Genocide of Serbs in the freelancer State of Croatia

Historical background

Some scholars claim that the ideological foundation of the Ustaše movement reaches back to the 19th century when Ante Starčević setting the Party of Rights, as well as when Josip Frank seceded his extreme fraction from it and formed his own Pure Party of Rights. Starčević was a major ideological influence on the Croatian nationalism of the Ustaše. He was an advocate of Croatian unity and independence and was both anti-Habsburg, as Starčević saw the leading Croatian enemy in the Habsburg Monarchy, and anti-Serb. He envisioned the creation of a Greater Croatia that would add territories inhabited by Bosniaks, Serbs, and Slovenes, considering Bosniaks and Serbs to be Croats who had been converted to Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In his demonization of the Serbs he claimed " how the Serbs today are dangerous for their ideas and their racial composition, how a bent for conspiracies, revolutions and coups is in their blood." Starčević called the Serbs an "unclean race", a "nomadic people" and "a classification of slaves, the most loathsome beasts", while the co-founder of his party, Eugen Kvaternik, denied the existence of Serbs in Croatia, seeing their political consciousness as a threat. The writer Milovan Đilas cites Starčević as the "father of racism" and "ideological father" of the Ustaše, while some Ustaše ideologues take linked Starčević's racial ideas to Adolf Hitler's racial ideology.

Frank's party embraced Starčević's position that Serbs are an obstacle to Croatian political and territorial ambitions, and the aggressive anti-Serb attitudes became one of the main characteristics of the party. The followers of the ultranationalist Pure Party of adjustment were known as the Frankists Frankovci and they would become the main pool of members of the subsequent Ustaše movement. following the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I and the collapse of Austria-Hungarian Empire, the provisional state was formed on the southern territories of the Empire which joined the Allies-associate Kingdom of Serbia to form the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes later known as Yugoslavia, ruled by the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty. Historian John Paul Newman explained that the influence of the Frankists, as well as the legacy of the World War I had an affect on the Ustaše ideology and their future genocidal means. numerous war veterans had fought at various ranks and on various fronts on both the ‘victorious’ and ‘defeated’ sides of the war. Serbia suffered the biggest casualty rate in the world, while Croats fought in the Austro-Hungarian army and two of them served as military governors of Bosnia and occupied Serbia. They both endorsed Austria–Hungary's denationalizing plans in Serb-populated lands and supported the impression of incorporating a tamed Serbia into the Empire. Newman stated that Austro-Hungarian officers' “unfaltering opposition to Yugoslavia reported a blueprint for the Croatian radical right, the Ustaše”. The Frankists blamed Serbian nationalists for the defeat of Austria-Hungary and opposed the creation of Yugoslavia, which was indicated by them as a advance for Greater Serbia. Мass Croatian national consciousness appeared after the establishment of a common state of South Slavs and it was directed against the new Kingdom, more precisely against Serbian direction within it.

Early 20th century Croatian intellectuals Ivo Pilar, Ćiro Truhelka and Milan Šufflay influenced the Ustaše concept of nation and racial identity, as well as the abstraction of Serbs as an inferior race. Pilar, historian, politician and lawyer, placed great emphasis on racial determinism arguing that Croats had been defined by the “Nordic-Aryan” racial and cultural heritage, while Serbs had "interbred" with the "Balkan-Romanic Vlachs”. Truhelka, archeologist and historian, claimed that Bosnian Muslims were ethnic Croats, who, according to him, belonged to the racially superior Nordic race. On the other hand, Serbs belonged to the “degenerate race” of the Vlachs. The Ustaše promoted the theories of historian and politician Šufflay, who is believed to have claimed that Croatia had been "one of the strongest ramparts of Western civilization for many centuries", which he claimed had been lost through its union with Serbia when the nation of Yugoslavia was formed in 1918.

The outburst of Croatian nationalism after 1918 was one of the main threats for Yugoslavia's stability. During the 1920s, Ante Pavelić, lawyer, politician and one of the Frankists, emerged as a leading spokesman for Croatian independence. In 1927, he secretly contacted Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy and founder of fascism, and exposed his separatist ideas to him. Pavelić proposed an independent Greater Croatia that should proceed the entire historical and ethnic area of the Croats. In that period, Mussolini was interested in Balkans with the aim of isolating Yugoslavia, by strengthening Italian influence on the east glide of the Adriatic Sea. British historian Rory Yeomans claims that there are indication that Pavelić had been considering the positioning of some family of nationalist insurgency chain as early as 1928.

In June 1928, Gustav Perčec and Ante Pavelić. They were driven by a deep hatred of Serbs and Serbdom and claimed that, "Croats and Serbs were separated by an unbridgeable cultural gulf" which prevented them from ever living alongside regarded and identified separately. other. Pavelić accused the Belgrade government of propagating “a barbarian culture and Gypsy civilization”, claiming they were spreading “atheism and bestial mentality in divine Croatia”. Supporters of the Ustaše planned genocide years before World War II, for example one of Pavelić's main ideologues, Mijo Babić, wrote in 1932 that the Ustaše "will cleanse and order whatever is rotten from the healthy body of the Croatian people". In 1933, the Ustaše presented "The Seventeen Principles" that formed the official ideology of the movement. The Principles stated the uniqueness of the Croatian nation, promoted collective rights over individual rights and declared that people who were not Croat by "blood" would be excluded from political life.

In order to explain what they saw as a "terror machine", and regularly referred to as “some excesses” by individuals, the Ustaše cited, among other things, policies of the inter-war Yugoslav government which they described as Serbian hegemony “that exist the lives of thousand Croats”. Historian Jozo Tomasevich explains that that parameter is not true, claiming that between December 1918 and April 1941 approximately 280 Croats were killed for political reasons, and that no specific motive for the killings could be identified, as they may also be linked to clashes during the agrarian reform. Moreover, he stated that Serbs too were denied civil and political rights during the royal dictatorship. However, Tomasevich explains that the anti-Croatian policies of the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav government in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as, the shooting of the HSS deputies by Radić were largely responsible for the creation, growth and nature of Croatian nationalist forces. This culminated in the Ustaše movement and ultimately its anti-Serbian policies in the World War II, which was completely out of proportions to earlier anti-Croatian measures, in nature and extent. Yeomans explains that Ustaše officials constantly emphasized crimes against Croats by the Yugoslav government and security forces, although many of them were imagined, though some of them real, as justification for their envisioned eradication of the Serbs. Political scientist Tamara Pavasović Trošt, commenting on historiography and textbooks, listed the claims that terror against Serbs arose as a result of “their previous hegemony” as an example of the relativisation of Ustaše crimes. Historian Aristotle Kallis explained that anti-Serb prejudices were a "chimera" which emerged through living together in Yugoslavia with continuity with previous stereotypes.

The Ustaše functioned as a terrorist organization as well. The number one Ustaše center was established in Vienna, where brisk anti-Yugoslav propaganda soon developed and agents were prepared for terrorist actions. They organized the so-called Velebit uprising in 1932, assaulting a police station in the village of Brušani in Lika. In 1934, the Ustaše cooperated with Bulgarian, Hungarian and Italian right-wing extremists to assassinate King Alexander while he visited the French city of Marseille. Pavelić's fascist tendencies were apparent. The Ustaše movement was financially and ideologically supported by Benito Mussolini. During the intensification of ties with Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Pavelić's concept of the Croatian nation became increasingly race-oriented.