“It’s Time”
by John Ovcaric
It would seem that Tony Jones recently plagiarised a Yugoslav era work of Propaganda titled “Dvadeseti čovjek” (the Twentieth Man) written by “Đorđe Ličina” and while we sit and read this in astonishment, Jones, who obviously must be suffering some form of writer’s block let alone dementia has the gumption to think that this will go un-noticed? Well no it isn’t, and this isn’t the most alarming factor here so let’s try again.
Perhaps it’s because he is supposedly writing about a situation that had passed all legal burning hoops and is undeniable in its accuracy? Sorry still no cigar, shall we try again?
OK, how about, not only does he appear to have plagiarised someone else’s propaganda, and not only are the supposed facts unfounded by lawful process, but that he laces into the plot fictional characters which only serves to subliminally cement in the readers mind that this work of semi fiction is based on fact?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm, we are getting close.
It’s actually all of the above and much more, but, he is perpetuating a smear campaign against a segment of the Australian community who have spent the last century battling conspiracy and injustice designed to deliver cultural genocide at the hands of what many now realise, but dare not admit, was as evil a regime as that of either Pol Pot or Idi Amin.
The fascinating reality is that like some cursed undead creature from the grave, this regime and its political secret service continue to campaign against us in a modern Western society let alone within the shadows of the modern political corridors of the Croatian parliament in Zagreb at this very moment.
But what Tony Jones is doing, which I will take a leap of faith and define in a few moments, reaches back further than many of us would care to remember and which some of us reading this may be too young to.
In the 1960’s, Broz Josip Tito, after his break with the Soviet Union of the 1950’s, realised that in order for his abomination Yugoslavia to survive, had to peel back the Yugoslav Iron Curtain and allow unthinkable numbers of the regime’s citizens out so as they could work and inadvertently fund the country through their earnings, Dad goes off to work in Germany and sends Deutsche Marks home strategy.
The exodus of citizens, namely from Croatia made their way not only to Germany and other like European economic powerhouses but far further flung places globally, consequently the benefit economically gained from doing so for the regime was counted by a new problem, these economic workers now joined with political exiles and Croatian nationalism and the fight against the tyranny of Yugoslav communist rule was fueled.
Such was the concern that estimates put the number of workers allowed out from behind the curtain near the end of the 1960’s to be in the vicinity of 600,000, a number based on declassified CIA documents of the era, and of greater concern, as also discussed in these CIA reports was the fact that the Yugoslav Secret Services (UDBA) could not keep track of their movements.
During this time, the CIA was dealing with a host of communist actions globally, Vietnam, the growing threat of communism spreading through other parts of Asia, not to mention South America, were key focal points for the U.S. administrations of the day, of equal focus in Australia’s back yard was the expansion of communism into the Pacific region and as a result, and as later exposed in a number of Royal Commissions, ASIO actively worked with the CIA in numerous Black Operations globally in the good fight.
No, I haven’t forgotten Tony Jones, bear with me, the enigma will all come together shortly.
Ok, back to Tito’s mobsters the UDBa, the 60’s apart from being a drug induced footnote in modern global history was also a time of incredible political psychedelia, the Yugoslav government of the day, which played a very similar if not identical game to the Serb’s of today, played West against East for its own gain.
As reported in several CIA and ASIO intelligence reports for the time, the West’s socialist “Stick that up your backside Stalin” pin up boy Broz tried to conjure the West to assist in monitoring its citizens and dissidents globally, Foreign Governments of the day however had more pressing business to attend to.
Ok, quiz question time. You are a foreign Government, concerned about your dictatorship and a potential revolt internally fuelled by Nationalists in exile, inadvertently you had the bright idea to tell the Soviet Union in the 1950’s to go shove the hammer and sickle up their collective Politburo orifices and opened the doors up to allow 600,000 of your citizens to work outside your borders to raise money, and now your global buddies from WW2 are too busy fighting the good fight against your very own kind elsewhere to help as your eyes and ears in their own backyards – what would you do?
If you answered as follows, big elephant stamp for you.
What you do is create a threat, spread misinformation, conduct black op or black flag operations in other sovereign states under the guise that such actions are being perpetuated by the same dissidents you asked your buddies to keep an eye on, you send in agents who infiltrate the immigrant population and either set in play black flag operations or collect information on those individuals while proudly acting as one of them.
And then if you’re really smart, you infiltrate the Governments of those nations and manipulate them so as to either use or draw information from their security agencies.
By the start of the early 1970’s Australian politics was moving away from the decades old conservative governance, which had existed under the Menzies era. Consequently, Australian’s were questioning our alliance with the United States particularly in light of our involvement in Vietnam, let’s not forget also that it wasn’t uncommon for a Prime minister to dip a toe in the water, go for a leisurely swim and disappear, times were changing and the left of politics in Australia were looking North towards new potential trading partners and regional players.
Times were a changing, and this gave rise to Gough Whitlam’s campaign theme of 1972.
“It’s Time”
Edward Gough Whitlam was swept into power based on a sway in the Australian public’s perception of decades of conservative governance that was no longer being in touch with a modern Australia both politically and socially, and the growing involvement of Australia in global affairs (Read Vietnam), which they believed the United States was dragging Australia into. Behind the scenes, this perception was true as ASIO was secretly working with the CIA without the Australian Governments knowledge as would later be revealed in a number of Royal Commissions.
Attorney-General Lionel Murphy upon entering his role with the new Government in Canberra was so suspect of ASIO that he had his offices in the old parliament building swept for surveillance and phone bugs numerous times, his and Whitlam’s suspicions were correct in that ASIO had become as powerful within the Australian political scene as that of the CIA in the U.S. equivalent.
Dr Jim Cairns who had held a number of portfolios during the course of the Whitlam Governments reign completed what would become for Croatians in Australia the Unholy Trinity of the Labor Government of the day, with Murphy’s focus on ASIO, Whitlam’s overtures to China and Cairns support of the Anti-Vietnam movement, the stage was set for a showdown and years later, as CIA documents would justify, the Australian Government of the day, leftist in its views and abhorrent to its partnership with the U.S. became the focus of an angered CIA and subsequently the British equivalent in MI5.
What connected the Croatian community in Australia to all this was the simple fact that the Whitlam Government of the day, for all its perceived foresight and vision for a modern Australia, was playing straight into the hands of foreign influence and as I previously mentioned foreign concerns. It was Yugoslavia and it’s UDBa that saw opportunities in Australia to indeed infiltrate the Government and use its security agency, namely ASIO, as its pseudo secret police force on Australian soil.
What transpired as this uneasiness grew resulted in what is dubbed the “ASIO Raid” and the Croatian community in Australia was flung into this international web of intrigue.
On the 15th of March 1973, Attorney-General Lionel Murphy and senior Commonwealth Police officers forcibly entered ASIO’s headquarters in Melbourne as a result of Murphy’s suspicions that ASIO was withholding information on terrorist threats and undermining the newly elected Whitlam government.
The Yugoslav Prime Minister was due to visit Australia and there were concerns that local Croatian dissidents were planning to assassinate him. Due to post WW2 propaganda, these dissidents were labelled as “Ustashe” and the remnants of the Croatian movement of that time that had been allied with Germany in World War Two and had active networks in Australia.
Dreaming of overthrowing Tito’s communist regime, “Ustasha” supporters were implicated in bombing Yugoslav diplomatic buildings and social clubs throughout Australia in the 1960s and 70s. In 1962 and 1973 they launched unsuccessful military raids into then Yugoslavia.
But ASIO was relatively indifferent to this perceived terrorist threat and was chiefly concerned with Soviet espionage and the perceived menace from that quarter of the time being communist subversion. The NSW Police Force had presumptively uncovered evidence that a Ustasha group planned to assassinate the Yugoslav Prime Minister, which was passed through the Commonwealth Police to Murphy, but ASIO denied knowledge of these threats.
Not trusting ASIO’s assurances that they had no information to support these concerns about assassination threats, the Attorney-General entered their Melbourne headquarters on St. Kilda road and declared to the ASIO staff that “it is our policy to bring open government to Australia” and demanded to know if they had been hiding information from him. Murphy questioned the officers for hours while Commonwealth Police carted off documents.
It is the question as to what occurred to those documents while in their care that has always plagued me and a recent piece I wrote on a UDBa document GHD (Croatian Diasporan Voice – Glas hrvatske dijaspore) recovered from Belgrade which clearly shows my father’s file number next to his name “X.2257” and which I believe to be an ASIO file reference that leads me to think this information was passed on to Yugoslav authorities.
So much has been uncovered since the 16th of March 1973 as to the involvement of both Yugoslav consulate staff and undercover UDBa agents during that time and their infiltration into both the Australian Government and their service arms and the Croatian community that it bewilders me to this day that a blind eye has been cast and a total lack of reflection on their activities maintained while the perpetuation of untruths continues, Tony Jones and his comic strip paperback being a prime example of this attitude.
For the Croatian people, Australian Citizens in every respect of the term, what transpired as a result of these raids is despicable. Personal threats both known and clandestine continued for years, the naming of names in the media of Croatian Australian Citizens being terrorists and war criminals would be unthinkable in this day and age, Jim Cairns stating under parliamentary protection in the old Parliament House that every man, woman and child of Croatian heritage should be returned to Yugoslavia as war criminals and terrorists is incomprehensible.
Yet it did deliver us one crucial thing in spades, fortitude, fortitude to continue the struggle with greater focus and depth of conviction and this was never more apparent than at the outbreak of the 1990’s war in Croatia when we rallied to the cry.
Eventually the Whitlam Government came into disrepute, Dr Jim Cairns was uncovered for his affair with Junie Morosi, we watched The Loans Affair unfurl as the political scandal involving the Whitlam Government demonstrated how they attempted to unconstitutionally borrow money from Middle Eastern countries through the agency of Pakistani banker Tirath Khemlani, bypassing standard procedures of the Australian Treasury. Minerals and Energy Minister Rex Connor, along with Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister Dr Jim Cairns misled Parliament and were forced from the Whitlam Cabinet over the Affair, and finally The Dismissal itself instigated by Sir John Kerr then Governor General of Australia with an ever towering and defiant Gough Whitlam declaring on the steps of the old Parliament House “Well may they say, God save the Queen, for nothing will save the Governor General!”
It wasn’t the Governor General as such at the time as it was the CIA, ASIO and Yugoslavia’s UDBa that ushered in the eventual fall of his Government.
“Yes! Yes! I know! Tony Jones, I’m getting there”
Tony Jones and his current likely plagiarised book “The 20th man” reflects much on the circumstances of that era based on propaganda and the effects of inter-government manipulation and espionage facilitated by unseen interests, where it fails is that it is a perpetuation of lies and deceit and delivers any potential reader a skewed view of history based on those premises.
But Tony is just a small pin in the greater machine that we thought had come to a grinding halt when Prime minister Paul Keating stood up in Federal Parliament, in January 1992, and recognised the Modern State of Croatia as a sovereign nation when in our darkest hour under attack we looked to the world for affirmation. To me that moment defined the crowning accomplishment of the Australian Croatian Community and justified our struggle, but it didn’t and never will justify what we were subjected to.
We cry for Lustration in our matriarchal homeland, yet is it paramount that this action must start in the heartland we call the Diaspora, our Diaspora, our Australia.
John Ovcaric
I put it to every reader that just as Prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised to indigenous Australians back in 2007 for the indiscretions imposed upon them as a culture, that we, as persecuted Australian Citizens of the day are as deserving of such an apology from the current Labor Party on behalf of their leaders in the Whitlam Government of 1973.
I call upon you, the reader, to deny Tony Jones his moment in the sun and send him back to the crypt of corruption deceit and treachery from whence the material he writes about came from.
I call upon every Croat, every Australian born citizen with a drop of Croatian blood running through their veins to protest the malicious play of words in the “20th Man”.
I call upon every one of you who read this to commit to signing a petition to the Attorney General of Australia and to the leader of the Labor Opposition calling upon him to apologise in Federal Parliament on behalf of his party and its predecessors to the Croatian community.
I call upon the Government of the day to release all documents highlighting and exposing the affairs of the Government of the day in its dealings with the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and to enter into Lustration, providing the Australian public with details of all information of a personal or communal nature that was transmitted to the FSRY.
Finally, I call upon the same Government to bear pressure on the Republic of Croatia to also Lustrate and reveal through the opening of its FSRY files all information collected and used against both Australian Croatians and their families under siege at that time in Croatia.
Lustration starts in Australia, and as the campaign slogan of the ALP in 1972 stated, “It’s Time”
I would urge you all to speak to your loved ones of that time, learn the stories of what we endured and then take a moment to visit the following Australian Human Rights Commission page which clearly compliments and demonstrates our rights which in my opinion are retrospective and applicable to the circumstances of the 1970’s.
https://www.humanrights.gov.au/…/racial-vilification-law-au…