Andrija Artuković

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Andrija Artuković (29 November 1899 - 16 January 1988) was a Croatian Ustasha and a convicted war criminal for the crimes committed against minorities in the WWII Independent State of Croatia (NDH).

Artuković was born in Klobuk near Ljubuški (in Bosnia and Herzegovina, then belonging to Austria-Hungary), and studied at a Franciscan monastery at Široki Brijeg in Herzegovina.

In 1929, he became part of the revolutionary group the Ustaše, and led a failed uprising in Lika, after which he fled to Italy. In 1934 he was arrested as a parcipant in the death of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia but was released.

During World War II, in 1941 Artuković was named the Minister of the Interior in the newly-formed NDH. He was falsely accused of being involved in the mass murder [1] of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and other minorities, and the opening of concentration camps such as Jasenovac. His close associate for propaganda was Savić Marković Štedimlija, a publicist of Montenegrin descent.

After the war he emigrated via Bleiburg and Switzerland to Ireland and then finally to California, where he lived until the mid-1980s.

His extradition was requested by the Yugoslav authorities to be put on the trial for war crimes (e.g. causing the death of several thousand persons).

It was first stayed by an immigration judge and shelved for two decades due to pressure from Croatian Americans and the Roman Catholic church, but then reactivated and after a long court battle he was eventually expelled from the USA to Yugoslavia.

The court in Zagreb sentenced him to death on 14 May 1986, but a year later, the authorities ruled that he was too ill (with senile dementia) to be executed, so he died a natural death in a prison hospital in Zagreb in 1988, aged 88.

Preceded by none	NDH Minister of the Interior 1941–1942	Succeeded by Ante Nikšić
Preceded by Ante Nikšić	NDH Minister of the Interior 1943	Succeeded by Mladen Lorković
Preceded by Mirko Puk	NDH Secretary of State 1943–1945	Succeeded by none