Bureaucracy: ASIO DELAYS OVER SPY FILE

ASIO DELAYS OVER SPY FILE

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the nation’s counter-intelligence agency, has inexplicably delayed responding to a request for a file on a former communist Yugoslav diplomat who might be linked to the Croatian Six case.

Sasha Uzunov, an Australian independent film maker and journalist, has tried to obtain under Australia’s National Archive Act access to the ASIO file of the late Dr Georgi Trajkovski, the Yugoslav Consul General in Melbourne during 1978-79.

Any federal government documents over 30 years become open to the public. Exemptions can apply on the grounds of national security. However, ASIO has 90 days to respond to any request.

So far Uzunov’s request, made on 4 November 2011, has taken almost double that time.

“I’ve made other requests for files and ASIO has responded within a matter of weeks,” He said. “I don’t know why this has taken over 150 days, almost double the time, just for a simple answer of yes or no.”

Uzunov, who is producing a documentary film about Yugoslav spying on Australia soil, titled UDBa down under, believes there is strong circumstantial evidence to link Trajkovski to the Croatian Six Case.

One of Australia’s worst miscarriages of justice, the Croatian Six terrorism case in 1979-80, may have been perpetrated by Trajkovski, a master spy posing as a diplomat and who, would you believe it, not once but twice managed to outsmart Australia’s domestic spy catchers, ASIO, and even shook hands with an unsuspecting Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser.

Intelligence sources in Washington and in the Republic of Macedonia, one of the successor states of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), have confirmed that Dr Georgi Trajkovski, the Yugoslav Consul General in Melbourne, Australia during 1978-79 was “hardcore UDBa (Yugoslav intelligence) and a key player in the Croatian Six set up.”

In 1988, Trajkovski with the same modus operandi, the use of agent provocateurs and exaggerated claims of anti-Yugoslav subversion, had a fellow Yugoslav diplomat removed from his post in Melbourne right under the nose of ASIO.

In 1991 legendary ABC TV investigative reporter Chris Masters dropped a bombshell on the Four Corners program about The Croatian Six case.

An agent provocateur set up members of Australia's Croatian community in 1979. Six Croats were imprisoned on false charges of wanting to plant bombs in Sydney.

Masters tracked down the agent provocateur, Vitomir Visimovic, who was an ethnic Serb living in Bosnia but had passed himself off as a Croat.

In fact, ASIO, the Australian Federal Police (successor of the Commonwealth Police) and the infamous and corrupt New South Wales Police Special Branch were all aware that Visimovic was an UDBa operative but suppressed the information during the trial of the Croatian Six. Moreover, the alarming thing was the Australian authorities let the man depart the country. This was during Malcolm Fraser’s tenure as Prime Minister (1975-83).

An UDBa hitman Vinko Sindicic was arrested in Scotland in 1988 after a failed assassination attempt on Croat dissident Nikola Stedul. At Sindicic's trial it was revealed he “had been in Australia in 1978, working with another Yugoslav agent on a plan to link Croatian political activists with terrorism.”

Hamish McDonald, an award winning Australian journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, has been following the Croatian Six case. He had this write on the subject: 

“In a new video, the Macedonian-Australian documentary journalist Sasha Uzunov says he has evidence Sindicic set up the Croatian six conspiracy with the main UDBa official in Australia, Georgi Trajkovski, who operated under diplomatic cover as Yugoslav consul-general in Melbourne."

Links:

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1107/S00270/who-was-the-croatian-six-mastermind.htm

Previews of UDBa down under

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuMIDTPyGe0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMA0QTTayxE

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EMAILS – Request for ASIO FILE on Dr Georgi Trajkovski (reference number 11/21566 - National Archive of Australia)

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Subject: RE: Your Inquiry - Ref: 11/21566 [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:59:41 +1000

From: ######@naa.gov.au

To: sashauzunov@hotmail.com

UNCLASSIFIED

Dear Mr Uzunov,

Unfortunately we have not yet received a response from ASIO, however please be assured that we will continue to process your application and will notify you as soon as we receive a response. 

As it has gone over the 90 days you do have rights of appeal which are outlined in the following link:

http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs12.aspx

Sincerely, ######

	t  02 6212 3924 f  02 6212 3999 e        @naa.gov.au
	Queen Victoria Terrace,Parkes ACT 2600 PO Box 7425, Canberra Business Centre ACT 2610

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From: Sasha Uzunov [mailto:sashauzunov@hotmail.com] 


Sent: Tuesday, 10 April 2012 10:31 AM


To: ######

Subject: RE: Your Inquiry - Ref: 11/21566 [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Hi ####,

Its been over 4 months (120 days) and no response on this request?

cheers

sasha

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Subject: RE: Your Inquiry - Ref: 11/21566 [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]


Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2012 09:36:38 +1100


From: ######@naa.gov.au


To: sashauzunov@hotmail.com

UNCLASSIFIED

Dear Mr Uzunov,

I refer to your request for an update on your request for ASIO files relating to Dr Georgi Trajkovski.

Unfortunately I have not yet received a response from ASIO, however please be assured that we will continue to process your application and will notify you as soon as we receive a response.

Sincerely,

 ###########

Reference Officer

Reference and Information Services 
Access and Communication

National Archives of Australia


Queen Victoria Terrace, Parkes ACT 2600 
PO Box 7425, Canberra Business Centre ACT 2610  t 02 6212 3924 f  02 6212 3999
e   ####@naa.gov.au


naa.gov.au

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From: Sasha Uzunov [mailto:sashauzunov@hotmail.com]

Sent: Thursday, 2 February 2012 7:14 PM


To: ########

Subject: Your Inquiry - Ref: 11/21566 [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Dear #####

Just wanting to know any progress on my request?

cheers

Mr Sasha Uzunov

mob 0419 635 808

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From: Sasha Uzunov <sashauzunov@hotmail.com>


Date: 4 November 2011 1:42:12 PM AEDT


To: ########>


Subject: RE: Your Inquiry - Ref: 11/21566 [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Thanks ##### for the quick response.

Georgi Trajkovski was under ASIO surveillance between 1977, 78, 79. He was Yugoslavia's consul general in Melbourne. He may have been a Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa / SDB) officer under diplomatic cover.

Cheers Sasha.  

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Subject: Your Inquiry - Ref: 11/21566 [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]


Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2011 13:06:41 +1100
From:

########@naa.gov.au


To: sashauzunov@hotmail.com

UNCLASSIFIED

Dear Ms Uzunov,

Thank you for your request for an ASIO file relating to Dr Georgi Trajkovski.

ASIO records are eligible for release under the Archives Act 1983 after 30 years, subject to exemption of any material of continuing sensitivity as prescribed by section 33 of the ACT.  They are generally only transferred to the Archives in response to applications for access under the Archives act.

In order to submit an application to ASIO I need you to provide the following information about Dr Georgi Trajovski:

Date of Birth
Period you believe he was under surveillance (eg. 19XX-19XX)
State he was living in a time of suspected surveillance
Reason you believe he was under surveillance (eg. Membership of organisations, participation in events, etc)

Once I receive this information I will submit the application to ASIO, and I will contact you as soon as we receive a response. Please note this process can take up to 90 days.

Sincerely,

#########

Reference Officer

National Archives of Australia - Canberra Office 


Telephone: (02) 6212 3924
Fax: (02) 6212 3999
Email: ######@naa.gov.au

CAN WE TRUST ASIO?

ON LINE opinion - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13223

CAN WE TRUST ASIO?
by Sasha Uzunov
Thursday 9 February 2012

Mr David Irvine, the Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Australia's domestic spooks, has called for more spies from within the country's Islamic communities, but can ASIO be trusted to do an efficient job? History shows that our counter-intelligence service has a poor record in thwarting foreign spies. Should Australia's Islamic communities place their trust in such an organisation to do the right thing?

Terrorism-mania in Australia is nothing new; we experienced this back in the 1970s when émigré Croats were portrayed as the bad guy, a role now filled by Australia's Muslims. In fact ASIO remains a laughing stock within the émigré Croatian and Macedonian communities for its decades long ineptitude in dealing with the then Communist Yugoslav secret police, UDBa, and its dirty tricks campaign against those two communities on Australian soil at the height of the Cold War.

I have spent 20 years researching UDBa activities in Australia and will soon complete producing a documentary film about UDBa in Australia, with a release date in early 2013. I have interviewed Croatian and Macedonian community leaders, Australian state police officers involved in counter-intelligence operations, and former spies both here in Australia and overseas. They all agree that UDBa ran rings around ASIO.

In one infamous case, ASIO recruited a “double agent” within Melbourne's Macedonian community during the 1970s. This individual was also an agent of influence for UDBa. What benefit he gave to ASIO remains doubtful and only when the secret files are declassified will we know for sure.

But according to a Victorian Police counter-terrorism expert, the late Detective Senior Constable Geoff Gardiner, this “double agent” had an extensive list of criminal convictions ranging from illegal gaming, receiving stolen goods, selling liquor without a license to passing off a counterfeit cheque in 1978 in the name of Red Star Belgrade (Crvena Zvezda) Soccer club, then touring Australia from Yugoslavia.

This individual was employed as a public servant and never underwent a standard police check. According to Detective Gardiner, this individual was being protected at the very top.

Mr Aco Talevski, a former Macedonian Orthodox Church Community leader in Melbourne and a long standing human rights activist, revealed in a filmed interview for my documentary that Detective Gardiner had in the mid 1980s also tipped him off about the “double agent.”

We can only be grateful that such individual police officers with integrity existed in the state of Victoria and did not buy the ASIO or UDBa spin.

Across the border in New South Wales, corrupt Police with ASIO connivance arrested six innocent Croatians suspected of plotting to blow up Sydney's water supply in 1979. The six were imprisoned on the testimony of a known UDBa agent provocateur who ASIO allowed to return to Yugoslavia.

The Australian taxpayer cannot have a vote of confidence that ASIO has picked up its game in fighting terrorism if it remains secretive and refuses to come clean over the whole Yugoslav episode dating back to the Cold War. ASIO refuses to hand over any documents relating to the Croatian Six case on the grounds of national security but more likely to hide its incompetence and political interference from above.

During the Cold War, Communist multi-ethnic Yugoslavia under the rule of strongman Marshal Tito used its intelligence service UDBa to portray émigrés opposed to the regime as bloodthirsty terrorists. Agent provocateurs infiltrated Croat and Macedonian organisations abroad and urged violent action against the regime, namely planting bombs against Yugoslav diplomatic missions.

This clever technique used to silence opposition abroad was created by the Tsarist Russian police in the late 1890s and later perfected by the Bolsheviks when they seized power during the October Revolution in 1917. UDBa would use the exact same technique, known as the TRUST operations.

In the 1920s, the Soviet Secret service, which began as the Cheka and evolved along the way as OGPU/NKVD/KGB, began to “lure émigré agents into the arms of the OGPU, including the Trust, an imaginary counter-revolutionary union of monarchists and social revolutionaries.” In other words, Russian dissidents living in Paris were fooled into returning to fight the Soviet regime but were executed on their arrival.

In the early 1970s UDBa managed to lure Croat nationalists back to Yugoslavia in a similar manner. UDBa also infiltrated some Macedonian organisations in Western Europe, namely Belgium, and Australia. In 1977 a leading Macedonian dissident Dragan Bogdanovski, with a large following in Australia, was kidnapped from France, drugged and smuggled out in the boot of a Yugoslav diplomatic car and returned to Yugoslavia to face trial and later 11 years imprisonment. Amnesty International adopted him as a cause celebrity.

The only prominent academic to undertake a serious examination of UDBa remains the American Dr John Schindler. So far dribs and drabs of ASIO files have been released under the 30-year rule and can be accessed at the National Archive of Australia in Canberra.

Dr Schindler's discoveries reveal how Western governments turned a blind eye to UDBa because Yugoslavia, despite being communist during the Cold War was anti-Soviet. In other words political expediency trumped rule of law and justice. In this current war on terror what guarantees do we have that ASIO will adhere to the principles of justice when pursuing Islamic terrorists and not lock up innocent people?

If Mr Irvine wants to build trust within the country's Islamic communities he needs to set the record straight with the Croat and Macedonian communities over ASIO's past behavior. Otherwise will we be condemned to see innocent Muslim locked up on the word of agent provocateurs acting on their own agenda?

BULGARIA'S HOLOCAUST DENIAL

Unsung heroes: Macedonian Partizans who fought Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Bulgaria (1941-45) enter the southern Macedonian town of Bitola, after liberating it from the Germans during fierce battles in November 1944.

Estreja Ovadija - Mara : Macedonian-Jewish Partizan Hero killed during World War II. (photo: Yad Vashem)

On Remembrance Day - 11 November– Lest We Forget

BULGARIA'S HOLOCAUST DENIAL

by Sasha Uzunov

In a shameful episode, the European Union's newest member Bulgaria has kicked up a stink about an upcoming Macedonian film which deals with Bulgaria's extermination of Macedonian Jews during World War II.

Bulgarian Members of the European Parliament, who seemed to have forgotten their country's well documented Nazi collaboration, have in effect resorted to blackmailing the EU's Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule in putting pressure on The Republic of Macedonia, which has applied for EU membership.

The film, “The third half time,” is a Macedonian production with international funding about a soccer match in 1942 between two teams in the Bulgarian soccer league, Levski and Makedonia. Makedonia is made up of ethnic Macedonians living under Bulgarian wartime occupation and coached by a Jew, who in the film, is being targeted for death by Bulgarian fascists.

see links: www.euractiv.com/enlargement/macedonian-film-infuriates-bulgaria-news-508639

Macedonian film infuriates Bulgaria

http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/18997/45/

'Third Halftime' filming kicks off

In 1941 Bulgaria under Tsar (Emperor) Boris became an ally of Nazi Germany and his armies invaded Macedonia, which had been under Serbian and Greek occupation. Ethnic Macedonians looked upon the Bulgarian Army as occupiers. On 11 October 1941 a Macedonian Partizan resistance uprising took place in the town of Prilep.

As Bulgarian occupation became more brutal, more and more young Macedonians joined the resistance and took to the mountains and engaged in guerilla, hit and run, ambush style warfare. Macedonian Jews fared worst. In 1943, over 7,000 Jews were rounded up by the Bulgarian security forces and sent to Nazi death camps. Ninety-eight percent of Macedonia's Jewish population was wiped out, even though Bulgaria managed to save its own Jews.

For decades Bulgaria had been boasting of its humanitarian record during World War II over its treatment of Jews. But the genocide in Macedonia has put a huge stain on that record.

In September 1944, with Nazi Germany losing the war, a communist coup led to Bulgaria, conveniently, changing sides and joining the Allies.

Macedonia later became a constituent republic within Marshal Tito's Federal Communist Yugoslavia in 1945 until 1991, when it became an independent state during the break up of Yugoslavia. Bulgaria, ironically enough, recognised the new state but not the ethnicity or language of Macedonians. Bulgarian nationalists, both on the left and right, deny the existence of a separate Macedonian identity, as does Greece, as do some Serbian nationalists.

Macedonians maintain they are a separate people, and who during World War II began a resistance movement against Bulgarian, Italian and Nazi German occupation of their homeland.

By the end of the war, over 80,000 Macedonians, including a small group of surviving Jews, were in the People's Liberation Army of Macedonia (NOV na M), which later was forcibly merged with Tito's Yugoslav Liberation Army (NOVJ).

Ethnic Macedonians in Greece established an anti-Nazi resistance movment known as NOF, which Greek writers refer to as SNOF (Slavo-Macedonian National Liberation Front). NOF linked up with NOV na M in operations against the Germans.

The Macedonian Partizans in an uneasy alliance consisted of communist and non-communists. One of the leaders of the resistance was Metodija Andonov-Cento, a non-communist who later was imprisoned on trumped up charges by Marshal Tito in 1946.

Estreja Ovadja-Mara, a young Macedonian Jewish Partizan was proclaimed a national hero and has a statue in her honour in her home town of Bitola (Monastir).

According to the Yad Vashem website:

www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/communities/monastir/partisans.asp

"In March 1943, on the eve of the deportation of the Jews from the town, Ovadja and some of her friends went underground, and a short while later joined the ‘Goce Delchev’ partisan unit, where she became the company's political commissar. Despite her non-combat role, she joined her unit for the majority of their battles, claiming her right to fight.

“With the establishment of the Seventh Macedonian Brigade, Ovadja was appointed regiment political commissar. In the early hours of the 26 August 1944, she was killed in a battle near the Greek border while attacking, as head of her unit, the last German fortresses in the Kaymakchalan Mountains.”

Considering Macedonia's tiny population, over 25,000 soldiers from the NOV na M were sent to assist the NOVJ at the Syrmian Front (Sremski Front) in North-Eastern Serbia in early 1945, one of the last major battles in the Balkans as the German Army were order to fight to the bitter end. This was to allow the retreat from the Eastern Front by other German forces back to Greater Germany and stop the Soviet Union entering German territory.

My great uncle Mitre Vrckovski was killed at the Syrmian Front serving with the NOV na M. He has a street named in his honour in Bitola.

Links:

http://israeljewishnews.blogspot.com/2011/02/bulgarian-holocaust-atrocities-revealed.html

Israeli Jewish News, February 11, 2011

Bulgarian Holocaust ATROCITIES Revealed: 13,000 Ladino Speaking Jews Deported By Bulgaria Remain Dirty Secret Until Now

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_War_of_Macedonia

National Liberation War of Macedonia

DID BULGARIA PROVOKE WAR IN MACEDONIA?

Map of The Republic of Macedonia during the 2001 Albanian Insurgency.
source: wikipedia

Part 1: Bulgarian Intelligence operations in Western Europe during the 1990s....

DID BULGARIA PROVOKE WAR IN MACEDONIA?

by Sasha Uzunov

The Republic of Macedonia celebrated its 20^th anniversary of independence on 8 September 2011. This year also marked a decade of the short-lived ethnic Albanian insurgency in that tiny Balkan state. Did neighbouring Bulgaria, for its own strategic ends, light the fuse to long standing tensions between ethnic Albanians and Macedonians?

Is Bulgaria's long term strategic goal in creating instability in Macedonia! That is making the new state non-viable and absorbed by a Greater Bulgaria, a century old aspiration of ultra Bulgarian nationalists?

The Balkans region of South-Eastern Europe has throughout history been a political powder keg. Not surprisingly, conspiracy theories have become the past time in many of the Balkan states. You will find crackpots blaming the CIA, Henry Kissinger, ex-KGB, the Vatican, Zionists, Islamic fundamentalists, the Freemasons for whatever misfortune occurs, including the current economic collapse in Greece and natural disasters such as earthquakes.

Macedonia managed to break away from the then crumbling Serb dominated Yugoslav federation in 1991 without bloodshed, unlike Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bulgaria, under its president Zhelyu Zhelev, was one of the first states to recognise Macedonia's independence but not its language or ethnicity. Intellectual circles in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, regard Macedonians as misguided “Western Bulgarians” who need to be coaxed gently back into the fold. Bulgaria tried unsuccessfully with brutal force during two world wars to achieve this objective.

In 2001 an ethnic Albanian insurgency erupted in the western part of Macedonia and, fortunately, it was short lived. But its legacy engendered mistrust on both sides.

Before the conflict, there had been an awkward but peaceful co-existence between the Macedonians, predominately Orthodox Christian and comprising 70 to 75% of the population, and the Albanians, largely Sunni Muslim, and about 20% of the population. But with simmering ethnic tensions just below the surface, ready to bubble over.

Macedonian nationalists were alarmed at the high birth rate of the Albanians and their alleged unwillingness to assimilate and their support for a Greater Albania. Moreover, as Macedonia had never been independent for over a millennium, there was a fear of losing territory.

The Albanians on the other hand complained of being marginalised in public service jobs and education, and their basic rights denied.

Since its independence in 1991, ethnic Albanian parties have been a coalition partner in successive Macedonian governments in order to allay these fears. Under Yugoslav rule, the communists were hard on Macedonian nationalists or those with mild patriotic aspirations as well. Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) spent years silencing dissent abroad with assassinations or scare tactics.

Into this volatile mix came the 1999 Kosovo War. Macedonia permitted NATO to operate on its territory to launch attacks and push the Serbs out of the region. Consequently, tiny impoverished Macedonia was swamped by thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing the war.

Two years later, a group calling itself the National Liberation Army launched an uprising in Western Macedonia claiming to be fighting for Albanian human rights. Initially, the West labelled this group as a terrorist or organised crime element but realising that it may have been aligned to the Kosovo Liberation Army, and a de-facto ally of NATO, changed its tune, according to Canadian journalist and award winning war reporter Scott Taylor. In other words, the KLA warriors were accused of going from freedom fighters against the Serbs to territorial expansionists in Western Macedonia.

So if Macedonia had opened its door to NATO and Western media scrutiny in 1999, then how was it that war, purporting to be fought for Albanian human rights, was permitted to erupt in 2001? Were both Albanians and Macedonians manipulated into a conflict?

Up until 1998, a United Nations peacekeeping force (UNPREDEP), including US troops, was deployed on Macedonia's borders to stop aggression at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic in his quest for a Greater Serbia or weapons smuggling by Kosovo Albanian separatist.

UNPREDEP managed the job well. But for some crazy reason, Macedonia's Foreign Minister Vasil Tupurkovski recognised Taiwan and all hell broke loose in the UN Security Council. Security Council permanent member the People's Republic of China in an act of retaliation withdrew support for the UNPREDEP mission. Macedonia's border now became a sieve: with criminal gangs or terrorists able to come and go.

But why did the Macedonian government at the time, headed by Prime Minister Ljupco Georgievski of the nationalist party VMRO-DPMNE ignore the threat?

Edward Joseph in his in-depth study: MACEDONIA’S PUBLIC SECRET: HOW CORRUPTION, DRAGS THE COUNTRY DOWN, 14 August 2002, for the think tank, International Crisis Group, wrote:

“The see-no-evil posture of the Macedonian police allowed smuggling villages like Tanusevci (which lies on the border, 36 kilometers north of Skopje) to become, in effect, “free territories”. The village not only became the transit point for contraband, it also served as a recruiting and training base for Albanian radicals active in the nearby Presevo Valley of southern Serbia.”

However, Joseph dismisses the conspiracy theory, largely popular in Macedonia, that there was collusion between Georgievski's VMRO-DPMNE and its coalition partner Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) to start a war in order to divide territory.

“Despite the evidence to the contrary, the notion that there was a “deal” to divide Macedonia persists. Even many of those who concede that the conflict was not the result of a grand conspiracy believe that the ruling parties colluded at least to manipulate public opinion during its course.”

However, in the footnotes he cites:

The notion of a VMRO – Albanian deal to divide the country dates back to the interwar period, and as well, the Fascist Bulgarian and Albanian period during World War II.

The 2001 Albanian insurgency was brought to a quick end and a deal known as the Ohrid Framework Agreement was signed by the Georgievski's government, DPA and the Albanian insurgents under Ali Ahmeti's command.

In what appears to be a case of sour grapes at Macedonia not being partitioned and with racist overtones, Georgievski called for a Berlin-style wall. But it was criticised by a leading expert:

“...a wall [to] be built if necessary to divide ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian populations accepts the possibility of considerable violence in realising the proposed territorial division. Even were such a division to occur without bloodshed, however, it would generate a new set of problems likely to further threaten the already tenuous stability of the region. On the one hand, cession to Albania of an artificially created ethnic Albanian enclave could upset the country’s (sub-)ethnic balance between Ghegs and Tosks.

"On the other hand, the loss of territory and population from the Republic of Macedonia would call into question the country’s existence not only for reasons of size, but also because such truncation could lead to clashes between serbophile and bulgarophile elements of the ethnic Macedonian population intent on union with neighbouring states already short on administrative capacity. Thus, while ethnic partition might promise to ethnic Albanian and ethnic Macedonian populations an escape from deadlock over the Framework Agreement, such an arrangement would pose a greater danger than does wrangling on implementation.”

(THE SPECTRE OF TERRITORIAL DIVISION AND THE OHRID AGREEMENT, by Eben Friedman, European Centre for Minority Issues, Brief # 9 July 2003).

Before we go any further or even dip back into history, we have to mention that Georgievski left VMRO- DPMNE, some say he was pushed out, to set up his own political party. He has taken to the Macedonian media with all sorts of controversial statements about Macedonian identity, allegations that his previous party was pro-Serbo-Yugoslav, the danger of Greater Albania, and calls for closer links to Bulgaria.

He told Milenko Nedelovski of Macedonian TV station Kanal 5 in 2009:

“In the Republic of Macedonia from 1945 and again from 1990, it's no secret that to be considered a Macedonian patriot you had to spit on Bulgaria...”

On the allegation of Georgievski holding dual Macedonian and Bulgarian citizenship, the former Prime Minister mentioned his cabinet colleague at the time, the bombastic Ljube Boskovski having Croatian citizenship.

Nedelovski's response: “the Croats don't deny the existence of our [Macedonian] name, language, nation, church [as the Bulgarians do].”

Georgievski's “Berlin War” solution is nothing new. However, the startling thing about it was back in the early 1990s, shadowy emigre groups in Western Europe with possible connections to Bulgarian intelligence were calling for the same solution !

In 1992 I had the good fortune of meeting Mr Goce Vidanovski, a long time Macedonian community leader and activist in Belgium. Vidanovski had spent decades trying to keep out Yugoslav and Bulgarian interference within his community. In doing so he lived with the possibility of being on the end of an assassin's bullet.

Belgium, because of its small size and lax policing, was a hub for UDBa operations in the 1970s and 80s against emigre political opponents living in Western Europe. Zeljko Raznjatovic-Arkan, the Serb warlord began his career as a petty criminal and bank robber in Belgium before graduating to UDBa hit man.

Likewise, Macedonian groups and individuals with pro-Bulgarian affiliations were active in Belgium as well. Vidanovski introduced me to them. One such individual strongly believed that Macedonia's salvation lay with the country being partitioned along the river Vardar, with the west going to Albania and the east linking up with “Mother Bulgaria.”

His reasoning was that Bulgaria needed a buffer zone against the Albanians. He also made the outrageous claim that the Bulgarian authorities had established camps for refugees fleeing from Macedonia into Bulgaria should war erupt. This individual was also free to travel to Bulgaria before and after the communist period in that country. A remarkable feat considering Bulgaria was one of the Soviet Union's staunchest allies during the Cold War (1946-90) and kept a close watch on who entered or left the country.

As I began to examine closely Bulgarian intelligence operations in Western Europe, I received a number of threatening phone calls during my stay in Belgium...

Coming soon: PART 2 – Bulgarian Intelligence's ferocious reputation.

The fight against Yugoslav intelligence

SECOND part in a series on Yugoslav intelligence acitivities on Australian soil from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

PATRIOT GAMES: ONE MAN’S FIGHT AGAINST UDBa
By Sasha Uzunov

During the 1970s, 80s and early 90s, an intelligence war was waged by the communist regime of Yugoslavia to intimidate and silence Australia’s Macedonian migrant community but one man, George Kostrevski, managed to fight the good fight.

In 1991, I met the feisty and well respected Kostrevski who was President of the Australian-Macedonian Welfare Council, in Melbourne’s western suburbs and a champion of free political thought. The AMWC is now known as the Macedonian Community Welfare Association (MCWA).

Kostrevski, who was a Socialist-Left Australian Labor Party (ALP) member and an admirer of legendary ALP right-wing kingmaker George Seitz, alleged that in 1983 he had been ordered by a local Yugoslav agent of influence in July 1983 to: “hold the Yugoslav political line…or he would not be allowed to return to Macedonia to visit relatives.”

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic communist federation founded in 1945, modeled on the Soviet Union, and fell apart in 1991 into various independent nation states of Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) later known as SDB, together with Yugoslav military counter-intelligence (KOS) were largely pre-occupied with silencing dissident Croats, Macedonians, Serbs and Albanians living in Western Europe, North America and Australia, who were agitating for independence from Yugoslavia.

UDBa was so ruthless and efficient it at one time rivaled the old Soviet KGB in liquidating opponents.

Communist strongman Marshal Josip Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia until his death in 1980 and during the height of the Cold War managed a great balancing act between East and West. He was seen as an indirect ally of the West after his infamous split with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1949.

In the 1970s and 80s, a number of Australian left-wing politicians, including Victorian State MP Joan Coxsedge, began to allege that ASIO was turning a blind eye to extremist Croatian elements, who were secretly training on Australian soil to undertake terrorist attacks on Yugoslav territory or upon Yugoslav diplomatic missions in Australia.

In this atmosphere of terrorism mania during the 1970s Australia’s Croat community were looked upon as the bad guy. We now know that the alleged Croatian terrorism on Australian soil was the work of UDBa agent provocateurs.

Mr David Perrin, a Liberal Victorian (Australian) State Member of Parliament for Bulleen, in 1990 accused in parliament the Melbourne-based and tax-payer funded Australian Yugoslav Welfare Society (AYWS) of being a front for Yugoslav intelligence.

Kostrevski, despite the fear generated by Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa), refused to be silenced. He had tried to raise this issue with his comrades within the ALP Socialist Left but it fell on deaf ears. In frustration he met with the Liberal Perrin at the MP’s electoral office in June 1991. Kostrevski invited me to sit in on the discussion and asked I keep this quiet whilst he was alive in case his family was targeted.

Kostrevski named names, dates, places and extraordinary detail as to the activities of UDBa in Melbourne, in particular how Macedonian community organisations had been infiltrated.

He passed away in 2002 and was granted a posthumous Victorian State Award for Excellence in Multicultural Affairs.

Kostrevski was a humanitarian who believed in non-violence to combat UDBa as well as proving welfare services to his community. It would be fitting if The Republic of Macedonia, which broke away from communist Yugoslavia in 1991, awarded him a high state order posthumously for his services in defending human rights and freedom of speech.




PART 1 – published in scoop.co.nz


http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1003/S00021.htm
Tuesday, March 02, 2010

ASIO’S POOR RECORD
By Sasha Uzunov

The alleged use of Australian passports by Mossad--Israeli intelligence—agents in a recent Middle East assassination suggest an impotent Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), which is responsible for our domestic safety. But ASIO has a poor record in tracking down the bad guys.

In 2006 The Australian reporter Cameron Stewart revealed that Chinese communist spies were running rampant in Canberra so much so that ASIO increased it recruitment of agents.
www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/spy-drive-to-tackle-chinese/story-e6frg6nf-1111112747905

Columnist John Birmingham has taken the mickey out of ASIO’s slick new job ads in search of nosey, latte-sipping spies. www.theage.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/the-man-with-the-golden--cufflinks-and-matching-tie-pin/20100224-p39q.html

It is both tragic and comical but ASIO has a poor record in catching the bad guys. The 1970s infiltration of Australia by then Yugoslav communist spies is a classic case.

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic communist federation founded in 1945, modelled on the Soviet Union, and fell apart in 1991 into various independent nation states.

Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) later known as SDB, together with Yugoslav military counter-intelligence (KOS) were largely pre-occupied with silencing dissident Croats, Macedonians, Serbs and Albanians living in Western Europe, North America and Australia, who were agitating for independence from Yugoslavia.

UDBa was so ruthless and efficient it at one time rivalled the old Soviet KGB and Mossad in liquidating opponents. In Munich, West Germany, a whole section of a cemetery was set-aside for Croats assassinated by UDBa.

Communist strongman Marshal Josip Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia until his death in 1980 and during the height of the Cold War managed a great balancing act between East and West. He was seen as an indirect ally of the West after his infamous split with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1949.

A number of Australian left-wing politicians, including Victorian State MP Joan Coxsedge, began to allege that ASIO was turning a blind eye to extremist Croatian elements, who were secretly training on Australian soil to undertake terrorist attacks on Yugoslav territory or upon Yugoslav diplomatic missions in Australia.

In this atmosphere of terrorism mania during the 1970s Australia’s Croat community were looked upon as the bad guy.

No doubt this was not helped by the fact that a sizeable number of Croats during World War II had collaborated with the Nazis. However, a large number had also fought against the Nazis as Partizans, including Franjo Tudjman later to become President of independent Croatia in 1991. But UDBa began to target the émigré Macedonian community in Australia, which had no history of large-scale Nazi collaboration, in fact the opposite.

Then there is Federal Attorney General Lionel Murphy’s infamous ASIO raid on 16 March 1973.
So much has been written about Murphy’s raid on ASIO. The controversial politician used the pretext that he was being kept in the dark by ASIO about alleged émigré Croatian terrorism on Australian soil aimed against the Yugoslav government. ALP Prime Minister Gough Whitlam said the Murphy raid was a mistake which hurt his government.

On 27 June 2007, I applied under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the media briefing notes of George Negus, Murphy’s Press Secretary and later celebrity war reporter, hoping if they could throw more light on the raid. But I ended hitting a bureaucratic brick wall.

We now know that the alleged Croatian terrorism on Australian soil was the work of UDBa. In 1991 legendary ABC TV investigative reporter Chris Masters dropped a bombshell on the Four Corners program.

Masters filed a story about The Croatian Six case. An agent provocateur set up members of Australia's Croatian community in 1979. Six Croats were imprisoned on false charges of wanting to plant bombs in Sydney. Masters tracked down the agent provocateur, Vitomir Visimovic, who was an ethnic Serb living in Bosnia but had passed himself off as a Croat.

In fact, ASIO, the Australian Federal Police (successor of the Commonwealth Police) and the infamous and corrupt New South Wales Police Special Branch were all aware that Visimovic was an UDBa operative but suppressed the information during the trial of the Croatian Six. Moreover, the alarming thing was the Australian authorities let the man depart the country. This was during Malcolm Fraser’s tenure as Prime Minister.

Masters’ older brother, fellow journalist and Rugby League Legend, Rugged Roy Masters wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on November 25, 2005:

“It is fashionable now to be a Croatian Australian, what with nearly half the Socceroos, including captain Mark Viduka, of Croatian background, plus Tony Santic, the owner of Makybe Diva, the triple Melbourne Cup-winning horse, and Andrew Bogut, the basketballer making a big impression in the United States.

“But when a young Scottish-born girl named Shirley, raised in north Queensland, started going out with Nikola Stedul, a Croatian-born cane cutter, in the early 1960s, her sister was horrified, asking, "Does he carry a knife?"

"Croatians were the bogymen then," Shirley, who married Stedul in 1965, said. "Like Muslims are today."

The Steduls, who live in the Melbourne suburb of Altona, after being adrift in Europe for 30 years because the Australian government would not renew Stedul's passport, warn the new anti-terrorism laws will create more problems than they are likely to solve. They claim a possible outcome is a society divided into the privileged and the proscribed, creating fertile ground for home-grown terrorism.

"Paradoxically, the police and security agencies will be more efficient but the population will be less secure," Stedul, 68, says.

“The Steduls accuse ASIO of conspiring with the Yugoslav secret police to prevent them returning to Australia and co-operating with a paid assassin, Vinko Sindicic, who fired six bullets into Stedul as he leaned through a car window outside their Edinburgh [UK] home on October 20, 1988.

“Two bullets entered his mouth and four were fired into his body, one nicking his spinal cord, causing a slight limp.

“Sindicic was arrested at Heathrow Airport after a neighbour had recorded the registration number of the hire car from which he had shot Stedul.

“The assassination attempt and the resulting trial, where Sindicic was sentenced to 32 years' jail, were given widespread publicity, and a film was produced for Scottish television. At the trial it was revealed that Sindicic had been in Australia in 1978, working with another Yugoslav agent on a plan to link Croatian political activists with terrorism.”

Television reporter Sarah Ferguson, the wife of ABC TV Lateline host Tony Jones, rehashed some of the discredited claims of Croatian terrorism on the now defunct Channel Nine program Sunday:

“The post-war migration boom brought not only cultural diversity, it brought ethnic divisions and old-country politics and foreign agents. It also spawned the first manifestations of domestic terrorism, a threat ASIO failed to deal with because the offenders were anti-communist Croatian nationalists.”

(The Spying Game, 2 April 2006, Sunday program)

Ferguson did not interview Chris Masters about his 1991 expose nor did she speak to anyone from the Croatian community.

Beacause my parents were Macedonian migrants to Australia, I naturally developed an interest in UDBa’s activities. I began to investigate the infiltration of the local Macedonian community by UDBa. My quest took me to Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia in 1993, which broke away from Yugoslavia together with Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1991. I spoke to Aleksander Dinevski, a former high-ranking official within the Interior Ministry, responsible for both the Police and Security Services.

Dinevski revealed he had read a number of files that confirmed UDBa had monitored and infiltrated Australia’s Macedonian community.

On 6 January 2006 I received a curious email out of the blue from Dr John Schindler, Associate Professor of Strategy and Policy, United States. Naval War College:

“I encountered your recent article discussing UDBa terrorism and was intrigued. I'm doing research into the topic of Yugoslav state security (UDBa, later SDB) anti-émigré operations during the Cold War, including assassinations.

“I've found some information you cite, including the ASIO scandals of the 1970s, but as an American I must confess some of the cases you cite (eg Croatian Six) were new to me. Have you published anything else on this topic? Any thoughts on where I ought to be looking for more info on UDBa operations in Australia?”

I explained to Dr Schindler that the Australian authorities, in particular ASIO, had turned a blind eye to UDBa operations on Australian soil or had tried to hush things up.

In 1974 Dr Blagoja Sambevski a Macedonian dissident living in West Germany was assassinated by having his skull smashed in ala Trotsky style by an UDBa hit man in a Munich train station. In 1981the hit man entered Australia on an unknown task but was quietly told to leave by immigration officials.

Mr David Perrin, a Liberal Victorian State MP for Bulleen, in 1990 accused in parliament the Melbourne-based and tax-payer funded Australian Yugoslav Welfare Society (AYWS) of being a front for Yugoslav intelligence.

Professor Nikola Zezov, an academic at Saints Kiril and Metodi (Cyril and Methodius) University in Skopje, has bravely explored Macedonia’s controversial communist past within Yugoslavia.

He is co-author of the 2005 ground-breaking book “The repressed and repression in contemporary Macedonian history” (Represijata I represiranite vo sovremena Makedonska istorija). He was given access to 14,000 intelligence files. He concluded that one in five Macedonians living in communist Yugoslavia (1945-91) were paid informers for UDBa. This is an alarming figure on par with East German communist intelligence, the Stasi, and its hold on the population.

In March 1993, Stevce Pavlovski, Macedonia’s Public Prosecutor told me in an interview he would not open an investigation into communist crimes because he would end up having to imprison fifty per cent of Macedonia’s old communists.

It is surprising that no Australian big name investigative reporter or scholar has ever bothered to access the old UDBa files held in the newly independent states of Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro (Crna Gora), and Kosovo. They must contain a goldmine of information on Australian politicians and journalists!

(end)

SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE?

Photos: Top-Scottish flag of Saint Andrew. Bottom-Scottish soldier stands guard at Edinburgh Castle, Scotland's capital city (photo by Philip Allfrey 2006).

After centuries of British rule, is it finally 'freedom for Scotland?' And what of Ulster and Wales?


ONLINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9848&page=0

Scotland the brave, Ulster the unsure?
By Sasha Uzunov - Wednesday, 23 December 2009

There are moves afoot in Scotland for a referendum on independence from the United Kingdom to be held next year. The likelihood of the UK falling apart into ethnic warfare à la Yugoslavia or Soviet Union is unlikely should the Scots reclaim their freedom from London.

However, in the event the referendum is successful (there are signs it may have difficulty getting over the line) then what of the future of the UK, including for Wales and the highly explosive Northern Ireland, also known as Ulster? In addition, there will also be other European Union members, such as Spain with its own restless Basque and Catalan ethnic groups, watching nervously from the sidelines.

The whole concept of “Britishness” is now being called into question. Can you be British and Scottish at the same time?

Hollywood has in recent times played a major part in popularising Scottish independence. High profile Oscar winning actor Sir Sean Connery has thrown his political weight behind it. Mel Gibson’s 1995 blockbuster film Braveheart, full on romance and action and light on historical accuracy, about Scottish hero Sir William Wallace’s brave fight for freedom from the nasty English king, Edward I (The Longshanks) in the late 13th century no doubt has raised public consciousness.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) emerged in the early 18th century with Northern Ireland a later addition. It consists of four major ethnic groups: the English, descendants of northern German tribes known as Angles and Saxons, also related to the Vikings, who arrived in the 5th century AD; and the indigenous Celts: Scottish, Welsh and Irish. The Germanic and Celtic languages are not related to each other. Prior to the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the Romans ruled Britain for three centuries.

The term Britannia and British originally refers to the Celtic inhabitants of the UK and the Celtic Bretons in modern day France. England evolved from the term Angle-land.

By 1066 “francofied” German tribes, the Normans, invaded England and spread a light French veneer over the Angles and Saxons. By the 17th century English dominance spread to most of the “British Isles” including the adjoining island of the largely Catholic Celtic Ireland.

English and Anglicised Scottish Protestants, later dubbed Scots-Irish, were sent as colonisers of Ireland. A fact largely ignored by both modern Irish and Ulster Union nationalists is that some of these Scots-Irish joined the native Irish Catholics in the 1798 Irish Rebellion against the British Crown, which was brutally suppressed with the assistance of the native Irish Catholic Church.

By 1921, the War of Irish Independence led by Eamon De Valera and Michael Collins successfully resulted in an Irish Free State and later, the Republic of Ireland (Eire) in the south largely populated by Catholics and a Northern Ireland tied directly to Great Britain. Some of the early Irish Nationalists were neither Irish nor Catholic but passionately believed in the cause. Robert Erskine Childers, a British Naval Intelligence officer decorated for bravery during World War I, comes to mind.

Since that time, political violence has inflicted Ulster as Irish Nationalists have fought for a United Ireland and the Ulster nationalists to maintain the status quo and their privileges. In 1969 the British government intervened by sending in the army to diffuse tensions between the long suffering Irish Catholic minority at the hands of the Protestant majority. Later the Provisional Irish Republic Army (PIRA), an organisation branded as terrorist by London, took up the fight for a united Ireland. The conflict has largely been viewed as a sectarian one, despite the ethnic dimension to it. Various ceasefires and peace plans have come into effect and at the moment the province is relatively quiet with former enemies sharing power.

One of the underlying fears of the Ulster Protestants has been the thought of becoming a “persecuted” minority in a united Ireland, should it ever take place. But others point out that the Republic of Ireland is a modern democratic state and member of the European Union along with the United Kingdom.

Scotland, Wales (its proper Welsh name is Cymru) and Northern Ireland have their own parliaments but Westminster in London retains control over the purse strings, foreign policy and the armed forces. The Queen, Elizabeth II, is the monarch for all four countries. At the Olympic Games, Great Britain marches as one team. In the FIFA soccer world cup competition the four have their own teams. Watching the Scottish national team play at a World Cup is an incredible spectacle. Instead of hearing the British national anthem of God Save the Queen, usually a lone bagpiper plays the stirring tune, Scotland the Brave.

If the United Kingdom was to unravel would it follow in the tragic path of the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, two multi-ethnic federations which spent nearly 70 years in one political form or another before imploding and transforming into many new nation-states? Probably not, but what effect would it have on the peace process in Northern Ireland?

If Scotland were to gain its independence, questions of its economic viability would obviously be raised. Supporters point to the oil rigs in the North Sea, which would fall within Scottish territorial waters. And not forgetting, of course, tourism and its “boutique Scottishness”.

A clever and award winning Australian journalist Alan Attwood has built a niche industry over the years regaling readers with quirky stories about his “Scottishness”.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Attwood as The Age newspaper’s expert tennis writer would clearly distinguish who was English, and Scottish, as in his own case, even though Scotland has not been an independent nation for over two centuries. There is no separate Scottish passport. Attwood should be applauded for being proud of his Scottish heritage and no one would oppose Scotland regaining its independence in a peaceful manner from London.

Then there is Attwood’s angst about being torn between two cultures, Australian and Scottish:

“Born in Dundee, Scotland but raised in Australia Alan Attwood felt torn between two countries. He went back to Scotland to discover his past but discovered he didn't really belong there either.”

We also have him as a working class hero:

“Alan Attwood was born in Scotland and emigrated to Australia with his family when he was four. He has worked as an abalone packer, a dishwasher and mail sorter, but, since 1978, mainly as a journalist. From 1995 to 1998 he was the New York-based correspondent for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and more recently he has been a columnist for The Age.”

Notice, Scotland is mentioned but not the United Kingdom or Great Britain.

But when it came to tennis players from other disputed regions, such as the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, Attwood would never go into more detail. Surely, as an expert on all things Scottish and tennis, you would think he would be more precise.

Not all who came from the Soviet Union were Russians: don’t forget the Lithuanians, Ukrainians and so on. Likewise, there was no such thing as Yugoslav, only Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Macedonians, Muslim Bosnians and so on. For many years during the late 1980s and early 90s Attwood refused to listen to those, including myself, who were telling him that Goran Ivanisevic was a Croat, Slobodan Zivojinovic was a Serb; and Monica Seles was an ethnic Hungarian from Serbia.

Regardless of Attwood’s antics, we wish the Scots good luck in their bid for independence and a long term peaceful solution to the troubles in Ulster.

(end)


www.youtube.com/watch?v=GowMI4wvmU4&feature=email
Scotland the Brave (song with lyrics supplied)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcSsmHOrQG0&feature=email
Scotland the Brave (bagpipe version)