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Neo-Nazism and neo-Fascism in Croatia exists among the people who during World War II participated in the creation of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), are or have been members of the Ustaše, or otherwise sympathise with these Nazi/fascist causes. These mainly arose from Croatian nationalism and are considered the far-right in the political spectrum.

Such sentiment and actions have been restricted by law since 2003, and the display of the symbols of the NDH or Ustaše symbols is illegal. Yet there are few punitive measures employed against the trespassers, as is most commonly noted with graffiti. Due to the fact it became part of SFR Yugoslavia in WWII, Croatia does not regard denazification as a major priority, unlike most other European states involved in that war.

Denazification

An important factor in the existence of neo-Ustaša sentiment in Croatia was the development after the Second World War in which Croatia was officially liberated by the Partisans who formed the second Yugoslavia. As such, Croatia was not treated as a nation defeated in the war nor did the majority of its citizens feel as such; instead, they were part of Yugoslavia which won the war.

That said, the Communist authorities did pursue a strict set of policies which could be deemed as a form of denazification, only more similar to the Soviet style than to the American style. People who collaborated with the Ustasha were often court-martialed at the end of the war, the Bleiburg massacre was committed, and after the war was over, there were also trials against suspected collaborators, secret service control over citizens with links to the Ustasha etc.

The modern Croatia was formed long after WWII was over, and aside from occasional exceptions, there was no desire whatsoever by the Croatian political elite to associate the new country with the former Independent State of Croatia or to revisit the status of Croatia as a member of the winning side of that war. While significantly more courtesy was shown to the Ustasha for their desire to make Croatia independent, they were neither rehabilitated nor explicitly banned - most people, in politics and otherwise, simply wished to leave that part of the past behind. Subsequently, no laws were ever passed that specifically targeted the issues of Nazism and/or fascism.

Nevertheless, the occasional outbursts of pro-fascist sentiment were rarely ever sanctioned by the authorities, much to the dismay of liberal media and the left-leaning public, not to mention the Serbs of Croatia which were the most common targets. Because of such leniency, extremists seemed to become more and more vocal. In a widely reported incident, the then leader of the veterans union HVIDRA Marinko Liović appeared on a Slavonski Brod radio station in 1998 and publicly stated that "In my basement, the access is forbidden to dogs, cats, women, Serbs and Jews". Eventually, on July 11, 2003 the Račan coalition government passed amendments to the Penal Code which outlawed this kind of hate speech in a new section titled Praising fascist, Nazi and other totalitarian states and ideologies or promotion of racism and xenophobia.

Croatia also has no laws against historical revisionism or holocaust denial. This can mainly be attributed to the change of political system and indeed the entire system of values as the country became independent. Revisionism was not frowned upon because priority was placed on the reevaluation of history as recorded during the Communist era, which was therefore deemed almost implicitly tainted. The re-examination of the number of victims of the Independent State of Croatia and particularly the Jasenovac concentration camp was fairly common, as well as fairly controversial. See also the Bleiburg controversy below.

Events and issues connected to neo-Fascism in Croatia

Since gaining independence in 1991, Croatia has often been accused of ignoring the crimes committed by the the Second World War fascist Ustasha regime, and tolerating the symbols or the activities of individuals sympathetic to such a regime. This has been known to provoke widespread criticism of Croatia particularly in the West, and notably among the Serbs.

The criticism has indeed been warranted. The primary reason for this has been a lack of priority and care taken by the Croatian public and the mainstream politics towards the issue, because numerous other issues plagued the country at the time.

In the early 1990s, during the secession war, numerous anti-fascist monuments (erected in honour of the Partisans) have been damaged or destroyed throughout the country, and these incidents were generally not sanctioned by the authorities at all. Furthermore, the devastation of WWII partisan monuments also often extended to those erected in honour of civilian victims of war, also with little or no intervention from the police.

Also there is the name of the new Croatian currency - kuna, introduced in 1994, which was also the name used in the NDH (1941-1945). Seeing this as a sign of reviving the Nazi past, some members of the Croatian Helsinki Committee fot Human Rights proposed renaming the currency - as an act of the purifification of the Croatian mentality.

A square in the central part of Zagreb which was named the "Square of the victims of fascism" (Trg žrtava fašizma) because during WWII over sixteen thousand people were deported via the square to concentration camps, was during the early 1990s renamed to "Square of great Croats" (Trg hrvatskih velikana). This decision was later reverted in December 2000 during Bandić's mayorship of Zagreb.

In several Croatian cities, streets were renamed after Mile Budak, a prominent Ustaša ideologist, on the basis that he was otherwise a poet. The moves to hail Budak this way, were supported by 120 university professors, scholars, and other prominent figures of the Croatian cultural and public life . These moves have since been reversed by recent governments.

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.

A more recent example of leniency towards neo-Fascism is how the pop/folk/rock singer Marko Perković and his band Thompson made a career for himself by singing patriotic tunes, but this has sometimes resulted in singing borderline fascist lyrics praising WWII criminals (cf. Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara). Thompson has not shown much restraint in displaying his Ustaša sentiment because he never faced any official opposition in Croatia for doing so.

Thompson has appeared on public television, and can still sometimes be seen on it. He has had at least a few concerts that have attracted tens of thousands of people. It has been widely alleged that he achieved such large audience with the support of right-wing politicians, although in general the people listen to him based on his patriotic sentiment, yet also his extreme rightist sentiment. Nevertheless, he was banned from performing in Netherlands and other states that do not allow display of Nazi symbols and celebration of the Holocaust.

Impact on and of the War of Independence

When Croatia started secession from SFRY in the 1990s, there was widespread and growing antagonism between the Croats and the Serbs. The disruption of decent relations towards the victims of WWII, particularly to the victims of Ustaša genocide, was offensive to the Serbs. While in normal circumstances these incidents would have been immediately sanctioned, in an atmosphere of fear built up by nationalist propaganda, the existing memory of WWII was easily exaggerated to make the Serbs frightened of the new developments.

There was no official connection between the Ustaše ideology and the politics of the new government that made Croatia independent from Yugoslavia, but numerous parallels were drawn between these two ideas by its detractors.

The Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ) which became the ruling political party in Croatia, and its president Franjo Tuđman, also had the financial support of the so-called Ustaša diaspora during the late 1980s and 1990s. The term "Ustaša diaspora" refers to those in the Croatian diaspora who had emigrated after WWII (who were often, although not always, directly connected to the NDH regime). The most notable supporting argument for this is the fact that Gojko Šušak and other such returnees became influential politicians in modern Croatia. The resurgence of the Ustaša ideology in present-day Croatia is often connected to this.

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.

President Tuđman himself had controversial views on the topic of World War II, claiming that the Ustaša state was indeed an expression of the Croat state tradition. Such a notion could be considered true in view of Croatia's long historical struggle for independence, but because Croatia was a puppet-state of Hitler at the time, that position is hard to defend.

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

After the war

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 actual neo-Ustaša politicians have never had 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.

As a rightist political notion, the neo-fascist symbols are by and large paired with nationalist ones. In recent protests, supporters of Ante Gotovina and other suspected war criminals often carried nationalist symbols together with pictures of Ante Pavelić.

Croatian president Franjo Tuđman proposed to inter soldiers of the World War II Croatian Fascist regime alongside with their Serb, Jewish, Roma, and Croat victims, buried at the site of a former Jasenovac concentration camp as a sign of "national reconciliation" , , - although it should be noted that Croatian partisans were only a very small proportion of casualties at Jasenovac. Croatian Serbs, whose relatives died in Jasenovac and other concentration camps in Croatia, found the proposal greatly insulting, to say the least.

With respect to processing war crimes, both in WWII and in the Croatian war of independence, the Croatian Government has had a rather spotty record for processing those committed by Croats. The pressure from the European Union, given that Croatia aims to join the EU, has helped rectify this in recent times.

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.

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 is one of the things which have prevented the majority of Serbs from returning. (For more information on non-neo-fascist issues troubling the Serbs of Croatia, see that article.)

The neo-Nazi symbols and slogans often deface walls in Croatia. The serif letter U (sometimes embellished with a cross, and/or letters NDH) representing Ustaše is the most common, while there are also instances of much more explicit hate speech: the phrase Srbe na vrbe! (meaning "hang Serbs on the willow trees!") also appears in graffiti and as slogans of Croatian football hooligans. Serbian property, even Orthodox churches, continue to be occasionally vandalized with various Ustasha-related graffiti, and the authorities, while nominally opposed to it, are in practice fairly indifferent about catching spraypainters.

In 2004, in a telephone straw poll conducted during the "Nedjeljom u dva" talk show at the Croatian Radiotelevision, more than 17,000 calls were in favour of 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 is of limited usefulness. The ratio of calls was 58% in favour and 42% against., ,

The Bleiburg controversy

To their modern supporters, the Ustaše are not considered responsible for mass murder that they committed, and instead they are considered to have been victims of the Bleiburg massacre, a major reprisal of the Partisans against them during the last months of the war.

The killings that happened in relation to Bleiburg were entirely covered up by the new Communist authorities. Such treatment of this event had lasted for several decades, and it greatly contributed to the rhetoric of the proponents of the Ustaše. Being able to portray their side in the war as a victim and making it possible to point to the Partisans as also being "wrong" or "evil" (see also: two wrongs don't make a right) generally serves as a tool in the political jousting on moral supremacy between the political left and the right.

During the time of the rise of Croatian nationalism in late 1980s and 1990s, Bleiburg massacre began to be exploited for political purposes, as the number of victims was inflated by proponents of the Ustaše. In 1990, a cousin of Ante Pavelić claimed in Bleiburg that there were 10,000 killed there, and that they were Ustasha and Domobran soldiers. There are reports of claims of in between 100,000, and hundreds of thousands victims , , - and some claimed that they were all soldiers, while some claimed that they were mostly civilians. At the same time, the number of victims of the Holocaust in Croatia was subject to revisionism, and some attempted to whitewash it or artificially reduce the number of victims.

See also

• Ustaše
• Neo-Fascism

External links

• Jasenovac Research Institute's "Statement on the Release of Ustashe War Criminal, Nada Sakic", February 4, 1999
• "Simon Wiesenthal Center Condemns Argentine Secretary Of Cultures Defense of Croatian War Criminals", June 12, 2003
• "Croatia's Willingness To Tolerate Fascist Legacy Worries Many", by Dragutin Hedl, September 8, 1999
• Ustashe in Zadar
• Ustashe in Zadar - charges against 7 people for cariing ustasa simbols
• "Hrvatski pravaši" party praises Ustashe Mile Budak
• Jasenovac i Gradiska stara played on occasion of international volleyball match
• Ustashe marching in Zadar downtown
• Group of teenagers supporting Ustase
• Anti-Semitism I
• Anti-Semitism II
• Anti-Semitism III
• New plaque for Ustashe
• Proposal to rename Croatian currency
• Holly Ante Pavelic

• Neofascism
• Neo-Nazism
• Politics of Croatia