Far-right politics in Croatia
Individuals and groups in Croatia that employ far-right politics are most often associated with the historical Ustaše movement, hence they have connections to Neo-Nazism and neo-fascism.
[3] Prior to World War II the Ustaše functioned as a paramilitary and terrorist organization, as it sought the separation of Croatia from Yugoslavia into an independent state through violent means.
[9] Za dom spremni ("Ready for the Homeland") was the WWII fascist salute used by the Ustaše and is considered to be the equivalent of the Nazi German Sieg heil.
In the aftermath of WWII, a guerrilla/terrorist anti-communist and Croatian nationalist insurgency group, the Crusaders, formed, and carried out terrorist acts against the new multi-ethnic communist state.
Between 1962 and 1982, Croatian nationalist groups carried out 128 terror attacks against Yugoslav civilian and military targets; notably it bombed a JAT plane killing 27 people in 1972.
The new mainstream politics showed significantly more courtesy to the Ustaše for their desire to make Croatia independent, but they were neither rehabilitated nor explicitly banned.
The late president of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, who had been a Partisan general who had fought the Ustaše, became a champion of reconciliation (Croatian pomirenje or pomirba), whereby Croats of all political views should unite against the shared threat from Serbia.
Such a notion could be considered true in view of Croatia's long historical struggle for independence, but does not give enough consideration to the puppet-state status of the NDH.
In the absence of a specific policy or laws against it, instances of pro-Ustaše sentiment and hate speech were rarely sanctioned, to the dismay of the left-leaning public, as well the Serbs of Croatia who were the most common targets.
Their symbols included dressing in black, at the time widely perceived to be reminiscent of blackshirts, and using the phrase Za dom spremni.
These units, however, quickly fell out of favor with the Croatian authorities and were eliminated through more or less violent means before the end of the first phase of the war in Croatia.
Remembrance ceremonies at the site of Jasenovac concentration camp resumed, with support from the highest levels of government, including the right-wing HDZ under Ivo Sanader.
In 1999, Croatia extradited Dinko Šakić from Argentina, one of the commanders of the Jasenovac concentration camp, and he was subsequently tried and sentenced to 20 years in prison, at the time the highest penalty under Croatian law.
The two-time prime minister Ivo Sanader of HDZ came to power after promoting himself as an avid advocate of Croatian general Mirko Norac in 2001.
This view is the extreme form of the position taken by the Supreme Court of Croatia, which allows "pursuit of a legitimate goal of defending one's country against an armed aggression" to be considered a mitigating circumstance in war crimes trials.
[40] On 11 July 2003 the Ivica Račan coalition government passed amendments to the penal code which outlawed hate speech, in a new section titled Praising fascist, Nazi and other totalitarian states and ideologies or promotion of racism and xenophobia.
[41] The law is not perfectly applied, evidenced by the examples of regular public display of Ustasha memorabilia by the group "Hrvatski domobran" from Zadar that only recently started to get sanctioned by the police.
Revisionism was not frowned upon because priority was placed on the re-evaluation of history as recorded during the Communist era, which was therefore deemed almost implicitly tainted, because it systematically omitted or misrepresented issues related to what was perceived to be Croatian nationalism.
On the other hand, the revision of history books often went too far in making them increasingly focused on Croatian national issues, even with far-right interpretations of various World War II events.
[48] Members of the organization includes public figures such as journalist Igor Vukić, Catholic priest Stjepan Razum and academic Josip Pečarić.
[50][51] Croatian filmmaker Jakov Sedlar also peddled this theory in his documentary Jasenovac – The Truth, bringing accusations of holocaust and genocide denial from organisations representing the ethnic groups that were the primary victims of the camp.
[citation needed] The conflation of modern and obsolete nationalist themes sometimes produces bizarre inconsistencies, as shown at picture on the right: at the time when the ICTY wanted Croatian general Janko Bobetko, the right-wing part of the public was adamant in its demands to prevent that, and some extremist painted graffiti saying so, together with neo-fascist symbols.
[56] Conversely, the leftist newspaper Feral Tribune regularly satirized the Mile Budak streets, and its journalists explicitly criticized this trend.
In 2003, Ivo Sanader's government decided to finally deal with the issue which resulted in a decision to rename all the streets bearing Budak's name.
The Israeli director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center slammed the proposed monument as a falsification of history and an insult to the memory of the victims of the NDH.
In the world of popular culture, the pop/folk/rock singer Marko Perković (Thompson) caused a scandal when the media obtained a copy song Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara allegedly sung by him.
[67] Simon Wiesenthal Center director Efraim Zuroff complained to the Croatian president Stjepan Mesić about the funeral of Dinko Šakić, one of the leaders of the army of the Independent State of Croatia, who died in July 2008.
[70][71] In January 2006, the Ustasha song "Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara" was played publicly during the interval of an international club volleyball match.
Snježana Koren, a historian at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, has judged the disputed articles as "biased and malicious, partly even illiterate".
[83] She further added that "These are the types of articles you can find on the pages of fringe organizations and movements, but there should be no place for that on Wikipedia", expressing doubts on the ability of its authors to distinguish good from evil.
