Concerns over Croatian band
MYSTERY surrounds the imminent visit to Australia of an ultra-nationalist Croatian rock music band whose pro-Nazi material celebrates the far-right Croatian Ustashe movement, with reports that none of the band members have applied for visas yet.
MYSTERY surrounds the imminent visit to Australia of an ultra-nationalist Croatian rock music band whose pro-Nazi material celebrates the far-right Croatian Ustashe movement, with reports that none of the band members have applied for visas yet.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) has asked the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to refuse the group Australian visas on character grounds.
However, a Department spokesperson told The AJN on Tuesday that none of the musicians in the band known as Thompson have applied for Australian visas.
Thompson – which is also the stage alias of the band’s lead singer Marko Perkovic, reportedly named after the Thompson submachine gun he used when fighting in the Croatian Independence War during the 1990s – has visited Australia previously, most recently in 2007.
Thompson’s songs hail the Ustashe, a pro-Nazi regime responsible for mass atrocities in Croatia during World War II, particularly at the Jasenovac extermination camp, where between 77,000 and 99,000 inmates – including Jews, Roma and dissidents – perished.
Its concerts around the world have attracted fans who wear Nazi insignia on their shirts and give Nazi salutes in response to some of Thompson’s more provocative songs.
Noting that the band had been barred from several European countries, ECAJ president Robert Goot told The AJN: “While we in Australia welcome free speech about ideas, our country has long prohibited incitement of hatred on the basis of race, which has nothing whatsoever to do with any debate about ideas.”
Despite not yet having visas, Thompson band members are booked to play Festival Hall in West Melbourne on April 29 and are booked at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion the following night.
The planned visit was condemned this week by B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) chair Dvir Abramovich, who said Perkovic should not be given a welcome mat in Australia.
“To glorify the horrors of the Holocaust is repugnant and not what we need here. If the Australian public truly understood the extremist rhetoric and what Thompson stands for, they would not want them playing songs which celebrate the deaths in the concentration camps, ethnic cleansing and genocide,” Abramovich said.
PETER KOHN
comments