Nikola Kavaja Dies at the Age of 76
“I think I’ll die. I dreamt my parents last night. The time has come for my final journey — take me home,” Nikola Kavaja said to his friends on Monday evening, in a Belgrade restaurant. He passed away that night, in his apartment in the Tzar Dušan Street, of heart failure.
Thus ended the 76-years long stormy life of Serbia’s best known anti-communist, commando, emigrant and the sworn enemy of Yugoslav dictator Tito.
Nikola Kavaja, a life-long revolutionary, descending from Cetinje in today’s Montenegro, was born on October 3, 1932, as one of nine children in the town of Peć, in Old Serbia, today Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija. Ever since his great-grandfather killed in a duel Bey of Kavaja (town in Albania), an Albanian serving the Turks, Nikola’s family Mrkoja became famous as Kavaja family.
In April 1941, German fascists have deported Nikola’s family members to different concentration camps in Albania. Nikola studied at the Air Force Academy academy in Pančevo, Serbia, where he became a fighter pilot and received a rank of colonel. After learning his brothers were arrested and sent to Tito’s prison camp Goli Otok, Kavaja joined the secret anti-communist group organized in the JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army) military camp in Sombor. One of Kavaja’s first illegal tasks was to write “Death to Josip Broz and to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia” in the Army base.
Since then, the most famous Serbian emigrant entered the world’s history as an anti-communist who has attempted to assassinate Josip Broz Tito four times — in Mexico in 1962, in New York in 1963 and in Washington in 1964 and 1967, but the FBI agents have thwarted his plans each time — and had single-handedly hijacked American Airlines commercial plane, on a flight from New York to Chicago.
Nikola Kavaja’s book “The Sons of Betrayed Serbia”Life-Long Soldier and a True PatriotIn the former Yugoslavia, he was listed as “the state enemy number 1″. His friends and everyone who knew him well described him as a true patriot, a great soldier for Serbdom and a fierce anti-communist. Kavaja was one of the founders of the organization Serbian Liberation Movement Fatherland (”Srpski Oslobodilački Pokret Otadžbina”, SOPO), based on Chetnik traditions, with which he attempted several assassinations of Tito.
In 1978 he hijacked Boeing 727 jetliner which he planned to use as a missile against the headquarters of the Yugoslav Communists’ Central Committee in Belgrade. After hijacking the plane which he landed in Chicago, he freed all the passengers and most of the crew members, and tried to free his comrades arrested in United States and held in prison. Following his lawyer’s advice, Kavaja flew the plane to Ireland where he hoped to get a political asylum. Ireland didn’t have an extradition agreement with the United States, but it had signed one five minutes after Nikola Kavaja flew in, so he was promptly arrested in Dublin and returned to United States.
He was accused for the attempted assassination of Tito and the terrorism on the territory of United States. Nikola was sentenced to 83 years imprisonment he was serving in the Chicago prison.
According to the chroniclers, he was assigned to King Peter II Karadjordjević’s security every time descendant of the Serbian Royal family visited United States, during seven years — since 1964 until the king’s death in 1971.
In 1971 Kavaja patrolled Camp David dressed as a Maryland police officer, looking for an opportune moment to assassinate Broz who was visiting Richard Nixon. He was in prison from 1979-1997 and was on conditional release until 2019. He decided to leave United States and return to Serbia, where he continued to keep in touch with Serbian diaspora.
A Kosovo Son Cannot Sit Idly By…“Since he came back from United States, Kavaja led a disciplined, clean life. He jogged each morning and was lifting weights. But he was very worried, because he had signed an agreement with the American producers to make a documentary about the Serbian revolutionaries, and one of his life-long friends and participant in the project, my husband Blažo Božić had suddenly died,” widow Mira Božić told Vecernje Novosti.
Even at 76, Kavaja wasn’t giving up, “he was still at war, struggling to liberate Serbia from the traitors, enemies and occupiers,” his Kum Boško Radonjić said.
“He lived with the idea of a free land of Serbs and he instilled that idea to the young patriots he would meet and talk with throughout Serbia, Montenegro and Republic of Srpska,” Radonjić said.
Once back in Serbia, Kavaja formed a new patriotic unit he wanted to use for defense of Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija province.
He established a camp for Serbian volunteers in Piva, Montenegro, where the young patriots were completing a six-month training, but this battalion was never given permission to be actively included in the war against the terrorist KLA, or the Arnauts, as Kavaja called Shiptars, asserting that he, “as a Kosovo son, cannot sit by while my country bleeds and is occupied by the enemy”.
Because of his activities surrounding the paramilitary camp, Kavaja was under police surveillance and even taken for an interrogation after the assassination of Premier Zoran Đinđić.
Topic: Death of a Revolutionary: Nikola Kavaja (Read 2365 times)