Sydney football fans’ fascist salute has its origins in ASIO’s post-war failure

Seventy years after Croatian WW2 criminals established cells of the Ustaše terrorist group in Australia, their legacy is alive and dangerous.

In April 1952, ASIO received information that Jure Krpan was living at 15 Duke Street in Western Australia. Their informant claimed that Krpan had been an “Ustasa police investigator” who had “participated in murdering several hundred persons” and was involved in organising “terroristic undertaking (sic)”.

ASIO took no action, failing to even advise the federal government of this disturbing development. As one of the key organisations involved in the naturalisation process, ASIO did nothing to prevent Krpan from obtaining citizenship, leaving him free to work with other Croatian war criminals to establish Ustaše cells in Australia.

This was a pity as ASIO’s failure led, some 70 years later, to the recent unsavoury scenes at a Sydney football match where Croatian supporters of the Sydney United team gave the Nazi salute and screamed “Za dom spremni”, which in Croatian means “Ready for the Homeland”.

The Ustaše was led by Ante Pavelić, who had formed this terrorist organisation in the late 1920s dedicated to the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, carrying out violent acts such as the murder of Yugoslav King Alexander in 1934. Pavelić’s primary focus was the creation of an independent Croatia. He “succeeded” in this when the Nazis established the “independent” State of Croatia in April 1941, putting the Ustaše into power as their puppet “government”.

Pavelić and his Ustaše units adopted the slogan “Za dom spremni”, which was intoned while they gave the Nazi salute. Pavelić quickly proclaimed the Croatian equivalent of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws and signs were erected in parks and other public places proclaiming, “No Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Dogs Allowed”.

They immediately commenced bloody massacres of these groups, which were so medieval in their brutality that even hardened Nazi units were shocked. In addition to the usual method of dispatching their victims by mass shootings, these included slow decapitation with saws; ripping out intestines, cutting their throats; smashing their heads with sledgehammers; and cutting off limbs so that they suffered slow, excruciating death.