Croatian National Resistance

The Croatian National Resistance (Croatian: Hrvatski narodni odpor, HNO), also referred to as Odpor, was an Ustaša organization founded in the aftermath of the Second World War in Spain. The HNO ran a terrorist organisation, Drina, which continued to be active well into the 1970s.

Odpor was founded in 1957 by former Ustaša General Maks Luburić. In 1969, Luburić was assassinated by the Yugoslav secret police the UDBA.

Odpor existed for over three decades, and while it never had more than a few thousand members worldwide, it linked a variety of notable Croatian nationalists. Odpor branches on four continents at times splintered, notably the Argentinian one under the leadership of Dinko Šakić. Šakić had lived in Argentina between 1947 and 1956, and then between 1959 and 1998.

A number of attacks against Yugoslavia were organized by the Ustasha emigration, including the 1971 killing of ambassador Vladimir Rolović by Miro Barešić and Anđelko Brajković.

The HNO was banned in Germany in 1976 because of their links to Zvonko Bušić and others.

The organization's activity in the United States was to investigate Yugoslav travel agencies and diplomatic facilities.

The organization operated between legitimate emigre functions and a thuggish underworld. Its leaders tried to distance the organization from the acts of the so-called renegade elements. It embraced a radical nationalist ideology that differed only marginally from Ustaše ideology.

The HNO had stated, in their constitution, that:

"[We] regard Yugoslavism and Yugoslavia as the greatest and only evil that has caused the existing calamity [...] We therefore consider every direct or indirect help to Yugoslavia as treason against the Croatian nation [...] Yugoslavia must be destroyed - be it with the help of the Russians or the Americans, of Communists, non-Communists or anti-Communists - with the help of anyone willing the destruction of Yugoslavia: destroyed by the dialectic of the word, or by dynamite - but at all costs destroyed."

The organization published its own magazine, Drina. It existed until 1991.

In 1991, a former leader of Otpor joined the Croatian Ministry of Defence and used his underground connections to try to obtain weaponry at the time the Croatian War of Independence was starting. In August 1991, the U.S. Customs Service arrested four members of Otpor from Chicago for attempting to procure illegal weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles, and ship them to Croatia.

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