Croatia’s unilateral declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in June 1991 did not come out of nowhere. It occurred in a context of growing nationalism on both sides amid the progressive dissolution of the communist regime, with roots that can be traced back in time. Let us not forget episodes such as the Nazi Germany puppet state governed by the fascist Ustasha movement or even the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which ignited the spark of World War I. Closer in time, in 1972, there was an attempt by a handful of insurgents, the so-called Bugojno Group, to organize a general uprising—one that ultimately failed.

They could have avoided disaster had they not ignored the similar fate suffered by the anti-Franco guerrillas in Spain in the 1940s, who tried to do something similar without understanding that the people were physically and mentally exhausted after nearly three years of civil war. As a result, the maquis, as they were called, were left alone in their quixotic endeavor. However, the international context of the second half of the 1960s—with the strengthening of the Cuban Revolution, the outbreak of the Vietnam War, and Che Guevara’s idea of promoting guerrilla movements in America through small cells—may have convinced the Croatians that the time was right.

Curiously, it all began far away, literally on the other side of the world. The Bugojno Group was organized in Australia by members of the Ustasha who had managed to escape from Yugoslav partisans after World War II and had taken refuge there in a process known as ratlines (escape routes for pro-Nazis). Although they were accused of genocide against ethnic and political minorities (Serbs, Jews, Roma, leftists), the Australian authorities welcomed them and even granted them citizenship, as the world had become polarized into capitalist and communist blocs, crystallizing in the Cold War.

Yugoslavia Croatia Command 1972
Yugoslavia and the Independent State of Croatia after the German invasion in World War II. Credit: Augusta 89 / Rowanwindwhistler / Wikimedia Commons

The Australian Croatian community had spoken out against the Ustasha and the NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia, under Hitler’s control), but their voices were gradually drowned out by those of the newcomers, among whom were war criminals such as Djujo Krpan and Ljubomir Vuina. Fierce anti-communists, they gained the passive complicity of Australia’s liberal governments to begin organizing terrorist activities in the 1960s against Yugoslav consulates and other leftist targets in their adopted country. However, they soon expanded their scope and in 1963 moved onto Yugoslav territory with their first action.

Yugoslav authorities discovered a gang of Croatian-Australians plotting to assassinate officials and incite a rebellion under what they called Operation Kangaroo. Tito’s government responded through the UBDA (Uprava Državne Bezbednosti, or State Security Directorate), the secret police, which began eliminating leaders of the HRB (Hrvatsko Revolucionarno Bratstvo, the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood), a separatist organization founded in 1961. A tit-for-tat exchange of attacks ensued throughout the decade: while one side planted bombs in a Belgrade cinema and railway station, the other arrested or directly eliminated separatist leaders.

The situation worsened after 1969 with an increase in attacks and the death of Vjekoslav Luburić, a Croatian war criminal responsible for concentration camps during the war, who was assassinated in Spain—where he had been hiding—by Yugoslav agents. Two years earlier, a group of Croatian poets and philologists had published the Declaration on the Name and Situation of the Standard Croatian Language, in which they denounced the imposition of the Serbo-Croatian language in all areas, to the detriment of other languages. Serbo-Croatian was one of Tito’s tools to try to harmonize Yugoslavia’s ethnic puzzle, but, as we see, it was not well received.

Yugoslavia Croatia Command 1972
Josip Broz Tito, president of Yugoslavia. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The protest by intellectuals, initially limited to linguistic concerns, soon overflowed into cultural, economic, and political spheres, with intellectuals and students joining in. Inevitably, street protests escalated, growing in intensity until they were harshly repressed after Moscow threatened to intervene if they were not swiftly quelled. This episode, which took place between March 1967 and December 1971, has gone down in history as Hrvatsko proljeće or the Croatian Spring, and although the government later tried to placate it with a conciliatory new constitution, the stage was already set for greater upheaval.

It was then that the HRB created the Bugojno Group, with the goal of forcibly achieving Croatia’s independence and restoring a sovereign state. HRB leaders believed that the Croatian Spring had sufficiently raised awareness among the people for them to support an armed insurrection. They began gathering weapons and funds to equip the first activists responsible for igniting the movement in the south of the country. Most of those selected were Australian residents, naturally, but the materials were acquired in West Germany, and training took place in a camp in Garanas, Austria, very close to the Yugoslav border.

Of the initial twenty-four combatants, three could not join because one backed out, and the other two were arrested by Australian and German police, respectively. A fourth was only involved in logistical support, and several others had already been ruled out for various reasons—including Josip Senic, who was assassinated by the UDBA. In the end, only nineteen men formed the Bugojno Group. It was named after the Bosnian city of the same name, in whose southern region lay Mount Raduša, where they planned to hide. In fact, Yugoslav security forces would refer to their counterinsurgency mission as Raduša 72, while the perpetrators called it Operation Phoenix.

Yugoslavia Croatia Command 1972
Socialist Yugoslavia’s regions. Credit: Bobby / Rowanwindwhistler / Incnis Mrsi / Wikimedia Commons

The commando unit entered Yugoslavia through Muta, a small village near Dravograd (in present-day Slovenia), on June 20, 1972, waiting a couple of days for the truck that was supposed to transport them. But since it never showed up, they hijacked one and also ran into some hunters, which ruined their plan to go unnoticed. Just five days later, the first armed confrontation took place near Uskoplje, a Bosnian town. They were intercepted by forces of the Teritorijalna obrana (Territorial Defense), a militia similar to the U.S. National Guard, separate from the JNA (Jugoslovenska narodna armija, or Yugoslav People’s Army), which each of the republics that made up the country had.

The Teritorijalna obrana had a total of about thirty thousand members. However, at that moment, only three dozen were available in the area, reinforced by police officers and reserve units, but with such a precarious level of training and equipment that they suffered several casualties: two wounded and two dead, among them the commanding officer. Even so, they managed to drive their adversaries into retreat and kill their commander, Adolf Andrić, a thirty-year-old member of the HRB, who had enlisted alongside his older brother, Ambroz. The unexpected success of the militiamen caused the Bugojno Group to scatter, with its members losing contact with each other.

Moreover, over the next twenty-four hours, three more activists were captured while the others barely managed to escape, later regrouping at the designated point near Ramsko Lake (an artificial reservoir in the municipality of Prozor-Rama, in present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina) and seeking the cooperation of sympathetic locals to hide. By then, the alarm had already been raised, and more men had been deployed to the area, with a thousand militiamen now in pursuit. The original plan to carry out sabotage and attacks was falling apart, and the dream of inciting a popular uprising was fading even further.

Yugoslavia Croatia Command 1972
Photograph of the Bugojno Group on the ground. Credit: nepoznat / Wikimedia Commons

Under increasing pressure, they hid in a cave in Rumboci, surrounded by forest, but the enemy was tightening the noose, leaving them no choice but to fight back by setting up an ambush. Although they managed to kill eight militiamen and capture a ninth—whom they executed shortly afterward—their fate seemed sealed. There were still a few more shootouts between Sinj and Imotski, in Croatian Dalmatia, where they were desperately trying to flee; however, their movements were known to the authorities, thanks to an informant working for the UDBA.

Everything came to an end on July 24 in a shootout in Rakovica, near Sarajevo, just over a month after it had begun. In total, ten of the commandos were killed, and five were summarily executed after surrendering. Four others who had been captured were tried and sentenced to death in December, except for one whose sentence was commuted to twenty years in prison due to his youth. His name was Ludvig Pavlović, and he was released in 1990—only to die during the war the following year. Meanwhile, Yugoslav troops suffered thirteen deaths and fourteen injuries.

The information obtained from the prisoners led Melbourne police to dismantle the network built by the HCB over decades, revealing the leading role played by its leader, Srećko Rover, a former Ustasha member personally decorated by Hitler for his role in capturing, torturing, and executing a large number of Serbs and Jews during World War II. However, the McMahon government did not want to publicly acknowledge that it had harbored war criminals, and Rover escaped prosecution, though the pressure forced him into hospitalization and a lower public profile. He died in 2005 without ever facing trial.

Croatian separatist terrorism continued. That same year, the Yugoslav embassy in Stockholm was shot up, a bomb brought down a passenger plane from that country (only a flight attendant survived), and another Swede was kidnapped. It was then that Australia began taking the problem more seriously, launching a wave of police actions over the following years, until the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the ensuing tragic war ultimately led to an independent Croatia, now a member of the EU.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on February 17, 2025: Cómo un comando procedente de Australia se infiltró en Yugoslavia en 1972 para fomentar la independencia de Croacia

SOURCES

Gobierno de Australia, Croatian terrorism

Crodex, Akcija Feniks :Bugojanska skupina 1972. godine

Kristy Campion, The Ustaša in Australia: A Review of Right-Wing Ustaša Terrorism from 1963-1973, and Factors that Enable their Endurance

Bogdan Denitch, Nacionalismo y etnicidad. La trágica muerte de Yugoslavia

Wikipedia, Bugojno group

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