PALUBA

There was a fair amount of small arms production in Croatia during the breakup of Yugoslavia, but most of it was not particularly high quality. After the government of Croatia had become established, it looked to arm a formal military, and turned to the Elmech company to produce a sniper's rifle. The result was the EMM-992 in .300 Winchester Magnum and a companion rifle in 7.62x51mm NATO, the EM-992. Adopted by the Croatian military and police forces in 1992, production ran until about 1997. It is not clear how many were made in total, although the majority were the .300 WM model.

Mechanically, the rifle is a simple push-feed, rotating bolt system. It uses a detachable magazine (unfortunately missing on this example) that could hold either 5 or 7 rounds (I presume 5 in .300WM and 7 in 7.62 NATO). The barrel is free floated, and has integral porting at the muzzle. The trigger is a commercial Timney unit, and the scope chosen was the Leupold 3.5-10 x 24mm. A commercial Harris bipod and composite wood stock round out the elements of the rifle. They apparently served well, but have since been replaced in military service by the Sako TRG-42.

Interestingly, a number of Elmech rifles have been documented in use in Syria, by ISIS and other groups. This particular example was imported into the US directly from a Croatian police department.

The Šokac is just one of more than a dozen different submachine guns developed and produced domestically in Croatia during the Yugoslavian civil war of the early 1990s. It is a mechanical copy of the Soviet PPSh-41 made in 9x19mm and a folding stock modeled after the vz25 family of submachine guns. Like the PPSh, it has a selector for semiauto or fully automatic fire, and used stick magazines of 25- and 30-round capacity. The Šokac was first tested in August of 1991, and it appears that as many as 5,000 were produced in total.

Today we are looking at both an early metal-framed example with a wooden grip and a later (and more typical) type with a plastic grip and magazine housing. There were also at least a few made with underfolding MP40-type stocks.