The ill-fated nineteen: the one identified photograph of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood members who went to Yugoslavia in 1972. Wikimedia
Fifty years in the past this month, in June 1972, Yugoslavia’s Territorial Defence Drive was desperately making an attempt to comprise and kill militants related to the Australian-based Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood.
For the second time in ten years, foreign-based nationalists had been trying to incite a revolt in opposition to the nation’s Communist Celebration authorities, headed by president Josip Tito. Their goal was to create a Croatia unbiased of the remainder of Yugoslavia.
Believing that now was the time for a revolutionary rebellion of Croatians, and having learnt from the smaller, unsuccessful assault in 1963, the militants devised a daring plan to strike deep into the guts of Yugoslavia. The fallout of the operation, which was launched below the code title Operation Phoenix, would echo by the governments of each Yugoslavia and Australia.
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Nineteen males, a lot of them Croatian Australians and a few of them from West Germany, had been getting ready for months. Impressed by Fidel Castro’s ways throughout Cuba’s revolution and observing the current suppression of the “Croatian Spring” motion, they believed they might rally the Croatians of Yugoslavia in opposition to Tito.
On the evening of the June 20 1972, the militants managed to evade detection by the authorities and enter Yugoslavia from Austria. They hijacked a truck and drove to Bugojno, a central Bosnian city with a big ethnically Croatian inhabitants. There, they tried to recruit locals to their trigger.
Receiving little sympathy from the resident inhabitants – a few of whom reported them to the authorities – the militants started to assault Yugoslavian outposts and distribute propaganda. Conscious that they’d no strategy to escape the nation, their goal was to offer most visibility to their trigger.
Alarmed and embarrassed by these developments, Yugoslavia mobilised hundreds of males and positioned central Bosnia below quarantine. Tito was personally concerned within the operation. After a brutal firefight on June 25 through which a lot of the attackers had been killed, the surviving members of the incursion fled into the hills. Solely after 4 extra weeks had been all 19 males accounted for. Fifteen militants and 13 Yugoslavians had been killed on this bloody occasion.
Mobilisation: a report back to President Tito on the Yugoslav response to the incident.
Petar Dragišić
The 4 captives confronted trial in Yugoslavia. Three had been executed and the ultimate member, the youngest, was sentenced to life imprisonment. He would later be launched, and in the end died combating in the course of the breakup of Yugoslavia nearly 20 years later.
Reverberations
For Australia, the incident was distinctive. An organisation based and headquartered on this nation had attacked Yugoslavia in a surprising approach.
Now, new analysis, and the more and more accessibility of main supply paperwork within the former Yugoslavia, has highlighted the appreciable affect of the assault in each international locations.
The militants didn’t spark an rebellion of Croatians in opposition to Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslavian authorities was little question reassured by their failure to draw native help. However the psychological affect of an assault deep into the nation was appreciable. Tito was enraged. His safety element feared that diaspora Croatian nationalists had the desire and class to aim to assassinate the president.
Vigilant: President Tito together with his Soviet counterpart, Leonid Brezhnev, in November 1973.
Wikimedia
The status of Yugoslavia’s safety providers was eroded. To make sure an occasion like this was by no means repeated, Tito launched a “particular battle” on émigré nationalists – a decade-long worldwide marketing campaign of focused assassinations. Yugoslavia additionally elevated strain on international locations like Australia to repress Croatian nationalist and extremist organisations of their territory.
In Australia, the assault wasn’t reported for weeks. When preliminary reviews arrived from Yugoslavia, they had been brazenly challenged by the Australian authorities, with Lawyer-Normal Ivor Greenwood declaring he was “not conscious of any factual foundation for such allegations”. Distrustful of its Yugoslavian counterpart, the Australian authorities wanted to be satisfied that the inconceivable occasions had truly occurred.
When the complete scale of the incident grew to become identified within the lead-up to Australia’s 1972 election, the federal government was caught flat-footed and deeply embarrassed. Police findings that not less than some members of the group had been recruited and skilled in Australia had been broadly reported within the press.
Australian safety forces, extra desirous about countering communism than investigating machinations inside migrant communities, didn’t have recordsdata on lots of the Australian-based members of the brotherhood. They had been unable to offer William McMahon’s Coalition authorities a transparent image of what had occurred and the way such a plot got here to be organised by Australians.
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The Commonwealth Police shortly launched a collection of raids and reported to the federal government that roughly 300 Croatian Australians had been of “specific concern”. The difficulty of how greatest to answer these developments bedevilled a authorities that was reluctant to alienate migrant communities however didn’t wish to give the impression such plotting was acceptable.
The Labor Celebration, lengthy involved in regards to the threat posed by violent Croatian nationalism in Australia, seized on the incursion as proof the McMahon authorities was unable to grapple with domestically primarily based terrorism. They might transfer aggressively in opposition to Croatian nationalist organisations once they got here to energy later that yr, although this led to damaging typecasting of unusual Croatian Australians and generally critical impacts on harmless people.
Flatfooted: Australian prime minister William McMahon, proven right here in 1971.
US Nationwide Archives/Wikimedia
Coupled with the September 1972 bombings of the Yugoslav Normal Commerce and Vacationer Company in Sydney, the June assault in Yugoslavia weakened McMahon’s regulation and order document going into the 1972 election. Certainly, Labor MPs like Jim Cairns warned the federal government that any try to marketing campaign on regulation and order had been undermined by their failure to deal with this challenge.
Whereas it’s unattainable to guage the position of a single challenge in any marketing campaign, and whereas neither celebration made the problem of Croatians central to their election pitch, the incursion had resonance.
Writing later, journalists Laurie Oakes and David Solomon noticed that the federal government’s incapability to cope with Croatian nationalist violence meant “Labor might seem stronger on nationwide safety than the Coalition”. The narrowness of McMahon’s election loss made each weak point extra necessary.
A forgotten episode of Australian nationwide safety historical past, the 1972 assault is greater than only a footnote. The incident had actual penalties for the political trajectories of each Australia and Yugoslavia.
Alexander Mitchell Lee receives funding from the Australian Authorities Analysis Coaching Program (AGRTP) Stipend Scholarship.
