had been placed in a coin locker at Grand Central Station in Manhattan. This bomb, which Bušić alerted the police to, was meant as proof that yet another bomb existed at an undisclosed location. There was no second bomb.
After dropping leaflets over Chicago, the hijacked plane was flown to Newfoundland where the passengers were released unharmed, then across the Atlantic where leaflets were dropped over London and Paris. The next day, as per their demands, the hijackers' manifesto was printed in all major US dailies, including the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. This act of terrorism was not without victims however. Twenty-seven-year-old Lieutenant. Brian Murray, a member of the New York Police Department's bomb squad, was killed when the bomb in Grand Central Station exploded in his face as he attempted to defuse it. Three others were injured. The Bušić couple became a cause célèbre for Croatian nationalists. They both received life sentences for air piracy that had resulted in death, though Julie would serve only 13 years. Zvonko was released in 2008, five years before his death.
The radical nationalist groups of the diaspora would become a part of the strategy of nationalist-leaning figures in Croatia when the federation of Yugoslavia was beginning to crack. Franjo Tudjman had fought on the side of the Yugoslav Partisans in his youth, and after the war took a position in the rank of Major General in the Yugoslav People's Army. Following his military career, he gained a doctorate in history in 1965. He soon would clash with the Tito regime. Paul Hockenos writes:
“Among the retired general's excesses in socialist Yugoslavia was the content of his historical research, which played down the crimes that Croat fascists committed during World War II, as well as the number of people killed in Croat concentration camps. Employing dubious historical methods, Tudjman's books appear as ideologically driven tracts intent on exonerating the Croat nation from World War II atrocities. In socialist Yugoslavia this was pure heresy.”
In 1972 Tudjman was sentenced to two years in prison for ‘subversive activities’ during the Croatian Spring, which was a political conflict arising from students and intellectuals pushing for greater autonomy for Croatia in the context of Serbian hegemony within Yugoslavia. Petar Šegedin, president of the Croatian Writers' Association which Tudjman had joined in 1970, accused the Yugoslav government of attempting cultural assimilation of Croatia. As the movement gained momentum,Tito became unnerved. He charged the leaders with being open to the influence of the "reactionary diaspora."
Tito, who died in 1980, would turn out to be correct. As it became clear that Yugoslavia would not survive in its current form after Tito, nationalist factions in the Croatian communist party and in the republican intelligence services, attempted to direct the course of history. It was, according to Hokenos, “a strategy of pure self-interest designed to protect their positions during the upcoming political upheavals.”
“Former officials high in the socialist republic's interior ministry, such as Josip Manolic, claim that they organized Tudjman's visits abroad, right down to buying his plane tickets. These very officials were later among the founders and leaders of Tudjman's new party, the HDZ. There is little doubt that the secret services had their eye on events-and a hand in the process. Without at least their tacit approval, Tudjman would never have received a passport.”
In June 1987 Tudjman travelled to Toronto, Canada, where he stayed with John (Zlatko) Caldarevic, a respected emigre businessman. The pair had met in Zagreb in the 1960s, Caldarevic had emigrated in 1968. "At first I thought he was coming just for a visit, to relax," Caldarevic told Hokenos when interviewed thirteen years later. "He started meeting with people, with extremists, without telling me,".
Caldarevic, who describes himself as a moderate, was suddenly finding people such as Marin Sopta, North America's president of the Croatian National Resistance in his living room. "I advised Tudjman not to meet these people, not to go to these places," Caldarevic, told Hokenos, referring to prominent nationalist figures and the friars at the Croatian Franciscans, a Catholic order who had helped Ustaše members flee the country in the 40s. The Fransiscans had a community centre in Norval, twenty-five miles north of Toronto. "I said if someone takes a picture of you beneath a Pavelić [the World War II Croatian fascist leader] photograph you'll end up in jail again."
Tudjman gave lectures in North American cities, which were published in pamphlets and sent internationally to other diaspora groups. Older Croats were initially sceptical of the former Partisan. Hokenos recounts a meeting where a man stood up and defiantly announced that he had carried a rifle for the Ustasha. "If I had caught you in the forest forty years ago," he assailed Tudjman, "you'd be dead now. And if you had caught me, I'd be dead." The hall stood still. "But whatever the case," he continued with a nod, "I'm behind you now."
Tudjman told audiences of a key part of his emerging programme; Iseljena Hrvatska, roughly translating to "exiled Croatia" or "expelled Croatia," implying that Croats had been forced out of their rightful homeland, and would one day return. In 1990, when Croatia held its first multiparty elections since 1938, Tudjman’s HDZ came to power. Gojko Šušak, a Bosnian Croat emigre who in Hokeno’s words had “circulated in a seamy underground of militant ultranationalist splinter groups” in Canada, moved to Croatia to become “President Tudjman's powerful right-hand man” and the Minister of Emigration, later the deputy minister of defence. Julie Bušić was given positions in the Croatian Embassy in Washington, D.C., then from 1995 to 2000 served as a senior adviser to President Tudjman, her post salaried by Šušak's Ministry of Defense. Zdravka Bušić became Tudjman's personal secretary, and an HDZ parliamentarian.
Aside from these notable individuals, Croatians in the West did not ‘return’ in significant numbers. An estimated 3,500 did, while a greater number of people left Croatia during the same period. Mass population movements did take place in the region in the 1990s, though not voluntarily as Tudjman had forecast. War and ethnic cleansing saw 500,000 ethnic Croats from Serbia, central Bosnia, and Kosovo relocating to Croatia proper and Croat-dominated parts of Bosnia. (In 1995, Croat counter offensives against rebel Serbs also saw over 150,000 non-Croats flee Croatia).
Zdravka Bušić’s terrorism adjacent past may be half a century ago, but as recently as 2023 she was giving a presentation at the European Parliament focusing on the activities of the state security of Yugoslavia, which she accused of committing heinous crimes, including jailing, torturing, and killing those perceived to be engaged in “hostile activities against the state.” She further insisted that the "biological descendants and ideological followers [of communists] hold a lot of power in the modern era" and that communist ideology had left a "clear contamination" on Croatian society.
“While at face value the topic of discussion might seem reasonable,” wrote journalist Una Hajdari for Euro News, “what Bušić and other speakers failed to address was the fact that talking about communist crimes continues to be a dog-whistle on the far-right for ultra-nationalists and Nazi apologists promoting ideas that encourage discrimination today.”
According to Michael Colborne, a journalist and researcher at Bellingcat who has covered Croatia and the Balkans extensively, when these talking points are used by the far-right the intent is stoking fear. “They exploit anti-communist sentiment that understandably exists not just in former communist or socialist countries, but in other places as well,” Colborne told Euronews. “It's always been a tactic of the far right, dating right back to the original capital-f Fascists in Italy: exploit people's fears of and dislike for communism – real or perceived, justified or not – and offer themselves and their ideas as the only thing that can protect them,”
Tanya Unkovich has no known connections to Croatian nationalist movements, who have not had a significant presence in New Zealand (unlike in neighbouring Australia), and she may well have been unaware of Bušić’s past or present political views when meeting with her. Talk of ideological followers and “biological descendants” of communism holding power in the modern era is, however, worryingly similar to the kind of conspiratorial rhetoric espoused by members of the so-called “freedom movement” of which Unkovich is a part.