What were the Ustasa for Minister Hasanbegovic?

Zlatko Hasanbegovic. | Photo: BETAPHOTO/HINA/Damir SENCAR/DS

In the text published for a pro-Fascist bulletin in his student days in 1996, Croatia’s new Culture Minister wrote about the wartime Fascist Ustasa fighters as “victims” and “martyrs”.

Zlatko Hasanbegovic unambiguously glorified the Ustasa and advocated the establishment of the Greater Croatia in the monthly magazine, “The Independent State of Croatia”, published in the 1990s.

He was photographed in it with Mladen Schwartz, Velimir Bujanec, and the son-in-law of former Fascist dictator and Ustasa leader Ante Pavelic. In one photograph he wears an Ustasa cap.

The then editor-in-chief of the monthly, Srecko Psenicnik, was the son-in-law of Ante Pavelic, and President of the Croatian Liberation Movement, HOP, a pro-Ustasa party founded by Pavelic.

In 1996, Hasanbegovic wrote at least two articles for the monthly that propagated Pavelic’s work and ideas and systematically denied the crimes committed by the Pavelic’s puppet state, The Independent State of Croatia, NDH.

As a history student at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hasanbegovic wrote about the history of Muslims in Croatia, emphasizing their political and social renaissance during the reign of Pavelic and under the NDH.

In a short commentary, illustrated by a photograph of the opening of the mosque in Zagreb featuring Pavelic in the company of Muslim dignitaries from the Ustasa movement, Hasanbegovic criticized the separation of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Croatia.

He said the advocates of this policy were “abusing the honourable symbols and names of Ustasa heroes whose bones… are now turning in their graves from the shame and misery inflicted upon them fifty years later by their so-called followers”.

As an alternative to those fake followers, Hasanbegovic offers the Ustasa “heroes and martyrs” who, like the author, are driven by a desire to create a Greater Croatia as envisioned by Pavelic.

“In the name of those true heroes… who gave their lives for our Homeland… we, the true Croatian nationalists… the deceived and defeated Muslims and Catholics, should expose those hypocrites and moral freaks for who they really are, and show the people the way out of this dark tunnel towards peace and unity and religious tolerance which can only happen in a truly free and unified Homeland, stretching from the Mura, Drava and Drina rivers to the Adriatic,” he wrote.

Excerpt from one of the texts Hasanbegovic wrote for Independent State of Croatia. | Photo: Novosti

The Minister is listed as an associate writer for the NDH publication from April to November 1996, but featured as an author already in the February edition of the NDH as well as, in the first edition printed in Croatia after being issued abroad for many years.

Psenicnik, president of the HOP, had managed to transfer publication of the NDH from Canada to Croatia, and register the HOP as a legitimate party in Croatia, despite its political platform affiliating it to the Ustasa movement and to the acts of terrorism.

The party is still active in Croatia and it still promotes the political agenda of Pavelic. Its activity is not substantial, but according to the latest data, it has 650 members.

In his most recent appearances, Hasanbegovic has denied his previous involvement with HOP. However, in one of the photographs featured in the NDH monthly, he is described as a “young HOP member”. In other photographs, he is described as a member of a party called the Young Croatian Rightists, headed at the time by Velimir Bujanec.

He was also photographed in the company of Mladen Schwatrz, a right-wing political activist who in the 1990s advocated a Fascist regime in Croatia. Whatever the formal nature of his connections to Pavelic’s and Bujanec’s parties, the fact is that Hasanbegovic had intensive social contacts with some of their most prominent members and attended events organized by the radical right.

The photographs in the monthly corroborate this. They show Hasanbegovic protesting against the 1995 Dayton Agreement on Bosnia, participating in the Bleiburg commemoration, and posing on the Split promenade wearing an Ustasa cap.

At Bleiburg, he was photographed with the representatives of HOP and with Psenicnik, author of the text accompanying the photographs. In a report from Bleiburg, illustrated by this and other photos with numerous Ustasa insignia, Psenicnik openly glorifies the Ustasha movement.

In Split, Hasanbegovic poses with five young men all described as “young nationalists” in the caption. Among them is Bujanec, who in the featured interview proclaims: “The future is ours”, just before the parliamentary elections in October 1995.

In all three photos, Hasanbegovic is in the company of Bujanec, a man who would later become a member of the HOP youth fraction, a board representative of the NDH magazine and their public relations officer.

At that time, Bujanec, who now hosts the TV show Bujica, was one of the many members of the Croatian Party of Right, HSP, and of the Young Croatian Rightists who subsequently joined the HOP. Pavelic’s son-in-law, Psenicnik, wrote in NDH that there were many reasons for their massive transfer to HOP, but the key reason was dissatisfaction with the fact that Pavelic’s photos had been removed from all the HSP’s offices.

Later, Bujanec tried to distance himself from his own neo-Fascist past, especially the part related to the NDH monthly. His fellow comrade at the time, the present Minister of Culture, later became a frequent guest on his TV show, Bujica.

As a guest of the show in 2015, Hasanbegovic said the government should stop sponsoring the Jasenovac commemorations, dedicated to the victims of the Ustasa regime, because they did not serve to commemorate the victims but to rehabilitate Yugoslav communism.

In 1996, Hasanbegovic was elected president of the youth fraction of the Croatian Pure Party of Right, HCSP, and remained at that position until the end of 1997. An article on the HCSP’s website claimed that the organization gained additional strength and membership during Hasanbegovic’s tenure.

The party was at the time led by the politician Ivan Gabelica, who, after winning a seat in parliament, left the HSP and reactivated his HCSP membership.

Gabelica dedicated years of political work to the rehabilitation of the Ustasa, claiming that the negative interpretation of the Ustasa should be viewed in light of the Yugoslav-Communist historiography. His ideological habitus is well illustrated by the fact that Mladen Schwartz and Psenicnik considered him the only person worthy of leading the unification of all the existing parties based on the teachings of Starcevic.

The HCSP shared Gabelica’s ideology. During the 1990s, the HCSP and HOP organized Catholic masses commemorating Pavelic and to this day they remain regular attenders of such masses that annually take place in the capital. They have regularly participated in demonstrations against Gay Pride, as well as those against non-governmental organizations that want a square in the centre of Zagreb returned to its past name, the Square of the Victims of Fascism.

Their inclination towards the idea of the NDH has been expressed on many occasions, be it through the use of the “Za dom spremni” [“Ready for the Homeland”] Ustasa salute, their cooperation with neo-Nazi groups such as the Hungarian Jobbik, or more recently through promotional videos on YouTube in which they attract new members with propaganda posters from the NDH era.

The recently appointed minister spent a considerable part of his political life in extremist political organizations and has never distanced himself from this past. Instead, he has directed his efforts towards denying that his statements represent relativization of World War II, claiming that all of his statements have been taken out of context.

The context, however, is that Hasanbegovic was a contributor to the monthly magazine called “Independent State of Croatia”, that he glorified the Ustasa under the editorial authority of Pavelic’s son-in-law, that he called the Ustasas “heroes and martyrs”, and that he posed in an Ustasha cap.

When recently asked about the controversies about Hasanbegovic, Prime Minister Oreskovic stated that Hasanbegovic was an anti-Fascist and reiterated this statement more recently when he said that Hasanbegović was in fact a “devoted anti-Fascist”. After the most recent revelations, we are eager to hear once again what the Prime Minister has to say.

The article was originally published at Novosti website.