roadcast: 21/5/2001
War Criminals, Welcome
Tony Jones speaks with Mark Aarons, the author of War Criminals, Welcome, which makes a compelling case that Australia remains a sanctuary for war criminals today.
Compere: Tony Jones
Reporter: Tony Jones
TONY JONES: Mark Aarons, let’s start with the Strecko Rover case.
It must be unique in that it’s connected to war crimes in the same place but divided by 50 years of history.
MARK AARONS, AUTHOR: Yes, it is quite an extraordinary tale really.
He was a member of the Nazi security police.
He was a member of a mobile killing unit that slaughtered Jews, Serbs, Communists, anyone who was opposed to the Nazi regime in and around Sarajevo in 1941.
After the war, he rose to a senior rank in the post-war Croatian movement to be a terrorist leader.
He immigrated to Australia and re-established his terrorist cells.
In 1967, he recruited a young 19-year-old called Blej Cralavich who had just emigrated to Australia.
He joined the underground terrorist cells and was exceedingly lucky not to have been sent on a mission in the early 1970s where nearly all his comrades were killed.
TONY JONES: A mission where?
MARK AARONS: A mission back to Yugoslavia that was allegedly aimed at the overthrow of the Tito Communist Government.
After the fall of Communism in Croatia and the outbreak of the Balkans War in 1991, Blej Cralavich became the commanding general of the Croatian defence forces, a paramilitary, irregular unit that was responsible for some of the worst ethnic cleansing which really is a euphemism for rounding up, torturing, raping, humiliating and ultimately slaughtering, quite literally butchering, men, women and children.
MARK AARONS: I have to declare a journalistic interest here because I, back in 1992, went looking for Blej Cralavich, the Australia militia leader in Bosnia, and we failed to find him for the simple reason that he was murdered a week earlier, but I did come across his group of militia.
They were still there.
They were wearing black uniforms in the style of the old black legion.
What do we know about what they actually did?
Is – was there a investigation into what his men did in the 1990s?
MARK AARONS: Certainly.
The international investigation into the various acts of genocide in the Balkans established quite definitively that they ran a series of concentration camps.
In those concentration camps, innocent civilians, mainly Serbs, but also a significant number of Bosnian Muslims were rounded up, tortured in the most inhumane ways, cigarette burns, knives were used, people’s genitals were mutilated.
People’s brains were literally spilled on the floor, their intestines pulled out.
This was a savage, brutal, almost medieval slaughter that was going on directly under Cralavich’s command and, I must say, with strong indications that he was not the only Australian Croat who was participating had these crimes TONY JONES: Nor the only Australian Serb, it must be pointed out.
There were Australian Serbs operating in Bosnia as well.
MARK AARONS: Absolutely.
The most notorious of them was the somewhat mysterious ‘Captain Dragon’, Vasil Covic, who was a resident of Australia, a low-life petty criminal who was recruited very early by Milosevic’s intelligence services to become principally an organiser of similar Serbian paramilitary units that conducted the very early and some of the most brutal Serbian ethnic cleansing which again was a euphemism for the sort of roundup torture and massacre of innocent civilians, mostly Croats.
TONY JONES: Let’s go back 50 years to the old man, the old Croatian Strecko Rover.
Was he typical of the war criminals who were coming here straight after the Second World War from Eastern Europe?
MARK AARONS: Absolutely.
Most of the war criminals who settled in Australia were not Germans or Austrians.
They were people from Central and Eastern Europe, from the Ukraine, the Baltic States, the central European countries of Czechoslovakia, Croatia and Serbia.
Most of them had been members like Rover was of pre-war fascist organisations.
They had volunteered as soon as the Nazis invaded their homelands to serve in police units that very quickly degenerated into mass killing units.
TONY JONES: And many of them, after the war, had connections to western intelligence.
I mean, one classic example is a new case you have brought up.
That is Nicolai Alfacic who was operating in Russia.
MARK AARONS: He was a typical case because he had all the characteristics that I have just outlined.
He went in with the invading Nazi forces into the Soviet Union, carried out massacres of Jews and Communists, fled westward as the war finished, and very soon after was recruited by western intelligence, and indeed, a massive dossier of his work on behalf of US intelligence has been declassified which shows definitively that they knew he was a senior Nazi official, that he was wanted for war crimes, but nonetheless recruited for anti-Communist operations and ultimately allowed to emigrate to Australia.
TONY JONES: Now, you claim a lot of this is – we learned much of this, anyway, some years ago, largely because of your work – but you claim many of these things are still going on, that we are still a sanctuary for war criminals albeit from other countries like Afghanistan, for example.
MARK AARONS: Absolutely.
There’s no doubt at all over the last 10-12 years, a significant number, dozens, probably well over 100, senior Afghan war criminals have emigrated to Australia.
They include men like General Miakal who lives here in Sydney, where this program is January generating from.
He was a senior official in the KGB controlled security police, the HUD, notorious for the rounding up and slaughter of not only military opposition figures in the Mujahadeen but also of innocent civilians in the most brutal ways.
He’s living here as an exemplar of the Afghan war criminals.
TONY JONES: How did these sort of people get here?
We can understand from your research that, in the past, there were reasons.
These people had done deals with western intelligence organisations, having given them intelligence were then secreted or allowed to go to third countries like Australia.
I mean, you’re not suggesting the same thing has happened with these modern war criminals, are you?
MARK AARONS: I think that we have to see this as a combination of, first of all, indifference.
Indeed, the Government was warned that General Miakal, for instance, was on his way to Australia by the Afghan community, and despite promises that he would be screened out, he arrived here, took up residency, and has never been removed.
Others of his close circle, however, there is strong, I think, indications that they have been working for Australian intelligence.
We have seen, for example, in one instance, a ACIS officer who says he wanted to screen out a particular senior Afghan war criminal who conducted a long campaign of terror against the opposition, and he was overruled by his superiors in Australia, and the man was allowed to emigrate and settle here.
Now, I think that that’s strong prima facie evidence that there is probably a repetition of the recruitment of war criminals by Australian intelligence.
TONY JONES: Your new book is a huge compendium of both new and old research and new research into some of these old cases as well as that.
What is it that, in this new research, that’s leading you to call for the special investigations unit to be reopened?
MARK AARONS: Well, the special investigations unit that was established by the Hawke Government to investigate World War II Nazis should never have been closed in the first place.
The head of the unit at the time, Graham Blewett, now the deputy prosecutor of the international tribunal in the Hague investigating the Balkans genocide of the 1990s warned the Keating Government that unless a standing war crimes units was kept in place, we would become a safe haven for modern war criminals.
Every word of his warning has come true in the last decade.
We require, therefore, not only a standing unit that specialises in it, that’s adequately resourced to do nothing other than investigate war crimes, but we need legislation that would actually enable us to prosecute war criminals.
TONY JONES: Very briefly, this is an election year, and these cases, inevitably, and these decisions become very political.
Do you expect either of the major parties to take up your call?
MARK AARONS: Well, I certainly hope that both the parties will.
I have very little faith that the present Government will.
I understand that not only would they not appear on your program this evening, they wouldn’t appear on radio national breakfast this morning and that they’re basically repeating the same words of previous governments about Nazis in the 1950s.
“Well, if you’ve got any evidence, bring it to us and we’ll investigate it.”
I think it’s the only crime in Australian law where journalists and the communities affected by the crime are expected to produce the evidence and to conduct the investigations.
The Government is entirely indifferent.
I hope that Mr Beazley and the opposition will take a different course.
TONY JONES: Mark AARONS, I have to leave it there.
Thanks for joining us tonight on Lateline.
MARK AARONS: Thanks, Tony.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/stories/s300455.htm
