Framed

by Hamish McDonald

A counter-terrorism coup for Australia or a set-up by a foreign spy agency?More than three decades ago, Australia was in a different terrorism scare. Then, the perceived danger came from a vastly different "other": a European and largely Catholic ethnic group. The so-called Croatian Six case seemed to confirm a stereotype of a whole community as wildly violent and adhering to old Nazi-associated nationalist politics, even in a new homeland.The conviction of six young Croatian-Australians for allegedly planting bombs around Sydney tore the heart from their community and left a bitterness about Australian justice that still burns today. Now The Sydney Morning Herald revisits the case, finding evidence the men were set up by the intelligence service of the then communist Yugoslav state -- with Australian police as unwitting participants - the judicial system turning a blind eye to flaws in the evidence and Canberra officials covering up knowledge of the Yugoslav role.

45 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 8, 2012

About the author

Hamish McDonald is an Australian journalist and author of several books. He held a fellowship at the American think tank the Woodrow Wilson Centre in 2014.

McDonald has worked as a journalist in mostly Asian countries like India, Japan, Indonesia, Hong Kong and China, where he was a correspondent based in Beijing from 2002 to 2005. He was in India between 1990 and 1997, covering the time immediately after the economic reforms. He was the political editor for the Far Eastern Economic Review and the foreign editor for the Sydney Morning Herald.

In 2005, he won the Walkley Award for newspaper feature writing for his article "What's Wrong With Falun Gong", which is about the brutal suppression of the Falun Gong religious movement in China.