– Bruno Bušić –
The following text was reproduced by Goran Babić in his collection of documents entitled Historija hrvatske histerije (History of Croatian Hysteria), according to the original published by the “Croats of Vancouver,” Washington, 1979. It is an exceptionally interesting work by a Croatian émigré and nationalist, Bruno Bušić, who publicised against the Second Yugoslavia (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). In it, he argues for the unification of Croatian Ustaše and communists under the same nationalist banner, and substantiates his view with the common ground the two found during the First Yugoslavia (Kingdom of Yugoslavia) against its integral Yugoslavism. These nationalists, both communist and anti-communist, did indeed find themselves on the same side in the 1990s, prompting Babić’s republication. It is a stark reminder of the danger of ethnic nationalism in our time, no matter what ideology it cloaks itself with, and the importance of unity on the basis of a common civic nation-building project.
Sava Press
“Those whose Croatian national consciousness and human conscience failed them at decisive moments — that is, those who sought to impart fascist characteristics to the Croatian Ustaša movement and those who sought to expunge the idea of Croatian sovereignty from Croatian communists — endeavour to consign to oblivion the longstanding and enduring ties between Croatian Ustaše and communists, while reviving memories of old misfortunes and ominous antagonisms that have already been overcome.
“Genuine Croatian communists and Ustaše alike cherished deep within themselves the idea of a free and independent Croatia and of its full sovereignty within Croatia’s historical and ethnic borders.” (Bruno Bušić)
BRUNO BUŠIĆ was persecuted, imprisoned and ultimately killed by a regime that declared itself communist and was known as such throughout the world. In reality, the colours changed, but in essence all Yugoslav regimes were Greater Serbian and imperialist, including the regime that declared itself communist. Those well acquainted with the circumstances were therefore not surprised that Bruno Bušić devoted his final and unfinished, yet politically most important, treatise precisely to the Croatian Ustaše and communists. Those pursuing their own particular interests, however, sought during his lifetime to “pack him off to Moscow,” only later to proclaim him an anti-communist, applying their own standards to him.
Despite his bitter personal experience, which culminated in his martyrdom — or perhaps precisely because of that experience — Bruno Bušić understood that there could be no question of Croatia’s national liberation unless national unity was simultaneously achieved above and beyond all ideological and confessional affiliations. He devoted his final treatise to this idea of Croatian national unity.
Bruno Bušić also gave his life in the cause of forging links between the émigré community and the homeland and in combating ideological delusions for which Croatia’s national liberation was being sacrificed. The publishers believe that, through this edition, they will in some small measure repay their debt to him and help ensure that his guiding principles do not disappear with his physical passing.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE — G. B.
* * *
At last year’s Book Fair (1977) in Frankfurt, one of the books that attracted the greatest interest among Croatian visitors was Fikreta Jelić-Butić’s The Ustaše and the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945 (Liber and Školska knjiga, Zagreb, 1977). The book’s foreword states that it is the “result of several years of the author’s work, undertaken as part of the scholarly programme of the Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement of Croatia in Zagreb.”
The initiative for writing this monograph actually came from Dr Franjo Tuđman, who served as director of the Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement of Croatia from 1961 to 1967. The author, who had only recently graduated in history from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, resisted Tuđman’s request that she undertake work on the monograph for quite some time, owing to her lack of familiarity with the subject, arguing that there was nothing more to be written about the Independent State of Croatia because everything had already been written and explained. Misled by the polemical writings of Mate Rajković, Šime Balen, Viktor Novak and Ferdo Čulinović, as well as by numerous newspaper serials cast in the same mould, she genuinely believed this to be the case. Over time, Fikreta Butić became increasingly immersed in the issues surrounding the establishment and existence of the Independent State of Croatia, to such an extent that in conversation she unconsciously employed terminology and linguistic expressions customary in the Independent State of Croatia. She also frequently complained about the lack of time and the fact that the Croatian wartime archives had been transferred from Zagreb to Belgrade — in effect, from the Croatian State Archives to the Military History Institute in Belgrade — to which access was difficult to obtain and where every researcher studying Croatian state and wartime history was constantly watched by an armed soldier, to whom all notes taken had to be submitted for inspection. She and other scholars at the Institute frequently expressed their displeasure at this situation and recalled the time when Ban and Count Karlo Khuen-Hedervary had been slapped and kicked in the backside in the middle of the Croatian Parliament because he had sent part of the Croatian archives to Budapest.
Fikreta Jelić-Butić worked on this monograph for almost 15 years, and it is therefore understandable that the book abounds in information that is little known, or entirely unknown, even to the best-informed reader. At the same time, however, certain inaccuracies and hasty assertions are readily apparent, as are frequent instances of suppressing or circumventing scholarly truth and even of adopting an unscholarly position in opposition to incontrovertible facts. The author too readily allowed herself to be misled by the “investigative and judicial materials of the people’s authorities from the trials conducted against a number of the principal representatives of the Ustaša regime.” Moreover, the monograph displays a certain predetermined political tendency to which the author was obliged to adapt her analyses and conclusions. Thus, she asserts that the Ustaše, in their exclusivism and hatred, attached the greatest importance “to explaining the justification for the use of force and all means of coercion and terror in achieving the movement’s principal objectives,” and that the “slogan of revenge set the fundamental tone both in the training of cadres and in the propaganda itself” (p. 26). She supports this assertion with quotations from Ustaša, Herald of the Croatian Revolutionaries, which state:
“Nowhere, in no country in the world, have so many opportunistic outsiders gathered as on sacred Croatian soil, living off the Croatian people, yet instead of thanking them for this and assisting them in their superhuman struggle for freedom, they serve the foreign usurper and tyrant while drinking and sucking the blood of the Croatian peasant and worker.” — Ustaša, July 1932.
“Through revolution, blood and arms, foreign tyranny must be overthrown and an independent Croatian state established. To this end, fighters are gathering in the revolutionary Ustaša ranks; for this purpose, the Ustaše are being equipped and armed. The Croatian Ustaša revolutionary organisation knows the causes of this misfortune, but it also knows the means by which the freedom, salvation and happiness of the Croatian people are to be attained. In pursuit of this objective and along this path, it will overcome every obstacle with a firm and armed hand.” — Ustaša, February 1932.
Developing this argument further, the author openly acknowledges that Hitler’s “Germany had an interest in maintaining stability in Yugoslavia” and that it “gave Yugoslavia its support” (p. 30). She quotes (p. 31) an article from the October 1932 issue of Ustaša attacking all those “who do not know, and refuse to understand, that the era of struggle on paper and by words has passed, that it has achieved nothing, and that henceforth the decisive role is being, and will continue to be, played by self-sacrifice, revolvers, bombs and the sharp daggers of the Croatian Ustaše (…).” Yet she entirely disregards the fact that, at that time and for many years thereafter, communist propaganda displayed the same characteristics and asserted the same indisputable facts. Particularly notable in this respect was Proleter, the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which was published from 1929 to 1942 and was, for a period, edited by Josip Broz Tito. By way of illustration, we reproduce several quotations from Proleter:
“The masses of the working people, reduced to unprecedented poverty and misery by the plundering capitalist and landowning policies of the Greater Serbian military-fascist dictatorship and by the economic crisis, are rising in struggle against the government of the bloody King Alexander the Last. A wave of protest against the criminal military-fascist dictatorship is sweeping across the entire country. Despite prohibitions, meetings and assemblies are being held, while demonstrations and clashes between workers and peasants on the one hand and the police and gendarmes on the other are becoming increasingly frequent. Workers’ strikes are multiplying despite the terror of the government and employers and the betrayal of the social-fascist leaders. Hungry peasants are storming state warehouses en masse and carrying away grain to feed their families; they are driving out of their villages the enforcement officers who come to sell a peasant’s last cow and field to satisfy taxes and debts to moneylenders. In some places, workers and peasants are taking to the forests and beginning an insurgent struggle against the state authorities. Even within the army, which the Greater Serbian bourgeoisie and its monarchy regarded as their most reliable bulwark and took particular care to shield from every revolutionary influence, mutinies by soldiers and officers are beginning to be organised. Discontent is spreading from day to day; each day new strata of workers, peasants, the urban poor, the working intelligentsia and oppressed peoples are joining the struggle. The front of those fighting against the dictatorship grows with every passing day and increasingly undermines the ground beneath the dictatorship’s feet.” — Proleter, no. 26, September 1932.
“Everyone seems to be awaiting the day of general vengeance, the day when the general and decisive struggle against the hated regime will begin (…). In such circumstances, workers and peasants must be made to understand that it is not enough to wait for some ‘day of vengeance’ with one’s fist clenched in one’s pocket. No people and no class can be liberated by anyone else unless they liberate themselves through their own struggle. The military-fascist dictatorship will not automatically collapse of its own accord. The overthrow of the military-fascist dictatorship will not take place simply because, one fine day, the masses spontaneously rise in armed revolt. The armed uprising of the masses must be prepared, persistently and systematically. The path leading towards the armed uprising of the masses consists in drawing them into the everyday struggle for particular and partial demands, expanding and strengthening that struggle and raising it to the level of a general struggle against the dictatorship. The military-fascist dictatorship, national and social oppression, and exploitation by employers, moneylenders, banks and great landowners — all of this can be overthrown and destroyed only by developing the everyday struggle in factories, villages and streets.
“‘Trust in yourself and your own horse,’ as the popular proverb says. The struggle must be waged now, without waiting for someone else to come and wage it.” — Proleter, no. 2, February 1933.
Numerous articles in Proleter concluded with slogans such as: “Down with the Greater Serbian military-fascist dictatorship! Long live the workers’ and peasants’ government! Out with Serbian officials, gendarmes and police! For freedom of the press, assembly and association!” (Proleter, no. 24, September 1932); “Down with the White Terror of the Greater Serbian military-fascist dictatorship!” (Proleter, no. 2, February 1933); “Let us not allow the fascists and their henchmen to sow confusion and destroy the unity of the Croatian people! To work! To struggle! Croatian communists, join the struggle to accomplish all the tasks set out above! Let us prove, in both word and deed, that we are true sons of the Croatian people! Let us prove that we love our people and our homeland!” (Proleter, no. 12, November 1937).
The writings of that period directed against “interlopers and profiteers” and all the enemies who “drink the blood” of the Croatian people (Ustaša), and the call to settle accounts as soon as possible “with Serbian officials, gendarmes and police” (Proleter), were not expressions of any exclusivism or hatred on the part of the Ustaše and communists, but rather a struggle “against every form of national oppression by the Serbian tyrants” (Proleter, no. 26, September 1932). The assertions that the “era of struggle on paper and by words has passed, that it has achieved nothing” (Ustaša) and that “no people and no class can be liberated by anyone else unless they liberate themselves through their own struggle” (Proleter) have, unfortunately, remained incontrovertible historical facts to the present day.
The pre-war writings of Ustaša and Proleter were followed during the war by numerous articles in Vjesnik, Organ of the United Croatian National Liberation Front, or, more simply, the partisan Vjesnik, which was edited by Croatian communists and from which today’s Zagreb Vjesnik emerged. From these articles we could cite numerous passages demonstrating that Croatian communists genuinely believed that, through class liberation, the Croatian people would also attain national freedom, which had been entirely denied to them in fascist-monarchist Yugoslavia. We reproduce only a few quotations:
“The working class of Croatia was persecuted and subjected to terror even under the earlier Yugoslav governments. In addition to being subjected, as part of the Croatian people, to various forms of national oppression, it was the principal target of extraordinary laws and emergency measures. (…) The working class of Croatia, in alliance with the Croatian peasantry, dealt severe blows to the Greater Serbian hegemonists and was always in the foremost ranks of the struggle for national freedom and equality.” — Vjesnik, no. 12, May 1942.
“Passivity, waiting and calculation are not characteristics of our people. (…) The Croatian people have struggled for freedom for centuries. And freedom, if it is genuine freedom, is not received as a gift; it must be fought for. (…) Today, every Croat who has the slightest love for his native soil, his sea, fields and mountains must join the national liberation struggle… (…) The Greater Serbian chauvinist clique, with the wholehearted assistance of the occupiers, has sharpened its teeth and once again directed its struggle against the Croatian people, with the open and direct assistance of a handful of Croatian renegades.” — Vjesnik, no. 15, August 1942.
“The multinational Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, in which numerous, predominantly Slavic peoples had languished in servitude for centuries, disappeared in 1918 under the blows of the Entente armies at the fronts and the internal blows of the oppressed peoples: Poles, Czechs, Slovenes, Croats and others. These peoples, who had waged a liberation struggle for decades, rose up during the war of 1914–1918, particularly after the revolutionary events in Russia, and dealt mortal blows to the oppressive monarchy. Owing to the absence of an organised revolutionary force, the Croatian people failed at that most favourable historical moment to realise their longstanding objectives. Instead, under pressure from the victorious great powers and Greater Serbian policy, and particularly as a consequence of the betrayal of the leading politicians in Croatia, they entered Versailles Yugoslavia and thus exchanged the semi-feudal Austro-Hungarian yoke for a Greater Serbian one. The Entente required its own strategic and political position in this part of Europe; the Greater Serbian ruling class sought the enlargement of Serbia and the creation of a Greater Serbian state; while the treacherous leaderships of the Croatian political cliques, fearful of the revolutionary wave among the people, sought to safeguard their selfish interests and positions in the embrace of the reactionary Belgrade establishment and military generals. Thus, on 1 December 1918, against the will of the Croatian people and all the other non-Serbian peoples, and without even consulting or obtaining the consent of the Serbian people themselves, the Versailles creation known as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia, was established. Not only did it bring about no liberation or unification for anyone, but it became a prison for all its peoples, in which even the Serbian people themselves, for the sake of preserving this reactionary creation, lost all those democratic institutions they had won through long and bloody struggles in pre-war Serbia. (…)
“For 23 years, the forcibly created Versailles Yugoslavia eked out its existence. The entire history of this reactionary creation is nothing other than a history of uninterrupted and steadily intensifying violence, plunder and terror against all the oppressed peoples of Yugoslavia — a history of the peoples’ liberation struggles and sacrifices against the Greater Serbian yoke.” — Vjesnik, no. 19, December 1942.
“During the 20-year period of life within the Versailles state, the Croatian people languished in the darkest national servitude, subjected to a policy of unparalleled plunder and terror by the Greater Serbian Belgrade establishment. Harbouring nothing whatsoever against the fraternal Serbian people or against sharing a common state with them, the Croatian people were nevertheless compelled throughout this entire period to wage a bitter struggle for national freedom and survival against the Greater Serbian clique, which fomented discord and national hatred and developed a bloody policy of national oppression, governing even the Serbian people themselves by violent and anti-popular methods and thereby creating the preconditions for the collapse of the state and the enslavement of all the peoples of Yugoslavia.
“Immediately after the creation of the state, the Belgrade establishment plundered the Croatian people and the entire population of the territories formerly under Austro-Hungarian rule, first in 1919, when, during the stamping of crown banknotes, it simply confiscated 20 per cent of the total amount held by all holders of crowns, and then again in 1920, when those same holders of crowns were robbed of several hundred million more dinars through the exchange rate of four crowns to one dinar. All subsequent financial policy was conducted in the same anti-popular and anti-Croatian spirit, particularly through the predatory inflation and stabilisation of the dinar, whose effects were felt especially severely by the working and peasant classes throughout Yugoslavia.
“For the entire 20 years, tax policy was based on imposing a disproportionately greater burden upon Croats and the inhabitants of the former Austro-Hungarian territories, while the machinery of taxation operated with particular rapacity and gendarmerie-style coercion in those regions. During the 10 years from 1918 to 1928, the lowest rate of house tax in Croatia was three times higher than that in Serbia, while land tax was twice as high. The average tax burden per inhabitant for the period 1924–1929 amounted to 406 dinars in Croatia and 180 dinars in Serbia. In total, the Croatian people paid 19 per cent more in taxes in 1925 than before the war of 1914–1919.
“The credit policies of state institutions and the question of relieving the peasant masses of their debts were merely playing cards in the hands of various party cliques and regimes, particularly during election campaigns, and were invariably imbued with an anti-Croatian spirit. During the severe industrial crisis of 1929, the policies of the Belgrade establishment drove tens of thousands of small Croatian savers and their savings into ruin solely because of rivalry and competition with the Zagreb banks, to which the state denied assistance at a critical moment, thereby causing a catastrophe whose costs were borne primarily by the Croatian working and peasant classes. It is significant to note that, at precisely the same time, the state was taking 45 million dinars at a time from public assets to support White Guard riff-raff who had established themselves in Belgrade, that centre of anti-Soviet activity.
“(…) In short, between 1919 and 1938 all state budgets amounted, in round figures, to 180 billion dinars, of which Croatia contributed 60 billion through taxes and other means. Of that sum, approximately 30 billion was spent on state requirements in Croatia, while the remaining 30 billion was taken out of Croatia — certainly not to Serbian villages and provincial towns, but into the coffers of the leaders of the Belgrade establishment.
“Educational and cultural policy in Croatia was systematically pursued in an anti-Croatian spirit, imposing Greater Serbian theories, songs, textbooks, language, teaching staff and ideology upon children in schools, suppressing every genuinely Croatian national endeavour and even abusing the Croatian name itself and compromising the idea of state unity, which became a mask for every anti-popular and particularly anti-Croatian undertaking.
“Croats, as Croats, were terrorised and harassed at every turn, while the fate of an entire people was governed by the arbitrary will of corrupt regimes. From mass terrorist attacks upon Croatian workers and peasants and the persecution of the intelligentsia, through the arrests of leading politicians headed by Stjepan Radić in 1924–1925 and their murder in the middle of the Belgrade parliament in 1928, through the 6 January dictatorship and on to the unprecedented violence at the elections of 1935 and the frenzied shooting at Croatian demonstrations and assemblies, a single line of anti-Croatian policy runs through all these Greater Serbian crimes — a policy that, even in Serbia, contained nothing Serbian or popular. Tens of thousands sentenced by the State Court for the Protection of the State, overcrowded prisons and detention centres, and beatings employed as an indispensable system complete the picture of that dark past for which the exiles in London and the treacherous Maček-Krnjević clique now shed their false tears.
“During the 20 years of the Greater Serbian state’s existence, more than 40 governments comprising approximately 700 ministers succeeded one another at the head of the state administration. Not a single government ever came to power or was brought down through parliamentary means; all were invariably formed, installed and dismissed under the influence of forces operating behind the scenes, particularly the Belgrade establishment. The Croatian people not only exercised no influence whatsoever over government policy, but every government was distinctly anti-Croatian, and even the few ‘joint, coalition’ governments were marked by the complete predominance of the Belgrade establishment.
“There were virtually no representatives of the Croatian people in the army or its senior command. The very fact that the cliques of generals operated without any control by the people in general, and by the Croatian people in particular, contributed substantially to the entrenchment within the senior command of anti-popular elements who, when the opportunity arose, readily developed into fifth columnists. They irresponsibly played with the fate of our peoples and ultimately cast them into the jaws of fascism.
“It is hardly surprising that this anti-popular and anti-Croatian spirit continually spread and became firmly entrenched throughout the entire apparatus of a state that had itself been created as a barricade erected by the enemies of the people against their own peoples.
“The country’s first elections, those for the Constituent Assembly, were conducted on the basis of the 1910 population statistics, ostensibly because of ‘Serbia’s numerous wartime casualties,’ whereas in reality this was an electoral manipulation intended to facilitate the creation of a majority for a centralist constitution. Subsequently, the adoption of the Vidovdan Constitution, the fundamental law of the state, was accomplished through a flagrant violation of popular rights and democratic principles, by the simple purchase of the votes of insignificant minorities, in the absence of and against the representatives of the working people — the 58 deputies of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia — and all the representatives of the Croatian people, the deputies of the Croatian Republican Peasant Party, and thus against the will of the social strata and peoples most entitled to be heard. Could such a creation have become anything other than a prison for the peoples, and particularly a prison for the Croatian people? (…)
“No people, least of all the Croatian people, can today regret the passing of that detested order, characterised by lawlessness, violence, terror and plunder on the part of the Greater Serbian Belgrade establishment, and by betrayal and continual deception on the part of the majority of the leadership of the Croatian Peasant Party.” — Vjesnik, no. 1, January 1943.
“Recently, during fighting in Banija, our fighters captured a major belonging to a Croatian Home Guard brigade. When, during interrogation, they told him that he was a traitor to the Croatian people because he was fighting against a free Croatia, the captured major replied: ‘I am fighting for a free and independent Croatia. I am a supporter of Maček.'” — Vjesnik, no. 16, 16 August 1944.
Indeed, the idea of a free and independent Croatia is deeply rooted in every Croat, irrespective of social background or personal ideological and political convictions. It is true that ideological antagonisms and differing political views divided Croatian Ustaše, communists, supporters of Maček and those who belonged to other political movements, parties or groups. Nevertheless, the idea of Croatian statehood and freedom brought them closer together, and under differing and by no means favourable circumstances they cooperated in bringing that idea to fruition. Today, the facts concerning this cooperation are concealed with the utmost care and documents relating to it are destroyed, while efforts are instead made to revive old antagonisms that have long since disappeared and been forgotten.
Fikreta Jelić-Butić not only conceals historical facts, of which she is very well aware, concerning the initial unity of Croatian communists and Ustaše, their cooperation and their common struggle against Greater Serbian Yugoslavia and for a free and independent Croatian state; she goes further, distorting historical truth while invoking Proleter, whose pages reveal an entirely different reality. Discussing the Croatian Ustaša action in the Velebit mountains in September 1932 (the Velebit Uprising), as well as the objectives and political significance of that action, she writes (p. 41):
“Following the Ustaša action in Lika, the authorities intensified police and gendarmerie surveillance of numerous individuals, while severe reprisals against the population itself followed. In several municipalities, conferences were held with prominent opposition political figures, who were warned of the consequences of becoming involved in Ustaša propaganda. Arrests on suspicion of involvement in Ustaša propaganda were also carried out in other parts of Croatia.
“At the same time, the Ustaša action met with genuine condemnation from the progressive forces in the country, foremost among them the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.”
Proleter, no. 28, December 1932, on pages two and three, carries a report on this Ustaša action in an article entitled “The Ustaša Movement in the Croatian Regions,” which states:
“Recently, particularly in Lika and northern Dalmatia, the Ustaša movement against the Serbian occupation authorities has begun to spread. There have been several clashes between armed Ustaše and gendarmes. Between Šibenik and Benkovac, the Ustaše blew up four gendarmerie barracks. In clashes in Lika, the Ustaše captured five gendarmes and took them away as hostages. In order to suppress the movement, the government declared a state of siege in these regions and dispatched 1,400 gendarmes, three army battalions, two cavalry detachments equipped with machine guns and one mountain artillery battery. In addition, irregular detachments of Kosta Pećanac’s so-called ‘National Defence’ (Serbian guerrillas) were dispatched. Yugoslav torpedo boats are patrolling between Rijeka and Split, maintaining the strictest vigilance to prevent arms from being smuggled from Italy to the Ustaše. In the villages, inhabitants are forbidden to leave their homes after eight o’clock in the evening, while anyone wishing to travel elsewhere must seek permission from the authorities. In connection with the Ustaša movement, people are being arrested en masse throughout the villages. Reports from Zagreb state that more than 150 peasants from Lika are being held in police custody there, in addition to approximately 90 people arrested in Zagreb in connection with the memorial service for Hranilović. Near Glina, where a peasant revolt recently took place, reports indicate that 15 people were killed and 16 wounded.
“All these reports — which are also partly confirmed by the official Avala news agency — demonstrate that the situation in Yugoslavia is becoming more serious with each passing day. Hunger, misery and the regime’s terror against the population have already exceeded all bounds, and peasants driven to desperation are fleeing into the forests and beginning, rifle in hand, to fight against Greater Serbian oppression. From the fact that the Ustaša movement is beginning in Lika and northern Dalmatia — the poorest regions of Yugoslavia — it may be concluded that socio-economic factors play an important role in this movement. The national factor is likewise highly significant, however, since the movement is most highly developed in the Croatian parts of Lika and northern Dalmatia.
“The Communist Party welcomes the Ustaša movement of the peasants of Lika and Dalmatia and places itself entirely on their side. It is the duty of every communist organisation and every communist to support, organise and lead this movement.”
The article further states that the “struggle to broaden the mass base of the Ustaša movement” is a task for the communists, because “the Greater Serbian military-fascist dictatorship cannot be overthrown solely through the actions of small groups of people without the participation of the broadest masses,” and that the “struggle for national liberation must be given concrete substance and must encompass the questions of land, debts, taxes, the struggle against local wealthy usurers, schools and so forth.” The article concludes by asserting that the communists are fighting:
“against national and social oppression, for the self-determination of oppressed peoples up to and including secession, and for the rule of workers and peasants. For this reason, they participate most actively in the Ustaša movement and lead that movement, linking the Ustaše’s struggle for national liberation with the struggle of the broad masses of working people for work, bread, land and freedom.”
Three months later, in Proleter, no. 3, February–March 1933, these earlier positions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia regarding the Ustaša movement were reaffirmed. The whole of the first page and half of the second page of that issue of Proleter were occupied by an article entitled “For the Everyday Interests of the Working People,” which included the following assertions and programmatic positions:
“The preconditions for a revolutionary crisis in Yugoslavia have gradually, and recently with increasing rapidity, been maturing. The unity of Versailles Yugoslavia is threatened both internally and externally. The Greater Serbian military-fascist dictatorship is consequently disintegrating. It can find neither a way out nor salvation either by relaxing or by intensifying its terror.
“(…) The immense accumulated dissatisfaction, disillusionment and bitterness of the working people are producing a rising tide of militancy. The militant movement of the oppressed peoples and the working class, together with the broadest strata of the ruined peasantry and impoverished middle classes, is rising rapidly. The time separating us from momentous events is short! (…)
“During the past two or three months, a series of events has occurred in Yugoslavia that has required, and continues to require, our entire Party membership to respond rapidly and concretely, both in oral and written agitation. For example, the position adopted in connection with the Ustaša action in Lika and the Croatian Littoral was correct, and sufficiently successful efforts were made to acquaint the masses of the oppressed peoples with that position. But it must be openly acknowledged that, in connection with the Ustaša action, the Party failed to prepare and develop the national-revolutionary struggle of the oppressed masses both in depth and in breadth. The Party did not conduct the struggle against the savage terror raging in Lika and the Croatian Littoral with sufficient specificity. (…)
“The broad masses of the people are increasingly coming to recognise that the communists were and remain correct in maintaining that all the hopes entertained by the Serbian bourgeois opposition concerning the voluntary
acceptance by the military-fascist dictatorship of a change in the form of bourgeois dictatorship, the calling of elections for a constituent assembly and so forth represent nothing but a delusion that obstructs and impedes the struggle against the military-fascist dictatorship. Yet these illusions continue to play an important role in deceiving the masses and must therefore be persistently exposed.
“The illusions of the leadership of the Peasant-Democratic Coalition and the Slovene People’s Party that the fascist dictatorship would negotiate with them on the basis of their Zagreb and Ljubljana proposals for mediation and compromise have likewise collapsed. They have collapsed because those who uphold the dictatorship are aware that the Croatian and Slovene national liberation movements of the working masses would sweep aside the barriers that the national-reformist leaders seek to place in the way of their struggle for liberation. Yet many of our Party comrades, in Serbia as well as in Croatia and Slovenia, have still failed to grasp the full significance of the need for proper Party work in assisting national-revolutionary movements. This is not merely a matter of Platonic solidarity with the national liberation struggle; rather, the organisation must wage a persistent struggle to establish the leadership of the working class throughout the entire struggle of the oppressed peoples. This means that the struggle against every form of national compromise, and against its proponents and representatives, must be intensified tenfold. The struggle for the hegemony, or leading role, of the working class in the struggle of the nationally oppressed and peasant masses, together with an intensified struggle against the leaderships of the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opposition groups, constitutes one of the most important conditions for the victory of the working people in their struggle against their oppressors.
“The internment of the leaders of the national-compromise and petty-bourgeois opposition in the former Austro-Hungarian territories, together with the general intensification of terror by the gravely threatened Greater Serbian dictatorship, has sharpened all the country’s contradictions in recent weeks. Mass movements against the Greater Serbian military-fascist dictatorship have intensified. The misconceptions and illusions of the bourgeois opposition and of national compromise remain strong among these movements, but they too have been shaken. Establishing close links with these masses in order to systematically prepare and lead mass actions against the terror of the fascist dictatorship is a highly important task for all our organisations.”
Such writing in Proleter was entirely consistent not only with the political convictions of Croatian communists but also with the conclusions of the First Congress of the Communist International, which stated that the “Yugoslav state was created through the application of force” and that it possessed no distinct state individuality, but had been artificially created as a “vassal state of the Entente” (Theses on the International Situation and the Policy of the Entente. First Congress of the Third International, Rad, Belgrade, 1953, p. 242). The First Congress of the Communist International anticipated a worldwide proletarian revolution in which the question of Croatian statehood would also be resolved, because the “productive forces of all countries will be freed from the constraints of national states, uniting peoples in the closest economic cooperation on the basis of a general economic plan and enabling even the weakest and smallest people freely and independently to administer the affairs of its national culture, without any detriment to the unified and centralised European and world economy” (ibid., p. 245). In this revolution, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes would disappear, because within it several nations lived under the rule of the “Serbian bureaucratic landowning oligarchy” (To the Proletariat of the Balkans and the Danube Region, Publishing House of the Communist International, Hamburg, 1920, p. 233). Addressing the Balkan communists, the Communist International stated that the creation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes represented an “enormous territorial enlargement of Serbia” (ibid., p. 231).
The Fifth Congress of the Communist International (17 June–8 July 1924) concluded that the “general slogan of the right of peoples to self-determination advanced by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia must be expressed in the form of the separation of Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia from Yugoslavia and their establishment as independent republics” (The Basis of Unification. The Unification Congress. The First Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Historical Archives of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, vol. II: Congresses and National Conferences of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, 1919–1937. Historical Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Belgrade, 1949, p. 421).
At the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, held on 6 November 1928 in Dresden, it was concluded that the assassination of Radić marked the beginning of an “accelerated exposure and narrowing of the basis of the hegemony of the Greater Serbian bourgeoisie, the beginning of a new period of intensified national conflicts and an aggravation of the state crisis, a period in which the oppressed peoples of Yugoslavia openly raise the question of their struggle for national independence, for secession” (ibid., p. 147).
Explaining the attitude of Croatian communists towards a free and independent Croatian state and their efforts towards that end, Dr Franjo Tuđman writes in his book Great Ideas and Small Nations (second, expanded edition, Matica hrvatska, Zagreb, 1970, pp. 265–268):
“The highest expression of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s commitment to resolving the Croatian national question was the attempt to establish the Croatian National Revolutionary Movement during the 6 January Dictatorship. At the end of 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia also initiated the publication of the movement’s organ, The Croatian Path, which was printed abroad and intended primarily for the Croatian peasantry.
“In keeping with the general line of the Third Communist International, which between 1924 and 1934 maintained that Yugoslavia, as a Versailles creation and prison of nations, should be dismantled, the ‘objective of the struggle of the Croatian National Revolutionary Movement’ was defined as ‘securing the self-determination of the Croatian people, giving effect to their right to secede from Yugoslavia, the unification, independence and liberation of the Croatian people from the Greater Serbian and every other imperialist yoke, and the creation of a free Croatian republic in which the people themselves will determine their own destiny.’
“The tasks of the Croatian National Revolutionary Movement’s struggle were defined as follows: ‘advocating, organising and leading the everyday struggle of the broadest strata of the Croatian people against all forms of oppression and plunder’; ‘against the political subjugation and denationalisation of the Croatian people’; against the ‘abolition,’ ‘Yugoslavisation,’ ‘Serbianisation and fascist transformation’ of Croatian institutions, schools and youth; against ‘sending Croatian sons to perform military service outside the Croatian regions,’ and ‘for the removal of Serbian occupation troops from Croatian territory’; and against the ‘economic and financial exploitation and plunder of the Croatian people.’
“The Communist Party sought to exploit the Croatian people’s general dissatisfaction with monarchist Yugoslavia in order to create a national-revolutionary movement under its own leadership. It therefore emphasised that the liberation of the Croatian people presupposed an ‘irreconcilable and uncompromising struggle against all traitors to the Croatian people, and generally against all the various allies and supporters of the Greater Serbian dictatorship’; and the ‘resolute suppression of dangerous ideological misconceptions and deceptions existing within the Croatian national liberation movement which are detrimental to the struggle for the liberation of the Croatian people and which, in practice, either benefit the Greater Serbian oppressors and their French imperialist patrons or place the liberation movements at the service of other foreign conquerors.’
“The principal misconceptions were identified as follows: a) ‘the misconception that the liberation of Croatia can be achieved through federalist or any other reorganisation of imperialist Greater Serbia, called Yugoslavia, by means of a new “agreement” either with the present rulers or with any other representatives of the Greater Serbian ruling class, under the patronage of French or British imperialism’; b) ‘the misconception that the liberation of Croatia can be achieved in alliance with expansionist Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and other forms of fascism’; c) ‘pacifist conciliation towards the oppressors and passive waiting for the Greater Serbian yoke to collapse of its own accord’; d) ‘the misconception that the persistent revolutionary struggle of the broadest strata… can be replaced by assassinations… and incursions by Ustaša detachments dependent upon foreign conquerors. But the Ustaša struggle, insofar as it arises from the dissatisfaction and resistance of the broad strata of the people, must be organised and led with all available strength‘ (emphasis in the original, F. T.).
“On this basis, the programmatic objective was defined as combating all the misconceptions propagated by the leaderships of various parties and currents, while at the same time ‘providing comprehensive assistance to the struggle of the supporters of those parties and groups and engaging in a common struggle with them‘ (emphasis in the original, F. T.) ‘against the various forms and methods of oppression of the Croatian people,’ and establishing an alliance with national liberation movements in the other countries of Yugoslavia that fought against the ‘military-fascist dictatorship and Greater Serbian monarchy’ and recognised the Croatian people’s right to self-determination.
“Although, following Hitler’s accession to power in Germany (1933), the Communist International altered its position towards Yugoslavia in response to the fascist threat, to the extent that it characterised the Marseille assassination of King Alexander as an ‘attack by fascism upon democracy,’ representatives of the Croatian communist movement accepted this change only with difficulty and reluctance. The Croatian Path, which continued to appear as the organ of the Croatian National Revolutionary Movement until 1936, continued to write largely in the same spirit. At the beginning of 1935, the newspaper rejected the view that the ‘Croatian people cannot liberate themselves’ because they were small in number and lacked an army of their own, whereas ‘the Serbs have their own army, gendarmes and police.’ Against such a defeatist position, the newspaper advanced the argument that the ‘Croatian people are numerically almost equal to the Serbs,’ and that together with the Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins and other oppressed peoples they constituted an overwhelming majority, while the army itself included the sons of the Croatian and other oppressed peoples, who would, ‘at the decisive moment, take the side’ of their own people.
“Having welcomed the unity and electoral victory of the Croatian people in the May 1935 elections, The Croatian Path criticised the pacifist policy of compromise pursued by the leadership of the Croatian Peasant Party, which offered no resistance to the rampages and bloody violence of the gendarmerie and police of the Belgrade regime. Having observed that ‘the Croatian people have paid ten times as many victims for this policy of compromise’ and that what they lacked was ‘resolute leadership and military preparation,’ the newspaper issued the following appeal: ‘Croats, organise your own defence detachments, which will know how and be able to suppress gendarmerie violence and enter the struggle for a free Croatian Republic.'”
The Ustaša action in the Velebit mountains and the police terror that followed it brought Croatian communists and Ustaše closer together. They assisted one another and even acted jointly against Greater Serbian Yugoslavia, as is attested by a large body of documentary evidence. On page five of its February 1933 issue, Proleter, no. 2, published a substantial article entitled “For the Assistance and Liberation of Political and Military Prisoners,” which states:
“During the four years of the Greater Serbian military-fascist dictatorship, 20 people were sentenced to death for political ‘offences,’ five to life imprisonment and more than 800 to a total of 2,673 years and six months’ imprisonment. More than 100 workers’ militants were treacherously killed without trial. These are horrifying facts upon which every worker, peasant and national revolutionary in the lands of Greater Serbian Yugoslavia should reflect seriously. Those whom the government has had killed and whom it casts into prison are workers’, peasants’ and national-revolutionary militants. The government had them sentenced because they organised and led workers, peasants and oppressed peoples in the struggle against reductions in workers’ wages and the deterioration of working conditions, against increased taxation, forced seizures and the plunder
of peasants, against national oppression and forcible Serbianisation, and against the bloody regime of the Greater Serbian military-fascist dictatorship.
“The fate of these fighters, who today languish in prison, is dreadful. They are treated worse than ordinary criminals. The government has introduced a horrific prison regime designed to destroy political prisoners physically, particularly the communists, who are the most numerous group in all the prisons. Recently, in the penal prison at Mitrovica, 10 political prisoners were compelled to embark upon a hunger strike and risk their lives in order to secure the most elementary rights enjoyed by prisoners, particularly political prisoners, everywhere: the heating of cells, the right to purchase food with their own money, the right to read books, the abolition of compulsory church attendance and an end to beatings and incessant, brutal disciplinary punishments.
“From this, every worker, peasant and national revolutionary may draw a conclusion as to the appalling prison conditions endured by those who fought for the interests of the working and oppressed people. Thanks to the heroic conduct and solidarity of the political prisoners in Mitrovica, as well as the widespread response and protests by the working masses at home and abroad against such treatment by the government, the demands of the Mitrovica comrades were met. Yet the working people cannot and must not be satisfied with this partial success. First, although the position of political prisoners in Mitrovica has improved to some extent, conditions in all other prisons remain appalling. Secondly, workers, peasants and oppressed peoples cannot be satisfied merely with insignificant improvements in the conditions of their imprisoned fighters. It is their duty to wage a resolute struggle for the liberation — amnesty — of political and military prisoners, all the more so because the struggle against the dictatorship continually demands new victims and because the bloody government, seeking to suppress the struggle of the working people, has recently intensified its persecution and arrests still further. At the end of 1932 alone, more than a thousand peasants and workers from Lika and the Croatian Littoral were arrested and taken to detention centres in Zagreb and Belgrade. Today more than ever, the working people need those comrades who languish in prison, so that together with them they may organise and lead the struggle against exploitation, plunder and oppression, which are becoming more intolerable with each passing day.
“To develop the struggle of the broad masses against the bloody dictatorship and for the liberation of political prisoners — this is one of the most important tasks confronting the revolutionary movement in all the countries of Yugoslavia. To this end, the Central Committee of the Red Aid of Yugoslavia, in agreement with the comrades in prison, has decided to organise and conduct, during February and March of this year, a broad campaign by the working masses against the White Terror and for assistance to and the liberation of political prisoners, under the following slogans!
“Down with the White Terror of the Greater Serbian military-fascist dictatorship!
“For improved conditions for all political and military prisoners in Greater Serbian prisons!
“For the amnesty — unconditional liberation — of all political and military prisoners!
“Against torture in police detention centres and prisons!
“For the fullest possible assistance to political prisoners by the broadest masses of workers and peasants!
“For the development and strengthening of Red Aid organisations!
“Down with the Greater Serbian military-fascist dictatorship!”
Because of its widespread resonance among the people and the subsequent political changes that followed from it, the Velebit action of the Croatian Ustaše also found its way into literature, including non-Croatian literature. Thus the Serbian writer Mladen Oljača (born 1926), in his novel Kozara (Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1973, p. 361), writes, purportedly reproducing the diary of the Ustaša Colonel Franjčević — in fact, the celebrated Croatian Ustaša colonel and senior commander Jure Francetić:
“It is not proper for me to boast, but I must record this. As early as September 1932, I led an Ustaša detachment in the Velebit mountains. We mined the barracks in the village of Brušane. On 14 September, at Jadovno, we fought the gendarmes across the mountain. There was gunfire from both sides, and hand-to-hand fighting. Stipe Devčić was seriously wounded and we carried him with us. So that he would not hinder us, he killed himself with a grenade and thus joined the Ustaše who had fallen before him: Hranilović, Soldin and Rosić. We spent the night in Rizvanuša, with four wounded men, among peasants who told us: ‘The Croatian people suffer like Christ on the cross. One Ustaša is worth more than an entire Serbian company.’ They brought us potatoes, eggs, cheese and milk for supper, and when we tried to pay they were almost offended; afterwards, they joined us in searching for telephone wires. After our departure for Italy, the gendarmes rounded up many peasants from the Velebit region: they bound them in chains, beat them and tortured them with hunger and thirst, all in the name of that tyrant and Gypsy, King Alexander Karađorđević, and showed them the Ustaša cap and cloak they had found on the dead Devčić.”
Oljača, like many other communists, was well aware of the association between Ustaše and communists, their mutual sympathies, ideological disagreements and debates, as well as their mutual cooperation in the common struggle against Greater Serbian fascist Yugoslavia. On pp. 373–374 of Kozara, he describes in the following manner the purported recollection of the Ustaša Colonel Franjčević concerning a meeting and conversation with the Poglavnik, Dr Ante Pavelić:
“The Poglavnik summoned me to stand immediately beside him. My heart leapt. I stood rigidly to attention, and the Poglavnik asked me:
“‘How long, Franjo, did you spend in Mitrovica?’
“‘Five years, Poglavnik.’
“‘They say you were hot-tempered and that you fought with the gendarmes every day. Is that true?’
“‘It would not be proper for me to boast, Poglavnik… Almost every morning I fought with the gendarmes. If I could not strike them, I spat at them, but they gave as good as they got: they would knock me to the ground or onto the concrete, then trample me from above with their boots like horses trampling sheaves… I was bruised almost every morning — until they recognised our status as political prisoners.’
“‘Was that when you cooperated with the communists?’
“‘We did not cooperate with the communists, Poglavnik. Rather, acting on our own initiative, just as the communists did and at the same time as they did, we went on hunger strike so that we would be recognised as political offenders and so that the prison administration would not treat us in the same way as criminals. Thus, in our demands, we found ourselves alongside the communists in the hunger strike.’
“‘That was when the communists won Balen and several others away from you.’
“‘Yes, Poglavnik,’ I said. ‘That was when Balen joined the communists, together with Marušić and several others.'”
It is true that, as a result of these lengthy discussions within the prison walls, certain Croatian fighters such as Šime Balen, Marušić and others left the Ustaša ranks and joined the communists. There were, however, cases of movement in the opposite direction as well. One of the finest Croatian journalists, Milivoj Magdić, left the communists and joined the Ustaše, subsequently becoming editor of Spremnost, for which he was later sentenced to death and executed.
Mutual understanding between the Ustaše and communists was also facilitated by the similarity of their social composition. “According to information obtained in Rome in the spring of 1937 by V. Miličević, a representative of the Yugoslav Ministry of the Interior, there were a total of 510 members of the Ustaša organisation in Italy. Most were accommodated on the islands of Lipari, Stromboli and Giglio, while the more prominent Ustaše were billeted in pairs in various places in southern Italy. According to these figures, the social and occupational composition of the Ustaše in Italy was as follows: 337 peasants, 77 workers, 33 sailors, 17 students, 12 merchants, 10 officers, two journalists and six members of other professions.” (F. Jelić-Butić, op. cit., p. 35).
Of all Croatian communists, Andrija Hebrang, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia, enjoyed the greatest esteem among the Ustaše. Following the Eighth Zagreb Conference (25–26 February 1928), Andrija Hebrang clandestinely crossed into Austria, where he was apprehended and handed over to the Yugoslav authorities, who sentenced him to 12 years’ imprisonment. During those many years in prison, he became acquainted with numerous Ustaša revolutionaries and, because of his steadfast Croatian convictions, personal integrity and pride, earned their respect, trust and friendship. Neither they nor he ever betrayed that friendship, despite their subsequent ideological differences and wartime antagonisms. When Andrija Hebrang was imprisoned in 1948 for opposing Greater Serbian violence against the Croatian people, he was not merely reproached for his friendship with Ustaša revolutionaries; he was even accused of having betrayed the movement to which he belonged through those friendships, which was entirely untrue.
Although Hebrang never concealed these Croatian acquaintances and friendships formed during his imprisonment, the book The Case of Andrija Hebrang (Kultura, Belgrade, 1952), written by the Serbian author Dobrica Ćosić — although UDBA Colonel Mile Milatović, who conducted the investigation of Hebrang, was named as the book’s author — claims the contrary and draws conclusions from this for which there is no foundation whatsoever. Pages 51 and 52 of the book state:
“The comrades in Zagreb had already questioned a whole series of witnesses concerning Hebrang’s life and activities during the period from his release from prison until his arrest. It was established that the Party comrades with whom he worked knew nothing of his connections with ‘Croatian nationalists’ — the Frankists (Ustaše). It was interesting to ask why Hebrang had established these connections and concealed them from his comrades. Something must be hidden there.
“I read the record of Ahmet Ljubijankić’s testimony. Ljubijankić had been sentenced as a Frankist to eight years’ imprisonment during the former Yugoslavia. He served his sentence in Lepoglava and Mitrovica, where he became acquainted with Hebrang. Immediately after the establishment of Pavelić’s so-called ‘Independent State of Croatia,’ Ljubijankić joined the Ustaša intelligence service. As an agent of that service, he renewed his connections with Hebrang. Ljubijankić states that, when the Ustaše came to power, Hebrang told him that all former Frankist prisoners should participate actively in taking over power in the Independent State of Croatia and should immediately respond to the Ustaša appeal and report to the ‘Uzdanica’ association in order to receive duties and positions. At another meeting, he told him that he should move into the flat of Dr Šlezinger, a Jew who had fled before the Ustaše, and that he himself would come and stay there. At that time, Hebrang was staying in the flat of another former Frankist prisoner, Vladimir Frajtić, who had been sentenced before the war to 10 years’ imprisonment. ‘I was afraid,’ Ljubijankić continues, ‘of the numerous connections that Hebrang maintained with former Frankist prisoners, including some very important Ustaša officials, but he reassured me that he had been on good terms with them since their time in prison and that I had nothing to fear… And when I told him about my cooperation with the organs of the Ustaša intelligence service, he merely told me to be careful, because it was dangerous to work for two sides…’
“Such conduct by Hebrang towards Ljubijankić, a man whom he knew to be working for the Ustaša intelligence service, gave rise to justified suspicion. He even stayed at Ljubijankić’s home! Ljubijankić put him in contact with senior Ustaša officials…”
Hebrang had no reason whatsoever to conceal his connections with “Croatian nationalists,” as Mile Milatović claims, something that Milatović himself indirectly acknowledges when reproducing a conversation between himself and Hebrang during one of the numerous interrogations that continued for more than a year (M. Milatović, op. cit., p. 57):
“‘What connection did you have with the Ustaša Colonel Juco Rukavina before your arrest?’
“‘I had no connection with him whatsoever. Sometime after the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia, I think in May or June, I was walking one afternoon with Marica Jošt and a female student whose name I cannot remember. When we were on the passage between Ilica and Tuškanac, we saw Juco Rukavina approaching us. When he was about three metres away, he occupied himself with some children who were there while we walked past him. On another occasion, I encountered Juco Rukavina at the corner of Trenkova and Gajeva Streets. Juco was accompanied by two other Ustaša colonels.’
“‘How do you explain the fact that Rukavina took no action against you?’
“‘I do not know how to explain it, but I believe it arose from our earlier acquaintance in prison.’
“‘Perhaps he did not recognise you?’
“‘I have no doubt that he did. He recognised me both the first and the second time. It was particularly obvious during the first encounter. He recognised me and, not wishing to take any action against me, deliberately turned his attention to the children playing there until we had passed.'”
Ustaša Colonel Juco Rukavina, one of the participants in the Velebit Uprising of 1932, did not wish to take any action against his former prison comrade Andrija Hebrang because he believed in the sincerity of Hebrang’s Croatian aspirations. Genuine Croatian communists and Ustaše alike cherished deep within themselves the idea of a free and independent Croatia and of its full sovereignty within Croatia’s historical and ethnic borders. On 30 June 1948, Vjesnik published the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to expel Andrija Hebrang from the Party, explaining that as early as “1944 he had been removed from his position as secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia because of chauvinistic outbursts towards the Serbs in Croatia, errors in policy towards the masses who were under the influence of the Croatian Peasant Party and the weakening of the struggle against the Ustaše”; furthermore, that “in 1946 he was punished by expulsion from the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and by the Party sanction of a severe reprimand; at the same time, he was removed from his position as president of the Economic Council because of his attempt to disguise his disagreement with the economic policy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the government of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia as Comrade Tito’s personal hostility towards him”; and that “through his subversive activities he fomented chauvinism and thereby attempted to destroy the brotherhood and unity of our peoples, which had been won through bloodshed, as is evident from a series of his actions; he maintained that the whole of Syrmia should form part of Croatia and in this way advocated the well-known Ustaša position.” In the same article, Hebrang was accused of having “obstructed the construction of the Belgrade–Zagreb motorway,” as well as “the Danube–Tisza–Danube Canal.”
Vjesnik of 23 November 1948 states:
“With regard to the creation of the People’s Front, Hebrang likewise pursued his own line. He genuinely sought to establish it as a coalition of parties with differing programmes. It is clear that such a policy would have revived bourgeois influence over all the groupings within the People’s Front, that it would have led to its weakening and opened opportunities for enemy activity. Such a policy did not correspond to the actual development of relations among the groups or to the development of the process by which the unity of the people was being formed. It would have opened the door to the restoration of the old order.
“With regard to the Serbs, Hebrang displayed chauvinistic tendencies. Through his influence, he attempted in various ways to impose upon Party organisations a policy that neglected the Serbs and impeded their unhindered national and cultural development. Serbian national elements were disappearing from agitation and educational work in the field. In schools, even in entirely Serbian areas, the teaching of the Cyrillic alphabet, Serbian history and so forth was obstructed. In the villages, there was even talk that it was no longer entirely certain whether one was permitted to speak freely about Prince Marko and similar subjects.”
Hebrang’s sense of responsibility towards the Croatian homeland was portrayed in Vjesnik as a chauvinistic tendency towards the Serbs, although he opposed circumstances through which, as Vlado Gotovac would put it, “the Serbs in Croatia are deprived of their homeland,” while “hundreds of years of their lives and their destinies are to be portrayed as though they were merely guests” (Vlado Gotovac, “Outsider Fragments”, Kritika, no. 8, p. 539, Zagreb, September–October 1969).
Andrija Hebrang shared the view of other communists, as well as that of all other members of authentic Croatian national movements, that the Serbs in Croatia could not be regarded as “political and religious guests,” but rather as citizens with full rights in their Croatian homeland and state. Affirming that Croatia is “their homeland” and that “it would be terrible for everyone if it were not,” Vlado Gotovac described those Serbs in Croatia who set themselves apart and seek to extend this political and religious separation to all their compatriots in the following terms:
“They reject Croatia as their homeland and reject any concern for it and its destiny. They resist the language that has for centuries been the language of their fathers, and the culture that has for centuries been the culture of their fathers, thereby denying the meaning and value of what their forebears accomplished, spreading emptiness instead and offering absurdity. Yet neither they nor anyone else can extend this to those who found their homeland in Croatia and who helped to create it as such. Those who now wish to be guests in their own home, beside the fires of their ancestral hearths, merely lay waste to their own hearts, while their dead remain within the destiny they lived and within which they laboured, however bitter it may sometimes have been: Croatia carries them within itself and bears them forward into the future, together with all those who built and sustained it through their labour.
“The now traditional invocation of religious faiths is not an appeal to their significance within Croatia, but outside it. For centuries, within Croatia, they have displayed no characteristics of guests in any sphere of life. To invoke them today as a basis for separation is contrary to their meaning and significance. This complete and sinister falsification belongs among the customary reactionary undertakings in our region. — Kritika, no. 8, Zagreb, September–October 1969, p. 540.
The assertion made in the summer of 1971 by Dr Vladimir Bakarić, then a member of the Executive Bureau of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, that only the “Frankists were steadfast on the question of a Croatian state” (Hrvatski tjednik, no. 16, Zagreb, 30 July 1971) is untrue. This assertion was challenged by invoking the declaration of the Third Session of the State Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Croatia in Topusko (9 May 1944) that the “Croatian people have for centuries aspired to create their own free state” and would continue to struggle for the “unification of all Croatian lands and the realisation of Croatian statehood” (Vjesnik, no. 13, 15 May 1944). It is true, however, that the Frankists and Ustaše placed greater emphasis on Croatian sovereignty, unlike the Croatian communists, who consistently emphasised the “class and national liberation of the Croatian people.” Just as the assertion that only the Frankists were steadfast on the question of a Croatian state is untenable, so too is the assertion that the Ustaše betrayed the “centuries-old aspirations of the Croatian people” and “sold” Croatia to the Italians and Germans. Countless articles concerning this “sale” have been written in Yugoslavia and in the Croatian émigré press. Some of these articles sounded quite convincing, particularly those claiming that Dr Ante Pavelić, because of his previous obligations towards the Italians, ceded to Italy under the Treaties of Rome (18 May 1941) the town of Sušak together with all the islands except Pag, Dalmatia from Split to the Novigrad Sea with its hinterland extending to the Zrmanja, almost all the Dalmatian islands except Brač, Hvar, Šćedro and the islands off the Dubrovnik coast, as well as the wider Bay of Kotor region. On the basis of German historical documents from the wartime period, the Croatian historian Dr Bogdan Krizman, in his study “From the Secret Correspondence of S. Kasche and J. V. Ribbentrop, 1941–1945” (see VUS, no. 1298, Zagreb, 26 March 1977; VUS, no. 1299, 2 April 1977; VUS, no. 1300, 9 April 1977; VUS, no. 1301, 16 April 1977; VUS, no. 1302, 23 April 1977 and others), demonstrated that Dr Ante Pavelić neither acknowledged nor had any prior obligations towards the Italians and that, during the negotiations preceding the Treaties of Rome, he resisted Italian imperialist demands with considerable persistence and diplomatic skill, demands that were far more extensive and damaging than those ultimately embodied in the Treaties of Rome. The wartime hostility of the Croatian Ustaše towards the Italians, who assisted the Chetniks and sought at every opportunity to curtail Croatian sovereignty, is widely known. Mladen Oljača (op. cit., p. 360), through the diary of the Ustaša Colonel Franjčević, who is accused of “grumbling against the Germans and refusing to recognise their authority.” describes the Croatian Ustaša attitude towards the Germans as follows:
“I did indeed say that, but I had my reasons: if we have created our own state, then we have the right to govern it as well. We were the masters here, not others. We shed blood. We went hungry, endured imprisonment and died. We fought the gendarmes and languished in prisons. We are the children of this land, and it is therefore only right that we should also be its masters. That is my position, and I stated it to the Poglavnik.”
After being elected president of the Council for the Liberation of Croatia, Vladimir Nazor issued a “Message to the Croats” (Vjesnik, no. 3, 20 February 1944), in which he declared:
“By this act, the patriots have drawn attention to me not only among Croats from Čakovec in Međimurje and Čičarija in Istria to the Bay of Kotor, and from Lošinj on the Adriatic to Zemun on the Danube, but also among people of our blood and language beyond distant mountains and broad oceans. I therefore feel the need to respond to this honourable summons not only to the members of the Council, but also to all those who found in this decision an expression of their own desire.”
I have already said somewhere that this is the first time since Petar Svačić that, after long centuries of suffering, Croats themselves are fighting for their honour, their native soil and their rights as human beings. The energy and tormented bones of Croatian soldiers compelled to serve various foreign masters were scattered — fruitlessly for themselves — across distant lands. The feudal lords Zrinski and Frankopan, Generals Jelačić and Borojević — although some of them received from their masters not merely ingratitude but even the executioner’s axe — are not representatives of pure Croatian resistance and of the irrepressible yearning of the ancient Croatian soul for its long-lost freedom; even the Uskoks of Senj maintained connections with, and indeed served, the Habsburg archdukes.
The Croatian poet Vladimir Nazor was only one of numerous Croats who believed that, within the partisan movement, he was fighting for his Croatian “honour, for his native soil,” for his Croatian homeland and state united “from Čakovec in Međimurje and Čičarija in Istria to the Bay of Kotor, and from Lošinj on the Adriatic to Zemun on the Danube.” In this naïve conviction, many of them lost not only their lives but also their honour, though not their dream and aspiration for a sovereign Croatian state.
Writing “on the general conditions and characteristics of the development of the revolutionary-democratic movement in Croatia,” the Croatian historian and partisan general Dr Franjo Tuđman (F. Tuđman, op. cit., pp. 285–286) establishes the following facts:
“The group of communist revolutionaries who perished following the unsuccessful escape from Kerestinec in July 1941, and which included August Cesarec, Divko Budak, Ivan Krndelj, Pavao Markovac, Muhamed Kulenović, Juraj Bermanec, Dušan Grković, Josip Rendić, Stjepan Šeremet and other prominent Croatian Marxist revolutionaries, left behind this poignant document expressing their vision and the objectives of the struggle they had begun, written on the basement wall of the Ustaša prison at 9 Račkoga Street: ‘IN THESE ROOMS, THE 44 INTERNED FIGHTERS FROM KERESTINEC SPENT THE FINAL HOURS OF THEIR LIVES. THEY ALL (!) RECEIVED THEIR SENTENCES OF EXECUTION BY FIRING SQUAD WITH THEIR HEADS HELD HIGH, FOR THEY KNEW THAT THEY WERE DYING FOR A JUST CAUSE, FOR THE CAUSE OF THE WORKING PEOPLE. LONG LIVE SOVIET CROATIA!’
“This idea of a struggle to realise both revolutionary and national objectives, with which the Croatian revolutionaries, the forerunners and leaders of the national liberation struggle, went to their deaths, also permeated the majority of members of the partisan movement in Croatia with such intensity that even the Tito–Šubašić Agreement itself aroused fears among broad strata of the Croatian people that it concealed some danger of a return to the old Yugoslavia in one form or another.”
The apprehension to which Tuđman refers — namely, the fear that, following the collapse of the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan), a collapse that appeared obvious and inevitable to the partisans, Greater Serbian Yugoslavia might be restored and Croatia once again occupied — was expressed in almost every wartime issue of the partisan Vjesnik. Thus Vjesnik, no. 1, January 1943, writes:
“What kind of ‘restored past’ are Maček’s treacherous clique and the émigrés in London preparing for the Croatian people and the other peoples of Yugoslavia?
“The massacres that Chetnik bands perpetrate daily against the Croatian population under the false slogan of ‘vengeance for the Serbs,’ at the instigation of the occupiers and with the blessing of the London clique and Maček’s associates, give us an indication of what this restored past would look like in reality. The builders of this hell would be the Chetnik bands and the occupying hordes, and the Chetniks would also be its sole judges. The bloodthirsty Chetnik refrain accompanying their bestial crimes against the Croatian people — ‘Oh Croats, how we shall slaughter you — when Pero returns from London’ — this guiding idea and sole motive of these bloodthirsty bands and their masters reveals the truth: the Chetniks would simply assume the role played by the Ustaše the previous year, with the sole difference that the Croatian people would now be the principal victim. Yet the full extent of the danger into which Maček’s treacherous clique and the London émigrés seek to plunge the Croatian people under the banner of ‘restoring the old order’ is revealed most clearly by the secret plan of the elite Chetnik unit, the Dinara Division, which was sent from the Knin Krajina under confidential no. O.-22- to 25- or III 1942 to Vojvoda Birčanin and, through him, to Draža Mihailović and thus to the London ‘government,’ including Krnjević, for approval. This plan for the ‘restoration of the old order’ reads verbatim: ‘Task of the division: the strongest possible organisation of Serbian authority at the appropriate moment, for the purpose of settling accounts with the Croats and ultimately of cleansing Croats and Muslims from Lika, northern Dalmatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and creating a homogeneous and purely Orthodox Serbian state.’
“This plan, in reality the plan of the émigré ‘government’ and of all those leaders of the Croatian Peasant Party who follow Maček’s line, the line of unconditional capitulation to Greater Serbianism, is worthy of these allies and collaborators of the fascist builders of the ‘New Order.’ Such a restored past would mean for the Croatian people complete extermination and lifelong bloodshed beneath the Chetnik knife, which the London émigrés and Maček himself, together with his entourage, are already sharpening today.
“Today the traitor Maček is no longer merely treacherously sabotaging the people’s struggle for freedom, as he has done until now, nor merely secretly stabbing in the back the people whom he deceived for some 10 years; today, in direct cooperation with the occupiers, he has most actively undertaken the work of suppressing the Croatian national liberation struggle. Maček and his clique, insofar as some of them have not long since joined the Ustaše or taken their seats alongside Draža in the treacherous government, are today working intensively to gather and revive the remnants of the wretched ‘Maček Guard,’ organising ‘confidential and secret’ meetings supposedly behind the occupiers’ backs and, most recently, conducting negotiations with Draža Mihailović’s Chetnik bands, thereby demonstrating to the fullest extent their identity with Greater Serbianism.
“(…) What is it that today draws the traitor Maček and his clique so powerfully into the abyss of treason? What has induced them to make the Greater Serbian Chetnik clique their ideal?
“There can be no doubt: precisely that which fills the broad strata of the Croatian people with the greatest joy and great hopes and gives them strength for the struggle — the nearly complete and genuine national liberation — is bringing all the secret and open enemies of the people into the light of day and driving them into ever deeper treason.”
At the end of the article, the hope is expressed that all plans to re-establish Greater Serbian Yugoslavia have “failed and disappeared without a trace,” because:
“This is guaranteed above all by the Croatian people themselves, who consciously, unitedly and fearlessly rise in struggle for their liberation, breaking down every obstacle, trampling over every traitor, with before their eyes a better, happier and freer Croatia.”
The editors of Vjesnik did not know that Dr Juraj Krnjević feared the re-establishment of Greater Serbian Yugoslavia even more than they did and that he did everything within his power to curb Chetnik crimes against the Croatian people.
At the congress of jurists held in Glina during the first half of August 1944, Dr Ante Kalođera posed the following question:
“By decision of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia, the King has been prohibited from returning to our country, and it has been decided that the question of the King and the monarchy will be resolved after the war and that elections will be held. This was incorporated into the Tito–Šubašić Agreement. I should like it to be explained whether there would be any legal or other obstacles if, within our federal state, some constituent states were to adopt monarchy while others wished to be republics.” (Commemorative Volume of the First Congress of Anti-Fascist Jurists of Croatia, Zagreb, 1974, p. 45)
Dr Ivo Krbek replied that “there are no legal obstacles to this, but in practice it would be difficult to implement and sustain,” because “a federation requires the fundamental principles to be the same in all its constituent states.” Dr Svetozar Rittig then asked: “What about confederation?” Dr Krbek, who had joined the partisans only a few days earlier, was unable to give him any definite answer, except to say that a confederation was “a form of association in which each state is independent, with only a common ministry of foreign affairs and armed forces,” and that consequently “we must reckon with the possibility that we would move closer to the confederal model” (Commemorative Volume, op. cit., p. 46).
On 29 December 1947, Vjesnik devoted its entire front page to an article entitled: “At the Ceremonial Anniversary Marking the Eightieth Anniversary of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, Marshal Tito Elected an Honorary Member of the Academy.” In explaining this appointment, the president of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, Dr Andrija Štampar, expressed the hope and conviction that “Marshal Tito,” “our man of the people, whose cradle stood not far from Zelenjak, our idyllic Dubrava on the Sutla, where the poet composed our national anthem,” would be the man who would bring “the idea of our Croatian political and cultural liberation” “to complete victory, crowning it with all the attributes of full national independence and statehood.”
Unfortunately, the words of the then president of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, Dr Andrija Štampar, in which he “interpreted the will of the people,” found no resonance in Tito’s deranged heart. He was not “the first among our political figures to extend Croatian state independence and sovereignty to all the regions inhabited by our people,” as Dr Štampar told him in his welcoming address, thereby suggesting that he should indeed become the first to accomplish this — the first genuinely to realise the “idea of Croatian sovereignty” and transform it into a “deed and an accomplished fact of international significance.”
Andrija Hebrang attempted to do so. During the final days of the investigation, only a few days before he would be strangled with bare hands upon a hard prison bunk in a dark, hopeless and insane Belgrade night, Mile Milatović asked him: “And when did your misconceptions concerning Syrmia begin?” Hebrang replied: “It is not a misconception. It was Croatian and ought to be…” (M. Milatović, op. cit., p. 232).
Those who cannot find sufficiently reassuring justification for their own errors and their own share of responsibility for Croatia’s present condition, and those who are unwilling to sacrifice anything or risk anything in order to change that condition and transform the “idea of Croatian sovereignty” into a “deed and an accomplished fact of international significance,” are inclined to regard the statements of Croatian communists, as well as those of Croatian Ustaše, merely as demagogic and disingenuous words intended to stir the people, win their sympathies and secure their selfless and steadfast allegiance. They therefore continually, whether covertly or openly, recall old guilt, bloodshed and death, attributing all evil to one side and one government, whether the wartime government or the present post-war one. They refuse to recognise that every government is self-satisfied and therefore irrational, and that every individual must at every moment do everything within his power to restrain that irrationality and seek to humanise it. Many Croatian intellectuals, who ought to have been the conscience of their people, not only failed to oppose the irrationality and imprudent actions of those in power, but actively encouraged them and sang their praises. For this reason, many Croatian communists died before volleys from Ustaša rifles; for this reason, Bleiburg and the present terror of Greater Serbian Yugoslavia against the Croatian people were almost inevitable. Equal responsibility rests upon those Croatian clericalists who introduced fascist characteristics into the originally non-fascist Croatian Ustaša movement and upon those Croatian Marxists who subordinated the idea of Croatian sovereignty to the idea of class struggle and world revolution. Today, when dogmatic Marxists and clerical fascists command no respect in Croatian cultural and political life, we read with astonishment the passage quoted by Fikreta Jelić-Butić:
“The intelligentsia was assigned a special role in influencing the Ustaša orientation of the youth. Particular importance in this activity was attached to cultivating the Pavelić cult. ‘Our new intelligentsia,’ wrote Vinko Nikolić, ‘must educate future Croatian generations according to Ustaša principles and, above all, must cultivate among all Croatian youth, from the earliest age, unlimited and self-sacrificing devotion to the leader.'” (F. Jelić-Butić, op. cit., p. 205)
Vinko Nikolić’s writings were characteristic of the task that the Ustaše assigned to literature in the Independent State of Croatia. His fundamental thesis was that the principal task of Croatian literature in the Independent State of Croatia was the “artistic representation of the magnificent Croatian present.” He appealed to Croatian writers to become creators of a “new literature” that would assist the Ustaša movement in “creating the new man,” whose principal characteristics were to be a “nationalist soul,” an “Ustaša heart,” the “Poglavnik’s thought” and “Ustaša faith.” For all these reasons, according to Nikolić, literary production in the Independent State of Croatia should provide evidence as soon as possible “that a new nationalist, Ustaša literature is being created” (F. Jelić-Butić, op. cit., p. 206).
With the same sense of revulsion, we read the speech by Slavko Komar published in Vjesnik on 12 May 1945, which states:
“Comrades!
“The war is over, but we citizens of Zagreb do not say that our work is finished. None of our peoples says so, nor shall we. Groups of bandits are still roaming and wandering through our country, and we must destroy them. There are still among us, here in Zagreb, those who may merely have changed their colours, who have put on the five-pointed star and who beat their breasts claiming that they were on our side. Bandits in civilian clothes are still hiding in Zagreb and must be brought before the People’s Court. I call upon all the people, all the male and female citizens of Zagreb, to remove this refuse from our ranks.”
And in another of his speeches, delivered at a youth rally in Zagreb on 12 May 1945 and published in Vjesnik on 13 May 1945:
“Can we show mercy towards people who throughout this entire period actively assisted the Ustaša movement and were its loudest agitators, its most prolific informers and its greatest spies? (We cannot!) To such people we say: ‘Death to them!’ (That’s right!).
“Under the harshest conditions of occupation, our young people killed Germans, Ustaše, Italian occupiers and all manner of other refuse in our occupied cities. Can we then permit Ustaša bandits to walk freely through our liberated city of Zagreb? Is it not a disgrace for the youth not to seize them by the throat and bring them before the People’s Court? We hope that the youth of Zagreb will likewise show no mercy towards such criminals, for the punishment of war criminals was agreed by the United Nations, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and America.”
No genuine and authentic humanism is without danger, particularly in wartime and its aftermath. Yet precisely for that reason, perseverance in humanism constitutes an even greater obligation and an inescapable responsibility, particularly for writers, who occupied a special position in the Independent State of Croatia. Fikreta Jelić-Butić acknowledges that the Ustaša leadership “was particularly concerned to attract the most influential Croatian intellectuals: writers, artists, scholars and other representatives of Croatian culture,” and continues:
“Particular attention was devoted to writers. A special atmosphere was cultivated, characterised above all by extensive publishing activity and exceptional attention to books. Ustaša propaganda made particular use of this fact as a significant argument for the emergence of a genuine cultural renaissance among the Croatian people in comparison with the Yugoslav period, that is, under Greater Serbian hegemony. ‘There is considerable support for such assertions,’ the literary historian and critic Antun Barac emphasises in his reflections and recollections of those days. ‘The vitality of the book market is surprising. Many books are published annually in Zagreb, with a quality of production in which they had never previously appeared. Claims concerning freedom can also be justified: people who once dared not even appear in the literary world were now given the opportunity to write extensively and publish their work.’ Efforts were made to attract writers by demonstrating exceptional favour towards them, accepting manuscripts for publication and paying fees. ‘The Ustaša authorities,’ Barac further observes, ‘display unusual favour towards books and writers. They have introduced numerous state prizes, which are awarded each year on the Feast of St Anthony in an appropriate ceremony. The prizes are fairly substantial — which is important when one considers that the award-winning writers also receive the customary fees according to the number of printed sheets. It appears that some of them even arranged their work so that they might receive some prize every year. In this way, income from literary work represents a substantial contribution to the monthly and annual budgets of individual intellectuals.’ Once a year, the Ministry of National Education announced the principal competition ‘for the best literary, visual-artistic and musical works.’ The newspapers Hrvatski
narod, Nova Hrvatska, Spremnost and Neue Ordnung were notable for the particularly high fees they paid for literary texts. These were the principal means by which writers were attracted.” (F. Jelić-Butić, op. cit., pp. 205–206)
Those whose Croatian national consciousness and human conscience failed them at decisive moments — that is, those who sought to impart fascist characteristics to the Croatian Ustaša movement and those who sought to suppress the idea of Croatian sovereignty among Croatian communists — endeavour to consign to oblivion the old and enduring ties between Croatian Ustaše and communists, while reviving memories of old misfortunes and sinister antagonisms that have long since been overcome.
Affirming the incontrovertible fact that “there is not a single value that fidelity to one’s homeland would render impossible, or to which love for it would stand opposed,” Vlado Gotovac writes:
“Invoking a particular misfortune so that it may serve as a perpetual warning creates and sustains the anxiety of a guilty conscience. But if that invocation is controlled, if it is merely an instrument, if someone determines where and when the warning is to appear, then what is at issue is the repressive inducement of a pathological condition of moral consciousness. The purpose is not to suppress particular negative tendencies, but to destroy the sources of a liberating relationship towards misfortune by extending this operation to ever broader areas of the past, as a tradition of downfall. What is at issue is a method of indirect genocide that employs an episode as an instrument for destroying the whole. Instead of being the teacher of life, history becomes its poisoner through a genocidal moral interpretation.” (Kritika, no. 5, March–April 1969, p. 185)
In the past, not only individual political and revolutionary movements but entire peoples have suffered moral collapse. Recalling such failures does not bear a destructive, genocidal character if it is imbued with confidence in the future, because such remembrance is “a means by which man’s conscience is kept awake, for it constantly stands on the verge of sleep” (Vlado Gotovac, Kritika, no. 5, March–April 1969, p. 185).
In 1971, all illusions and doubts fell away, and it became evident that the “unification of all Croatian lands and the realisation of Croatian statehood” was an objective shared by Croatian communists and Ustaše alike, and that both had proved “steadfast on the question of a Croatian state.” That year, Nerkez Smailagić formulated the Croatian people’s centuries-old aspiration for a Croatian state that would embody all the attributes of the “full and unequivocal affirmation and safeguarding of indivisible Croatian sovereignty, as the expression of the original and institutionalised constituent authority of the Croatian people,” with the proviso that “for the peoples who live together with them in a single community and one and the same homeland, this unified, indivisible, inalienable and imprescriptible sovereignty of the Croatian people constitutes the primary and inviolable foundation of their common history and their political and legal constitution, which, naturally, presupposes the proper and indispensable recognition and guarantee of equality for all in rights and duties” (Hrvatski tjednik, no. 21, Zagreb, 21 September 1971).
(Translated by Sava Press from: Babić, G. Historija hrvatske histerije. Beograd : Stručna knjiga, 1992. P. 217-238.)