Tomo Jančiković

Tomo Jančiković (2 November 1899 – 30 November 1951) was a lawyer and politician in Croatia and Yugoslavia. He was a member of the Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska seljačka stranka, HSS) and a prominent member of its leadership. Jančiković was a member of the Assembly of Yugoslavia elected on the HSS ticket.

Born in Vinkovci, Jančiković graduated law from the University of Zagreb in 1924 and opened his own law office in Zagreb three years later. Before switching his allegiance to the HSS, in 1920s, Jančiković was a member of the Action Committee of the Democratic Party for Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia. In that period, he wrote for party newspapers criticising actions taken by the HSS leader Stjepan Radić and against the Protection of State Act as unlawful. Following assassination of Radić in 1928, Jančiković joined the HSS. In 1929, Jančiković led an effort to reopen investigation of deaths of Communist Party of Yugoslavia members Đuro Đaković and Nikola Hećimović in which he disproved police accounts of their killing. Jančiković took part in drafting of the 1934 Zagreb Memorandum. He defended those accused of participation in the peasant rebellion in Kerestinec in 1936. On that occasion, he was noted for a speech in which he characterised the rebellion as a "mass delict" brought on by anti-Croatian coercive rule. He was elected to the national parliament on the HSS ticket in 1935 and 1938 elections as the representative of the district of Novi Marof. In 1920s and 1930s, Jančiković wrote professional papers on criminal law, law practice and the work of Ivo Pilar. (Jančiković married Pilar's daughter Vera.)

After the World War II invasion of Yugoslavia, Axis puppet Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) was established. The HSS split into several factions, but Jančiković stayed in a faction which remained loyal to the party's pre-war president Vladko Maček. Soon after the beginning of the war, Maček was arrested and spent most of the period under house arrest, advocating passivity and keeping distance to the Ustaše who ruled the NDH on one hand and to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička partija Jugoslavije, KPJ). The KPJ and its nominally independent branch, the Communist Party of Croatia (Komunistička partija Hrvatske, KPH) which led increasingly successful armed resistance – the Yugoslav Partisans. He was released in July 1941 and then he moved to the Adriatic Sea coast town of Crikvenica deeming it safer for him. There he declined an invitation by former HSS, then KPH member to join the Partisans. Jančiković turned down the invitation to attend the 1942 session of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia in Bihać. Instead he wrote to the HSS leaders urging them to revive intelligence gathering and propaganda work in view of battlefield successes of the Western Allies. Jančiković tried to establish cooperation with the KPH, but his request for authorisation of negotiations with the KPH leader Andrija Hebrang and Balen in June 1943 was declined by the HSS leaders in Zagreb.

Jančiković was arrested in May 1947 and convicted in February 1948 on trumped-up charges of wartime collaboration with the Axis powers. He was sentenced to 10 years of prison and hard labour. He died of unknown causes in Sremska Mitrovica Prison on 30 November 1951.