Soy croata. Escribo esto porque la mayoría de la gente en México probablemente nunca ha escuchado este nombre, y debería conocerlo.

El 22 de agosto de 2012, Selena Margarita Graciano Macedo, una mujer mexicana de 31 años, visitaba Split, Croacia, junto a su hermano Emanuel. Pasaron el día fotografiando la ciudad y caminando por Marjan, la colina boscosa que es el corazón de Split. En un momento su hermano se detuvo a descansar y Selena siguió caminando sola.

Un hombre llamado Edi Mišić, de 29 años entonces, la estaba esperando. No fue un impulso. Llevaba en su mochila cinta adhesiva y un cuchillo de cocina que tomó de la casa de su madre. Lo planeó. La emboscó cerca de la cima, le ató las manos y la boca con cinta, la arrastró hasta un muro bajo y le cortó la garganta. Después cubrió su cuerpo con ramas, piedras y hojas.

La ciudad quedó en shock. Marjan, normalmente lleno de gente, quedó en silencio durante días. Las farmacias se quedaron sin gas de defensa personal.

Y aquí viene la parte de la que me avergüenzo.

La patóloga, la Dra. Marija Definis Gojanović, declaró ante el tribunal que en veinte años de trabajo nunca había visto un caso más perturbador. Y aun así el tribunal lo condenó a 15 años — la pena mínima. ¿Por qué? Porque la fiscalía no logró probar legalmente la calificación de "asesinato grave y cruel". Se encontró un hematoma en su cuello que sugería que él presionó con fuerza antes de cortar, lo que podría haberle causado la pérdida del conocimiento — así que el tribunal razonó que tal vez ella no sufrió lo suficiente como para considerarlo cruel. Un asesinato premeditado y planificado de una turista fue reclasificado como un asesinato común.

Su hermano Emanuel lo dijo entre lágrimas: no podía entender cómo alguien podía atar a una mujer, taparle la boca, y que eso se llamara un asesinato "común".

Durante toda la evaluación psiquiátrica, Mišić no dijo ni una sola palabra sobre el asesinato. No mostró ninguna emoción ni ningún interés por la mujer cuya vida terminó. Los peritos le diagnosticaron un trastorno de personalidad antisocial con marcados rasgos narcisistas y sádicos.

Está previsto que salga en libertad en 2027. Tendrá 43 años.

No escribo esto para pedirle a nadie que odie a Croacia. Lo escribo porque Selena era su compatriota, murió aquí, y la forma en que nuestro sistema manejó esto no le hace honor. Su familia merece que su nombre sea recordado, y la gente en México merece saber lo que le pasó y lo que está a punto de pasar el año que viene.

Descansa en paz, Selena.

When Josip Šimunić grabbed the microphone at Maksimir in November 2013 and led 20,000 fans in "Za dom — Spremni!" four times, his defense was simple. He didn't grow up with all this baggage. He was born in Canberra. He didn't feel the weight of the words.

That defense is more revealing than he meant it to be. Because Šimunić wasn't raised in some neutral place where Croatian symbols arrived sanitized and contextless. He was raised in Canberra's Croatian community. And the Canberra Croatian Club, in the 1960s and 70s, was managed by a man named Josip Bujanović, also known as Pop Jole. Bujanović was a high-ranking Ustaša military chaplain from Lika who, during the war, was a key organizer of the liquidation of Serb civilians in his region. After 1945 he helped run the ratlines that smuggled Ustaša officials to South America before settling in Canberra himself, where he led annual commemorations of Ante Pavelić on the anniversary of the Poglavnik's death.

This is the community that produced Šimunić. Not as some weird coincidence. As a direct institutional inheritance.

I want to lay out how Australia became what the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood's own founders called "the citadel of Croatian national consciousness abroad." I want to show how this happened with the full knowledge and active protection of the Australian government. And I want to explain why the things you see today, Šimunić's chant, Sydney United fans throwing Nazi salutes on national television in 2022, planeloads of Australian-Croatians flying to Zagreb to scream "Za dom spremni" with Thompson — are not separate incidents. They are the predictable output of a machine that was built deliberately, run for decades, and never dismantled.

The Pipeline: 1945 to 1953

After the war, Australia desperately wanted European migrants. Arthur Calwell, the first Minister for Immigration, put it bluntly: "populate or perish." Between 1947 and 1953, Australia took in around 170,000 Displaced Persons from Europe. On paper, applicants had to be "healthy, free of fascist sympathies and ready to live anywhere and work at anything in Australia."

In practice, the fascist-sympathies filter was a sieve. Anti-communism mattered more. If you'd fought Tito, you were considered useful. The Ustaša understood this immediately.

The men who came through this pipeline weren't disorganized civilians fleeing chaos. Many of them were senior cadres of a regime that had run extermination camps, and they arrived with their politics intact and their networks already forming.

Some names you should know:

Fabijan Lovokovic had been Ante Pavelić's personal bodyguard and a leader in the Ustaše Youth. He migrated to Sydney in 1950. By 1957 he was running the Australian branch of the Croatian Liberation Movement (HOP), the post-war organization Pavelić founded from exile in Argentina. Lovokovic also re-established Spremnost, a major Ustaša newspaper from the NDH period, on Australian soil.

Srećko Rover had served in the Ustaška nadzorna služba (UNS), the Ustaša security service that worked directly with the Gestapo. During the war he led a mobile unit that traveled village to village arresting and murdering people. He arrived in Melbourne, helped found the Melbourne Croatia football club in 1953 (yes, a club still active today), got Australian citizenship in 1956, and went on to run the Australian branch of the Croatian National Resistance (HNO), the militant wing of the post-war Ustaša movement led from Spain by the Jasenovac concentration camp commander Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić.

Ljubomir Vuina had been a colonel in the Black Legion (Crna Legija), one of the most notorious Ustaša military units. He founded the first Australian Croatian Club in Adelaide. According to ASIO's own assessment, around 60 percent of its members were ex-Ustaša.

Josip Bujanović, mentioned earlier, ran the ratlines before running the Canberra Croatian Club.

These were not shadowy figures hiding in basements. They held public roles. They published newspapers, founded football clubs, ran community centers. The infrastructure they built is the same infrastructure many Croatian-Australians grew up inside.

Australian State Complicity

Here's where the story gets ugly. The Australian government knew. ASIO knew. The Liberal Party knew. They knew, and they let it happen, and in some cases they actively helped.

The Director-General of ASIO from 1950 to 1969 was Charles Spry. In 1953, an internal ASIO report warned that Rover and Drajutin Sporish's newspaper Hrvat was becoming "the official organ of Fascist propaganda in Australia." ASIO assessed Sporish himself as "an ardent fascist and a man who would stop at nothing to gain his own ends." The Australian Croatian Association was identified as having "pro-Ustaše policies" and contacts "with the Croatian terrorist Ante Pavelić."

Spry's response? He raised "no security objection," because the group was "anticommunist and anti-Tito." That phrase — anticommunist and anti-Tito — was the magic password. If you said it, you could be anything else underneath.

In April 1963, photographs appeared in Australian media showing HOP paramilitary training exercises near Wodonga, Victoria. The men were in Ustaša uniforms, armed with Australian Army rifles, sitting on an Australian armoured vehicle. Spremnost, the Sydney-based Ustaša newspaper, openly described it as a five-day paramilitary exercise and published a poem about it titled, with no irony, "Poem for Terrorism."

When questions were raised in the Senate, the Minister for the Army, John Cramer, dismissed the Wodonga training as a "picnic group." That's the official Australian government position, on the parliamentary record: heavily armed men in fascist uniforms training with army weapons on Australian armoured vehicles were having a picnic.

In 1962, the Melbourne Moomba parade — one of Australia's largest mainstream civic festivals — permitted an Ustaša float to participate.

This is the environment in which the Croatian-Australian community came of age. Public Ustaša organizing was treated as normal civic life. The state's security service wrote internal memos calling it fascist propaganda and then signed off on it anyway.

The Terror Years: 1963 to 1973

The HOP, the HNO, and a third group called the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (HRB) — founded in Australia in 1961 by Geza Pašti, Jure Marić, and Josip Senić — were not just political clubs. They were terrorist organizations, and the violence is documented in court records and Hansard.

In July 1963, nine Croatian-Australian HRB members were captured in Yugoslavia after entering on a sabotage and assassination mission codenamed Operation Kangaroo. They had trained at HOP camps in New South Wales, including a camp at Tumbi Umbi run by Deszol Saaghy, a Hungarian former member of the Nazi Brandenburger special forces. Their goal was to assassinate local officials and trigger an uprising.

In 1967, an Ustaša cell smuggled gelignite into the Yugoslav Consulate in Sydney. The same year, an attempted mail-bomb assassination targeted Marjan Jurjević, a Croatian-Australian anti-Ustaša activist. The bomb detonated prematurely in the General Post Office mail chute, narrowly missing the six postal workers in the mailroom.

In June 1972, nineteen armed men from the HRB, dubbed the Bugojno group or Operation Phoenix, were intercepted attempting to launch an armed uprising in Bosnia. Six were Australian citizens. Three more had previously lived in Australia. Half the group, in other words, was built and trained out of Australia.

On 16 September 1972, two Yugoslav travel agencies on George Street in central Sydney were bombed during the morning rush. Sixteen people were injured, three seriously, most of them random pedestrians on the street. Anjelko Marić was eventually convicted in 1976 and sentenced to 16 years. The bombing was organized through the Vjekoslav Luburić Society, a Sydney organization named in honor of the Jasenovac commandant — run by Stjepan Brbić, a former NDH Ustaša who had taken over leadership of the HNO in Australia from Rover.

In total, around 60 attacks were attributed to Ustaša-linked groups operating out of Australia between 1969 and 1973. Bombings of Yugoslav embassies, Soviet embassies, Yugoslav travel agencies, Serbian Orthodox churches, cinemas showing Yugoslav films.

Throughout this entire period, the Liberal government under Menzies, Holt, Gorton, and McMahon refused to act. ASIO had files. The Commonwealth Police had files. Memos were written and ignored. It took the election of the Whitlam Labor government in late 1972 and the parliamentary intervention of Attorney-General Lionel Murphy and Jim Cairns in 1973 to finally force the issue. The 1973 ministerial statement to Parliament listed the organizations by name, identified the recruiting youth groups, and laid out the documentary trail of how the Ustaša had operated unchecked on Australian soil for a decade.

This is not Yugoslav propaganda. This is the Australian Parliament. You can read it on the Hansard website.

The 1990s Pipeline

Croatia declared independence in 1991. The Croatian-Australian community, already organized and ideologically intact, mobilized.

Up to 200 Croatian-Australians went to fight in HOS, the Croatian Defence Forces paramilitary units associated with the far-right Croatian Party of Rights. HOS was openly continuationist. Their black uniforms emulated the Crna Legija. Their slogan was, of course, Za dom spremni. Their commander in Bosnia was Blaž Kraljević, a former HRB member from Melbourne who had been arrested in Australia for liquor offenses in 1972 to prevent his participation in the Bugojno raid.

So the line is unbroken. The same Australian-Croatian network that produced terrorist operatives in the 1960s produced HOS fighters in the 1990s. The same clubs. The same ideological ecosystem. The same families, in many cases.

Today

Now we get to the parts you and I were already discussing.

In November 2013, Šimunić, born in Canberra, raised in the Canberra Croatian community where Pop Jole had run the club, leads "Za dom spremni" four times after a World Cup qualifier and is genuinely surprised that anyone is upset. His defense, given to Sportske novosti in 2019, is that he hadn't lived in Croatia long enough to feel the controversy. The president of his hometown club, Canberra Croatia FC, defended him by comparing the salute to "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi." A diaspora club president, in 2013, equating a fascist genocidal salute to a sports cheer. This is what institutional memory looks like when it's been preserved without correction for seventy years.

In October 2022, Sydney United 58 (formerly Sydney Croatia, founded by these same networks in 1958) reaches the Australia Cup final. On national television, in front of 16,000 people at CommBank Stadium, a section of their fans boos the Welcome to Country, performs Nazi salutes, chants Za dom spremni, waves the HOS flag and the flag of the WW2 NDH puppet state, and unveils a banner that bears a striking resemblance to the flag of Nazi Germany. One fan imitates a monkey at Macarthur striker Al-Hassan Toure, who is of African descent. Football Australia issues lifetime bans for two supporters. The club is fined $15,000. In June 2023, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald run a major investigation into Croatian-Australian club culture and document open, annual celebrations of fascist iconography across multiple clubs.

In July 2025, Marko Perković Thompson plays the Zagreb Hippodrome. Half a million people. World record for a single-event ticketed concert. He leads the crowd in Za dom spremni. Officials from Croatian government attend. Croatian Wiesenthal officials and the Croatian Ombudsperson condemn the event. Plane after plane lands from Australia, the United States, Canada, Germany. Australian-Croatian newspaper Hrvatski Vjesnik publishes glowing coverage and dismisses critics as "Yugo-nostalgics." A Sydney-born former Associated Press journalist now living in Zagreb writes a column accusing the people who object of "lazy hysteria."

If you want to know why diaspora Croatians are so often more hardline than those of us in Croatia, this is the answer. We had to live through the actual postwar settlement, however imperfect. We had to share schools, towns, workplaces with Serbs. We had a state that, even at its most nationalist, had to negotiate with the Wiesenthal Centre, with the EU, with foreign press. The diaspora had no such pressure. Their politics froze in 1945 and were preserved by men who had personally helped run camps, written by men who had personally led killing units, taught to children in football clubs and church basements where Pavelić's portrait still hung.

Why This Matters

When somebody from Sydney or Melbourne or Canberra tells you Za dom spremni is just an old Croatian greeting, that it's like Aussie Aussie Aussie, that Thompson is a misunderstood patriot, what you're hearing is not their personal opinion. You're hearing the output of a seventy-five year old institutional system that was built by Pavelić's bodyguard and Luburić's lieutenants and the chaplain who organized the killing of Serbs in Lika, that was protected by ASIO and the Australian Liberal Party because they were useful Cold War assets, that bombed Sydney in 1972 and trained killers in the bush near Wodonga and sent fighters to HOS in the 1990s and now sends planeloads to Thompson concerts.

The diaspora didn't drift into this. It was put there. Deliberately. By people whose names are in the public record.

You can name those names. The records are not hidden. They are in Hansard, in court convictions, in academic histories, in ASIO's own published official history. The 1973 parliamentary statement is online. Mark Aarons' books on Nazis in Australia are in libraries. Hamish McDonald wrote Framed about the Croatian Six. The Wikipedia article on "Ustaše in Australia" is heavily sourced and a perfectly fine starting point for anyone who wants to verify what I've written here.

To my fellow Croatians: when our cousins from Sydney or Melbourne come home in summer wearing Thompson shirts and shouting Za dom spremni at weddings, we should not laugh and shrug and say diaspora are like that. They are like that because somebody made them like that, on purpose, with the knowledge of the Australian state. The least we can do is know the history well enough to tell them.

To Croatian-Australians who already know all of this and have spent your lives pushing back from the inside: Marjan Jurjević, who they tried to kill with a mail bomb. Lucy Zelić, who called Sydney United fans' behavior in 2022 a national embarrassment. Craig Foster, who called it a horrific display of racist hate. You are the ones the historical record actually vindicates. The rest is propaganda preserved in amber.

Jasenovac was real. The children's camps at Sisak and Jastrebarsko were real. The eighteen hundred dead babies were real. The men who did it had names, and the men who shielded their followers in Australia had names, and the men today who chant their slogans have names too. The first job is to keep the record clean.

Za dom spremni is not an old Croatian greeting. It is the slogan that men screamed while they cut throats over the Sava and threw infants on bayonets. Anyone telling you otherwise, in Sydney or Melbourne or Canberra, is repeating a lie that was constructed for them by the men who ran the camps.

u/ThePurpleKing159

Como croata, me da vergüenza contarles cómo el sistema judicial de mi país trató el asesinato de una mujer mexicana. Se llamaba Selena Margarita Graciano Macedo, y su asesino queda libre el año que viene.

Jel ima još ljudi kod nas koji pokušavaju malo “de-googleat” život ili većinu boli k?