Major sporting and cultural clubs in Australia’s large Croatian community openly celebrate fascist anniversaries while displaying emblems, flags and maps of the murderous Ustasha regime of World War II.
An investigation by this masthead has uncovered how mainstream the celebration of the Nazi-backed regime that slaughtered Serbs, Jews and Romani people from 1941-45 is in key institutions of the Australian Croatian community.
The regime is conservatively estimated to have killed 500,000 people, including political opponents, and is widely regarded by historians as having committed genocide.
Croatia’s ambassador to Australia, Betty Pavelich, said in response to the investigation that there was no place in society for the “glorification of totalitarian regimes, extremism or intolerance”.
So open is the celebration of fascism that a Sydney-based website has been selling Ustasha-themed keyrings, T-shirts, beanies, stickers and prints of wartime Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic, a close ally of Adolf Hitler, while a separate Melbourne-based website sells Ustasha flags.
On April 10 this year, six men were filmed at the Melbourne Knights soccer club doing stiff armed salutes as they sang a song extolling the Ustasha, also spelt Ustase.
“The battle is being fought, Ustase flag is fluttering,” they sang as they performed a fascist salute. “For the freedom and for home, Croatian home!” according to a professional translation of the song. A second translation of the same video was substantially similar.
Read the article by Ben Schneiders and Simone Fox Koob in The Sydney Morning Herald.