Special report by Sasha Uzunov –
ASIO FILE RELEASED
Nikola Brkljac, an Australian based radical Serb nationalist with numerous criminal convictions including manslaughter, was placed on an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation terrorist warning list over plotting to assassinate Serb leader in Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic but permitted by Australian authorities to travel to the United States and Yugoslavia in 1990, according to a newly declassified but heavily redacted ASIO file.
The file also contains the revelation that Brkljac looked on as an associate had a noisy political disagreement with Australian politician John Newman at 1992 Serbian function in Sydney which caused event security to intervene. Newman, a New South Wales Member of Parliament, was later assassinated by a Vietnamese Australian political rival Phuong Canh Ngo in 1994 over issues unrelated to the Balkans.
After a two and a half year wait, ASIO via the National Archives of Australia granted access to Brkljac’s intelligence file, volume 1, covering the period 1987-1999. Volume 1 contains 250 pages, of which only 60 have been released and many of those pages have been heavily censored or blacked out. There is a Volume 2 which would cover post 1999 but has not yet been released. Australian government documents enter the “open period” after 20 to 30 years from the date of their creation before they can be accessed by the general public.
A 1990 ASIO assessment warned that Brkljac and another radical Australian Serb nationalist Momcilo Kuzmanovic were intending to carry out acts of terrorism including hijacking aircraft and killing controversial Serb leader in Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic. Furthermore, Brkljac and Kuzmanovic, according to ASIO, were believed to be associating with Nikola Kavaja, a Serb nationalist imprisoned for terrorism in the United States. Kavaja had a hijacked a passenger jet in 1979. Kavaja also made the extravagant claim he worked for the CIA and wanted to assassinate Socialist Yugoslavia’s leader Marshal Tito.
Brkjlac, an ethnic Serb was born in Croatia, then Yugoslavia in 1949, passed away in 2008. He is believed to be implicated as a co-conspirator with another radical Serb nationalist Momcilo Kuzmanovic in the 1985 murder of lay Sydney Serb Church official Radojko Djordjevic, which officially remains an unsolved homicide. NSW Police in 2024 offered a $500,000 reward for information leading to the killer or killers of Djordjevic. Kuzmanovic was put on trial in 2004 for Djordjevic’s murder and acquitted.
By 1990, Yugoslavia a multi-ethnic socialist federation began to unravel and in 1991 war erupted as the Republic of Slovenia seceded. War later broke out in the Republics of Croatia and Bosnia. Brkjlac, according to the ASIO file, had boasted of being a Serbian paramilitary leader who had fought against Croats and Muslims but some local Australian Serbs were sceptical of his claims.
MENTOR MOMCILO DJUJIC
Both Brkjlac and Kuzmanovic were long time disciples of a US based radical Serb nationalist leader of the Chetnik Movement called Momcilo Djujic, an intelligence asset for the United State’s Central Intelligence Agency. Djujic was wanted for War Crimes against Croats and Serbs as a collaborator with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during WWII. He managed to flee Yugoslavia via the Vatican Ratlines and ended up in America post war. Communist Yugoslavia which emerged after WWII had requested his extradition but the US kept rejecting it. Djujic was on a British Home Office Nazi War criminal list but that did not stop hm from entering Australia numerous times including in 1966 to promote America’s war in South Vietnam and encourage local Serbs to join the Australian Army to fight in that conflict.
Kuzmanovic was at one stage close to notorious Serb paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj who visited Australia in 1989 before cutting links.
