By Dick Nichols
SYDNEY — The facts in the case of the Croatian Six — revealed to a mass television audience in a recent Four Corners program — confirm that the Australian "criminal justice" system is about the closest thing in these parts to the nightmare universe of George Orwell's 1984.
Confirmed, too, is the fact that, in all matters that touch on vital state interests, there are several grades of truth — ranging from Official Truth, Judicial Truth and Mass-Media Truth to poor, ragged and despised commonplace truth.
Even more than in the case of the Hilton Bombing, the facts about the Croatian Six were available for years to anyone wanting to know them.
Eight years before Four Corners ventured onto this dangerous ground, former New South Wales Labor MP George Petersen, Direct Action, the weekly of the Socialist Workers Party (now the Democratic Socialist Party), and other labour and migrant movement sources were trying to interest public opinion in this terrible miscarriage of justice.
They had to do battle with the indifference and self-interest of the legal system, the nonchalant cynicism of the mainstream media and a very heavy dose of racist stereotyping of the Australian-Croatian community (Croats = Ustashi = bomb-throwers).
Now, after six men's lives have been nearly ruined, the truth in the Croatian Six affair is out in the mainstream media.
- The chief prosecution witness, who called himself Vico Virtez, was in fact a Serb, Vitomir Visimovic, and a member of the Serbian chauvinist organisation, the Black Hand. The New South Wales Police knew that Visimovic was a Serb at the time of the trial and deliberately suppressed this evidence. They allowed Visimovic to present himself at the trial as a Croat who had seen the error of his ways.
- Visimovic was known to ASIO, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Federal Police as a "low-level" agent of the Yugoslav secret service. When David Buchanan, lawyer for one of the six, Ilija Kokotovic, subpoenaed these departments for any records concerning Visimovic, the subpoena was set aside by the Supreme Court on the grounds that the information sought could endanger national security.
- There are remarkable parallels between Visimovic's role in the Croatian Six case and the role of NSW
Special Branch informer Richard Seary in the trial of Tim Anderson, Ross Dunn and Paul Alister on charges of attempting to bomb the house of National Front leader Robert Cameron. In both cases the prosecution case depended on "confessions" of provocateurs who planted explosives.
- Both the Croatians and the Ananda Marga had been under long-term surveillance by ASIO and Special Branch. In 1985 Tim Anderson, who became convinced of the Croatians' innocence when he met some of them in jail, noted that, as in the Ananda Marga trial, the police put on a massive "security" show inside and outside the courtroom designed to prejudice the jury and public opinion, to convince them the accused were dangerous terrorists.
In this atmosphere it was impossible for the men to receive a fair trial.
Everything about the Croatian Six case points to a judicial and secret police frame-up. The progressive movement must take up the call for an open judicial inquiry into all aspects of the case. Then, at last, we might start to learn the identity of a few of our own terrorists.