By Sasha Uzunov

A 1977 ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) assessment paper, heavily redacted, found in a newly de-classified file on Yugoslav diplomat, Dr George Trajkovski, reveals that Communist Yugoslavia threatened to step up its campaign to silence Croatian dissent on Australian soil and the consequence would lead to violence.

The conclusion reached in the ASIO paper is startling in light of the fact that in 1979-80 six Australian Croats were set up by a Yugoslav agent provocateur and sent to prison as as “terrorists.” 

“Yugoslav national security is seen as being as being threatened by internal dissension perhaps encouraged…

“The likelihood of (Croatian extremist violence) this occurring depends very much upon the determination of the Yugoslav government to destroy Croatian extremist bodies in Australia once it is realised that their diplomatic offensive at the most can have only partial success.”

In other words, if Yugoslavia could not get Australia to clamp down on Croatian dissent it would take the law into its own hands. It sounds like a threat.

The rationale for all this was the fear Yugoslavia would disintegrate after the expected death of Marshal Tito, then in his 80s, the ruler of the country. The irony is that Yugoslavia did fall apart in 1991, eleven years after Tito’s death but it was ethnic Albanian and Serb tensions in the then Yugoslav province of Kosovo which lead a spooked Slovenia, regarded as a prosperous Republic with no violent extremists abroad, to leave the Yugoslav Federation.

ASIO is Australia’s counter-intelligence and domestic spy agency.