The Ustaše (also called Ustashas or Ustashi) was a Croatian racist, terrorist, and Nazi-like movement. It was engaged in terrorist activities before World War II. Under the protection of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the Ustaše ruled a part of Yugoslavia, after Yugoslavia was occupied by Italy and Germany. At the end of World War II, the Ustaše were defeated and expelled by the Yugoslav Partisans.
Establishment of the Ustaše Organization
Croatian politician Stjepan Radić was shot in October 1928 and died a month later. Alexander I, King of Yugoslavia, imposed a royal dictatorship in January 1929 and made all political parties illegal. Ante Pavelić left the country for Vienna. He and Gustav Perčec, a former Austro-Hungarian Lieutenant colonel, established contact with organization of Macedonian political emigres. These two groups agreed to coordinate their political activities for achieving full independence for Macedonia and Croatia. There and then, Pavelić secretly met with the leader of outlawed Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), Ivan Mikhailov, a declared enemy of Yugoslavia, and made agreement with him to cooperate against the Yugoslav state.
Due to these circumstances, the Court for the Preservation of the State in Belgrade sentenced Pavelić and Perčec to death on 17 July 1929. The exiles started organizing support for their cause among the Croatian emigration in Europe, North America, and South America. The Ustaše organization was small in numbers and was organized in military patterns. They fought Yugoslav statehood by means of terror.
Ideology of the Ustaše Organization
The roots of the Ustaše ideology were in the Croatian nationalism of the nineteenth century. The Ustaše ideological system was chiefly based on the traditional pure Croatian nationalism of Ante Starčević. About it, W. Safran wroteBut another vision of Croatian identity that was closely tied to the Catholic Church and the Vatican and was led by an ex-seminarist Ante Starcevic became the ideological precursor to the Ustase. Starcevic and his followers emphasized the high achievements of Western Catholic, Croatian culture, while Serbian culture was depicted as oriental and inferior. Starčević's racism was further fully elaborated by Ustaša Ivo Pilar [under the pseudonym L. von Südland]. His book was translated into Croatian in 1943, by Pavelić's regime, as one of the tenets of his Ustaše and his Independent State of Croatia. At the same time, the Ustaše borrowed from traditional Croatian nationalism, the National-Socialism of Hitler, the fascism of Mussolini, and even from the program of the Croatian Peasant Party. The Ustaše aimed at an ethnically "pure" Croatia, and saw the Serbs that lived in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina as their biggest obstacle. Along that line, Ustaše ministers Mile Budak, Mirko Puk, and Milovan Žanić declared in May 1941 that the goal of the new Ustaše policy was an ethnically clean Croatia. They also publicly announced the strategy (on July 22, 1941 ) to achieve their goal, which resembled the bloodiest religious wars: "A third must become Catholic, a third must leave the country, and a third must die!"
The Ustaše persecuted the Serbs, who were Orthodox Christians. They were tolerant toward the Muslims Bosniaks, claiming that the Muslims were actually ethnic Croats that converted to Islam during the Ottoman Turk occupation of Bosnia. The state even converted a former museum in Zagreb for use as a mosque. The basic principles of the movement were laid out by Pavelić in his 1929 pamphlet "Principles of the Ustaše Movement."
The Ustaše's problem with the Nazi ideology was that the Croats are Slavs and were considered inferior by Nazi standards. Ustaše ideology thus created a theory about a pseudo-Gothic origin of the Croats in order to raise their standing on the Aryan ladder.
Terrorist Activities
At Janka Puszta training facility in Hungary, IMRO terrorists trained Ustaše operatives in bomb-making and in conspirational activities. The Ustaše put that knowledge to immediate use, carrying out about half-dozen assassinations of Yugoslavian officials or pro-Serb civilians. They carried out a dozen bombings of trains, including the Orient Express, and other public targets during the first four years of their existence. This caused the Yugoslav Government to complain to the League of Nations and forced Hungary to close down Janka Pusta Ustaše training camp. Internal power struggle, and discovery that Perčec's mistress was a Yugoslav police informant, will lead to the Perčec assassination by Pavelić in 1933.