BYE BYE GAZA - Barry Chamish

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The Party of Right was doomed to remain on the fringe of
Croatian national politics within the Empire. But it was an
attractive ideology when it was discovered by a young lawyer
from Bradina, a small village in present-day Bosnia-
Hercegovina, named Ante Pavelic.
Ante Pavelic rose through the ranks of the Party of Right
after the incorporation of Croatia into the Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes, later to be renamed Yugoslavia. He
led the far right-wing of what was already a right-wing party -
the "Frankist" faction, so named after Josip Frank, a
singularly intolerant man despite his ethnic background as an
assimilated Jew.
On January 6, 1929, King Alexander Karadjordjevic declared
his personal dictatorship. Among those who sought refuge
abroad was Ante Pavelic. After drifting rather aimlessly
through Vienna, he established a relationship with Ivan
"Vancia" Mihailov's faction of the Internal Macedonian
Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), a terrorist organization
founded more than thirty years before aimed at establishing
Bulgarian hegemony in Macedonia. It is believed that
Mihailov recommended Pavelic to Italian duce Benito
Mussolini, who soon became patron, providing funds and
training at a camp near Siena to what Pavelic christened his
ustase.
From the beginning, Pavelic had quite naturally adopted
Starcevic and Frank's ideology for his own movement. As
with the Italian Fascists, the Ustase was at its origins
xenophobic, and author Stella Alexander's description of
some articles in the Croatian Catholic press from this time as
"unpleasantly anti-Semitic but in a traditional, pre-Hitlerian
way" fits the Ustase as well. Ante Pavelic's own wife, Mara
Lovrencic, came from a family of assimilated Viennese Jews,
and his chief aide in exile, Dido Kvaternik, was related to
Josip Frank. Nevertheless, the movement became both
overtly and violently anti-Semitic when the center of gravity
for the militant right shifted from Rome to Berlin and Hitler's
Nazi Party.