Mile Budak
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Mile Budak (1889 - 1945) was a Croatian writer and politician, best known as one of the chief ideologists of the Ustaše movement, who created Croatian national plan to get rid of Orthodox Serbs - by killing one third, expelling one third and assimilating the rest.
Mile Budak was born in Sveti Rok, in Lika, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was educated in Sarajevo and studied geography and history at University of Zagreb. In 1912 he was arrested by Austro-Hungarian authorities over his alleged role in attempted assassination of Croatian ban (vice-roy) Slavko Cuvaj. In 1914, after the start of World War I, he was drafted in Austro-Hungarian Army where he received the rank of NCO. In 1915 he was captured by the Serbian Army and witnessed the Serb retreat through Albania in 1915-16.
After the end of war Mile Budak returned to Zagreb. In 1920 he received a law degree at University of Zagreb in 1920 and became clerk in the office of Ante Pavelić. He became active in Croatian Party of Rights (HSP) and was elected in Zagreb City Assembly. In 1920s he was the editor of political magazines close to HSP.
In 1932 he survived an assassination attempt from men close to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. This convinced him to emigrate to Italy, join Ustashas and become commandant of Ustasha training camp. In 1938 he returned to Zagreb, where he started Hrvatski narod, a weekly newspaper. In 1940 authorities had that magazine banned, and Budak arrested.
When the Independent State of Croatia was formed, Mile Budak became minister of education and religious worship. As such he publicly stated that forcible conversion, expulsion and extermination of the ethnic Serb minority was the official national policy. He later became foreign minister and Croatian ambassador to Nazi Germany. When NDH collapsed in May 1945, Mile Budak was captured by Tito's Partisans, sentenced to death after a one-day trial and executed. The rest of Mile Budak's family perished in the Bleiburg massacre.
He is famous for formulating a project of how to get rid of Orthodox Serbs from NDH. One third are to be killed, one third expelled and remaining third converted into Catholicism (Budak's ideology).
Budak was also known for his literary work, especially novels and plays in which he had glorified Croatian peasantry. The best known part of his opus is novel Ognjište (Hearth), in which described the customs and lifestyles of people in his native Lika region.
After the war his books were banned by Yugoslav Communist authorities. Because of that, many Croatian nationalists viewed Mile Budak as great figure of Croatian literature, equal, if not superior to left-wing Miroslav Krleža. Following Croatian independence in early 1990s, the government of Franjo Tuđman started to rehabilitate Budak historically.
Many Croatian cities, including Split, had streets named after him and Croatian Radiotelevision aired a dramatisation of Budak's autobiographical account of the 1915-16 Serb retreat through Albania. The official line was that Budak should be viewed as an important literary figure, independently of his controversial role in World War II. This caused reaction from the left-wing, liberal minority of the Croatian public, most notably Feral Tribune, which launched a year's long campaign to have Budak-named streets renamed.
In 2003., Ivo Sanader's government decided to finally deal with the issue which resulted in renaming all the streets bearing Budak's name. In 2004 a plaque commemorating Budak's birth in Sveti Rok was removed by Ivo Sanader's government, in an attempt to show that his government is distancing itself from the controversial policies of the late Tuđman.
