Domovina Urednistvo
As I stood in the courtroom the customary knock on the door behind the judge’s bench, announcing the entry of Justice Robert Allan Hulme benumbed me; joy, excitement, worry, anxiety, delightful hope, great expectations – all tumbled around simultaneously inside my abdomen! Of course, Justice Hulme was not there for me but still, the criminal case and its convictions he was about to commence unravelling touched my life deeply as it did the entire patriotic Croatian community in Australia and beyond.
It’s 4 December 2023 in Sydney, Australia, and it’s the first day of hearing the evidence for the Judicial Inquiry into the 1981 criminal convictions of the so-called Croatian Six (Vjekoslav Vic Brajkovic, Mile Nekic, Maksimilian Max Bebic, Ante Tony Zvirotic, and brothers Ilija and Joseph Kokotovic). The now successful petition to the Supreme Court of NSW for a Judicial Inquiry was made to the Supreme Court of NSW in February 2021 on behalf of three of the Croatian Six – Max Bebic, Vic Brajkovic and Mile Nekic) – by barrister Sebastian De Brennan and solicitor Helen Cook.
More than 40 years have passed since the criminal convictions were delivered against the Croatian Six and even though the application for a judicial review was made by three, the result of the judicial inquiry is expected to flow on and apply to all six men. It has been an awful 40-year period not just for the Six but for the entire patriotic Croatian community, which at that time felt targeted by the communist Yugoslavia because it fled oppression and political purges massively occurring in Yugoslavia post World War Two. Indeed, the operations of UDBA, communist Yugoslavia secret service/police, embarked upon the business to destroy the good Croatian name and reputation abroad any which way it could – including false allegations of nationalistic extremism and terrorist pursuits in many cases as far as Australia is concerned, and in other diaspora countries where also dozens of assassinations of freedom-fighting Croatian patriots by UDBA took place (Australia, Canada, USA, UK, Germany, France …)
The start of this judicial inquiry on 4 December 2023 in Sydney opened a window of new hope not just for justice but also for the entire patriotic and freedom-fighting Croatian community in the diaspora. That new hope comes in the form of justice for the six men and closure for the mental torture these convictions had imposed on many Croatians living in the diaspora, not just the convicted six men. Whether the judicial inquiry, expected to end during April 2024, will yield a recommendation that the 1981 convictions be quashed and the Croatian Six exonerated of guilt of the 1979 alleged conspiracy to bomb several sites in Sydney Australia or not, there will be closure for many, nonetheless. Justice is being given another opportunity to show itself in a different, deserving, attire than what it wore during the original criminal trial of 1980/1981 presided by Justice Victor Maxwell who, at the time, told the jury on reportedly more than one occasion the words to the effect that it was incomprehensible that police would fabricate evidence in cases of criminal charges! That is, this time around the attire that wears the colours of conspiracy among the police force and secret services rather than a conspiracy between the Croatian Six appears to be the one palpably hovering above this judicial inquiry.
The judicial inquiry, investigation, into the terrorism plot convictions of the Croatian Six was, as stated above, launched in a premise used by the Supreme Court of NSW after several unsuccessful appeals and attempts, spanning more than three decades, to have the verdicts returned to the appeals court and one attempt to have the case returned for judicial inquiry into the verdict. The Supreme Court of New South Wales had in August 2022 ruled that new circumstances and evidence that have surfaced regarding this case since the 1981 verdict cast doubt on the fairness of the proceedings and the fairness of the verdict and convictions, which in February 1981 sentenced each of the Croatian Six to 15 years in prison and had ordered that a Judicial Inquiry into these convictions be held. On 16 March 2023, the Honourable Chief Justice Bell of the New South Wales Supreme Court, pursuant to section 79(1)(a) of the CAR Act (Crimes Appeal and Review Act), appointed the Honourable Acting Justice Robert Allan Hulme (‘the Inquirer’) to conduct the Inquiry.
If this judicial investigation concludes in favour of the Croatian six and proposes the annulment of the convictions, it will also go down in records as the most serious violation or miscarriage of justice in the history of Australia.
The process began on Monday, December 4, 2023, with the presentation of the plan mapping the stages of this judicial inquiry investigation and a very extensive presentation to the court by a Crown Solicitor assisting this judicial inquiry, Trish McDonald, on the arrest of the six men in February 1979, the police investigation, and the court criminal trial of the six. It was a trial that lasted 172 days with Justice Victor Maxwell presiding, which saw more than 100 witnesses give testimony. But even in that trial and now in the judicial investigation, one witness is of decisive importance, as are his identity and his true role in these events. The documents of the Australian secret service ASIO, which were declassified around 2016, indicate that Vico Virkez, the crown witness for the prosecution, on whose report and story the six were arrested and accused of a bomb plot, i.e., planning terrorist attacks on several targets around Sydney, was associate of the Yugoslav secret service UDBA. The testimony of the informer Virkez, who told the court that he had been part of the conspiracy, was crucial to the prosecution’s case.
“Virkez’s evidence was a critical component of the Crown case against the six men,” counsel assisting the inquiry Trish McDonald SC told the court on Monday 4 December 2023, and continued: “The other key components of the Crown case were evidence given by police officers of confessions made by the accused … [and] about explosives and other material located at the homes of the accused men and evidence about the involvement of the accused in the Croatian national movement.”
With a great deal of community as well as the convicted men’s agonising unease that the 1981 convictions were unsafe and that justice had not been done for the Croatian Six who always expressed their innocence of the crimes in 1990, and hearing from people that the informing alleged co-conspirator Virkez was not who everyone thought he was, Australia’s ABC Four Corners investigative journalist and reporter Chris Masters set out to track Virkez down. He travelled to Bosnia and Herzegovina (which was still a part of Yugoslavia then) and after a year of hunting, he found Virkez living on a pig farm in Bosnia. In an interview, Virkez revealed that he was a Yugoslav loyalist, not a Croatian nationalist as he told police in Australia, that he was a Serb with the real name of Vitomir Misimovic, that he was an UDBA collaborator and did what UDBA told him to do including infiltrate the Croatian community in Sydney — and that the testimony he had given to the police in Sydney in 1979 and 1980 had been made up and was a lie.
Almost 40 years after the 1981 criminal convictions, an investigation by Australian journalist and author, Hamish McDonald, has brought to light, among other relevant things, Australian intelligence material about Virkez as well as ways in which the communist Yugoslavia secret police UDBA operated in the diaspora, especially targeting the patriotic Croatian community. As reported within Australian public space ASIO’s own official history, released in 2016, described the Croatian Six case as “a wrongful conviction”. Eventually, revelations indicated that the conviction of the Croatian Six resulted from a deliberate Yugoslav intelligence services UDBA operation to portray the Croatian-Australian community as extremists and terrorists and increase public support for Yugoslavia.
The judicial jnquiry will seek to determine not only what the Australian secret service ASIO knew about Virkez, but also when this information was known to the police and other government bodies and agencies, as well as who and why made the decision not to disclose this important detail to the legal representatives of the Croatian Six in 1979 and beyond, for the duration of the trial.
Considering that, the second day of hearing, 5 December 2023, saw one of the Croatian Six, Vjekoslav Vic Brajkovic, give testimony on particular pieces of evidence from the 1980 trial for which discrepancies with factual matter were delved into. E.g. a white plastic bag with incriminating contents (explosives and detonators) police presented as having been found on Vic Brajkovic’s property Brajkovic was adamant that he had seen that plastic bag for the first time in his life when police presented it at his committal hearing in 1979. “It’s not my bag … I don’t recognise it by anything,” Brajkovic told the inquiry. He also called a transcript of a supposed interview between himself and police a “complete fabrication”. “It was like tying up the hands of the men who were arrested behind their backs and then telling them to go off and fight the trial,” he said.
Brajkovic’s evidence of discrepancies between police evidence and what the accused were and are saying appear enormous and troubling, certainly giving rise to troubling thoughts of likely police fabrication and/or planting of evidence. He stated further that the place where police claimed they found the plastic bag was not on his residential property but near shrubs on public land nearby. While it was obvious that life had dealt him a cruel and terrible lot, now grey-haired Brajkovic appeared as having held onto his human dignity and ability to withstand any attack stoically, such as ones that may come from the opposing legal representatives, hurled his way!
Josip Joseph Stipic, who was also arrested in February 1979 together with the Croatian Six on similar allegation of being involved in the conspiracy to bomb several places in Sydney but soon released appeared as a witness in the judicial inquiry on Tuesday 5 December 2023. Of particular interest was Stipic’s testimony that he never had a desk in his bedroom where the police said they found a bag of explosives and such being the case one simply cannot avoid questioning the veracity and reliability of police evidence about explosives claimed to have been found at the premises of others from the Croatian Six group. Furthermore, as Croatian Six had been labelled as extremist Croatian nationalists, as so have many from the Croatian Community to a point of generalisation effects, Stipic gave excellent explanations regarding the work and mission of two mentioned in the original trial Croatian organisations in Australia around the time of the Croatian Six arrests, viz., The Croatian National Council/HNV and the Croatian Republican Party/HRS. Their main mission and work, he said in court, had nothing to do with Australia, they were concerned with Croatia within communist Yugoslavia, political situation in Croatia, and supported Croatian political prisoners in communist Yugoslavia.
The Croatian Six legal representative, David Buchanan SC, on 6 December 2023 made an application to Justice Hulme to include in the inquiry additional material that points to police fabrication of evidence in this case as well as the need for the inquiry to investigate the culture of fabrication of evidence as may be found, referring to findings of available sources such as the Wood Royal Commission (1997) and the Operation Florida Report (2004) which address police corruption. Such sources lead one to come across the occurrences or ideas such as fabrication of confessions, unsigned confessions or police keeping stashes of guns in storage for the purposes of planting them to suspects of crime… While such sources yield a generalised view this judicial inquiry, of course, must ascertain as to whether police fabrication of evidence did occur in the case of Croatian Six.
“I see this topic of police fabrication of evidence as relatively free of controversy amongst us in 2023,” Justice Hulme said. “It might have been a controversy in 1980,” he added.
The testimony of several police officers is expected, there are currently about twenty of them on the witness list, as well as one present-day judge who was in the police at the time. The inquiry will examine the actions of police, including those of disgraced officer Roger Rogerson, who helped lead the arrests of the six men. Rogerson who is serving a life sentence for murder, could be called to answer questions about his involvement in the case.
The first part of the inquiry ended on Friday 8 December 2023 and the second part of court hearing is scheduled to continue for three weeks starting on 25 March 2024. Ina Vukic
