by Sasha Uzunov

Did the Soviet Union try to interfere in the Yugoslav government’s campaign against dissident Croats in Australia during the 1970s at the tail end of the Cold War?

Story:

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was deeply concerned about a schism that had developed within dissident Croatian ranks abroad, namely Australia and Western Europe in the 1970s.

A 1971 assessment paper for ASIO and the then Commonwealth Police–declassified and in the National Archives of Australia– raised concerns about a faction headed by the mysterious Dr Branimir “Branko” Jelic, a Croat right wing nationalist living in West Germany who believed that an independent Croatian homeland could only break away from then communist Yugoslavia with assistance from the Soviet Union.

In 1972 Dr Jelic, Moscow’s man, was assassinated by UDBa, the Yugoslav Secret Police, and no doubt Washington would have looked the other way, as the enemy of my enemy is my friend !

To understand the dynamics: Communist Yugoslavia was a federation of Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Muslim Bosnians, and other ethnic groups, led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito who broke away from the Iron Curtain in 1949. A rivalry developed between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, which Tito managed to use to his advantage by squeezing aid out of the West in order to stay out of the Soviet Camp. 

But Tito was also adept at cosying up to the USSR when it suited him, especially after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953.

In the early 1970s the Yugoslav government began a campaign to discredit emigre Croats, Macedonians and others opposed to the regime, whether their opposition translated into terrorism or just peaceful means. So a dirty tricks strategy was commenced with agent provocateurs and infiltrators, ironically learned from the Soviet Secret Police Cheka/OGPU/NKVD/KGB.

The Moscow faction within the Croat dissident community remains a touchy and mysterious subject. It is hard to know whether it was genuine Soviet interference or another fiendish double cross thought up by Belgrade.

However, the importance is that the West, and in particular ASIO, believed in the Soviet plot. 

Denis Strangman, the then Private Secretary to Senator F.P. McManus, Federal Leader of the DLP, in The ASIO-CROATIAN AFFAIR of 1973 chapter to Les Shaw’s book, The Shape of the Labor Regime, mentions high ranking Czech communist defector Major-General Jan Sejna.

Sejna claimed there had been a Warsaw Pact plan, code named Polarka which was to involve raids into Yugoslavia from Austria. The raids would be used by the Warsaw Pact (under Moscow control) as a pretext for invasion…”

The irony is Yugoslavia did not fall apart in 1991 because of “Croatian extremism” abroad, Soviet interference, the Vatican’s meddling or because of the CIA. The ultimate disintegration was due to Serbian and Albanian ethnic tensions in the province of Kosovo that spooked the northern most republic of Yugoslavia, Slovenia, which had no history of “overseas extremists,” pulling the pin and seceding from the federation.