Macelj – Croatia, the War, and the Future

Croatia: Tito’s Bloodthirsty Unpunished Genocide

The month of May is one of the most poignant months for Croatians. Patriotic Croats, those who fought for independence during and since World War Two commemorate the victims of communist crimes, the multitudes of thousands brutally murdered at Bleiburg (Austria) in May 1945 and the hundreds of thousands murderously purged post WWII (Way of the Cross), while the communists and former communists celebrate what they call their liberation of Croatia in May 1945! The historical fact remains that Croatia was not liberated, it was forced to remain as part of Yugoslavia and the weapon used for that was genocide and mass murders of Croats who rejected communism.

8th of May 2023 the so-called antifascists in Croatia, communists actually, celebrated “their” liberation of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, on May 8^th 1945. Sickening accolades to murderous communists/partisans rang painfully in our ears because the historical facts point to absolutely nothing that can humanely be celebrated. The remains of brutal murder of innocent Croats by the partisans, including children, filled mass unmarked graves on the fields around the capital as well as its main cemetery Mirogoj. The fact is that archived boxes of death records in the cemetery contain names of people, men, women, and children whose date of death is recorded as 8^th May 1945. These registers of deaths speak of 8^th May 1945 as a very sad day for Zagreb, on which many innocent people murdered and suffered terribly. There are tens of mass graves around Zagreb, alone. All those deaths and massacres occurred on 8^th May 1945. Does this signify liberation! Not by a long shot. Partisans had orders: locate the people on the list they were given, take them within the hour and kill them! This pattern of killing is found in records of all cities, towns, and villages in Croatia from 8^th May 1945 onwards.

More than one thousand mass graves, many of which contain several thousand victims of communist crimes, have been unearthed in Croatia; more than 1800 when those unearthed in Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are counted. Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito has been labelled by several credible academics and politicians across the world as among top ten mass murderers of 20^th century.

Zagreb was occupied, not liberated on 8^th May 1945. Occupied in every possible way by genocidal communist forces as directed by communist Yugoslavia leader Josip Broz Tito using Stalinist communist methods that murdered some 36 million innocent Russian lives. After which a murderous totalitarian dictatorship followed in Yugoslavia.

The fact is that Yugoslavia was the most unsuccessful European country of the 20th century. There is no country in Europe, which is in its seventy years of existence, from December 1918 to January 1992, twice created and twice disintegrated in the seas of blood of its citizens. The first Yugoslavia (two versions of Kingdoms headed by Serbian Monarchy) lasted less than 22, and the other (communist Yugoslavia) for less than 47 years – together they survived less than the average life expectancy of European citizens. All possible economic and political arrangements have been tried in Yugosavia so that it could be preserved. It was capitalist and socialist, monarchical and republican, genocidal and murderous, unitarist and federalist, pluralist and monistic, the king’s right-wing and the marshal’s left-wing dictatorship. She was in the West and the East, undecided and unaligned. Nothing helped. Yugoslavia fell in early 1990’s – rivers of blood just like during and post World War Two, but Croatia finally emerged free of the Yugoslav communist terror.

This genuine freedom though, is still being undermined and cut and disrespected. Instead of organising commemrations to victims of communist crimes during May 2023 the powers that rule Croatia celebrate false liberation! They are the participants in continued denial of justice to these victims! The occupation, not liberation, of Croatia in 1945 was initially physical, murders. Yugoslav/Partisan military forces killed many tens of thousands of Croatian, prisoners of war and civilians in Slovenia and Austria after the formal end of the war in 1945 and the slaughter continued for decades to come. This was not discussed in historiography and politics until the collapse of Yugoslavia in early 1990’s, partly because the state hid and erased the traces of its abominable crimes and because, through intimidation, it forced millions of inhabitants to remain silent – to live in a kind of schizophrenia in which they could not forget the past, and were not allowed to remember it. Then the communists turned to property, they sent innocent people to their deaths in order to steal their properties. The political occupation followed which was characterised by oppression, political prisoners, assasinations at home and in the diaspora of Croatian patriots and multitudes fleeing the country to the West in fear for their lives.

In June 2006 the Croatian Parliament adopted bz a large majority the DECLARATION ON THE CONDEMNATION OF CRIMES COMMITTED DURING THE TOTALITARIAN COMMUNIST REGIME IN CROATIA 1945-1990. Given today’s developments and those after that year in which former communists took more and more power in Croatia for whose independence they spilled not a single drop of blood, includes the following paragraphs:

„… 4. The fall of totalitarian communist orders (regimes) in Central and Eastern Europe was not in all cases, and not even in the case of the Republic of Croatia, accompanied by national and/or international investigations of the crimes committed by those regimes. In fact, the perpetrators of these crimes were not brought before the court of the international community, as was the case with the terrible crimes committed by National Socialism (Nazism).

5. As a consequence, there is a very low level of awareness among the public of former communist countries, including the Croatian public, about crimes committed by totalitarian communist regimes…

6. The Croatian Parliament is convinced that people’s knowledge and awareness of historical events is one of the prerequisites to avoid similar crimes in the future. In fact, moral assessment and condemnation of committed crimes play an important role in the education of young generations. A clear attitude of the international and national communities towards the past can and must be a guideline for our future actions.

7. The Croatian Parliament believes that victims of the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes who are still alive or their families deserve sympathy, understanding and recognition for their suffering…“ (Croatian National Gazette/Narodne Novine NN 76/06 od 10.07.2006)

And this very parliament continues to promote the communist murderers, continues to justify these abominable crimes, continues to degrade the victims of communist crimes they condemned. It is truly sickening! Even more so knowing that this is not even a bit penalised by the European Union of which Croatia is a member state and which condemned most strongly all totalitarian regimes including the communist.

There is absolutely no doubt that the communist system was the most criminal of all totalitarian ones; of the fascist one, of the National Socialism one. The numbers of victims testify to that, the manner of killings testify to that… Croatian government of today, its cronies and parties of interest, with their public displays about liberation of Croatia in May 1945, have the audacity to claim that Croatia was liberated by mass murderers (of its wn people). Communist Leader Josip Broz Tito is still revered by quite a few and so is the communist five-pointed red star on the Yugoslav flag that was smothered by the bloody fight for independence during 1990’s. Several hundreds of thousands of innocent Croats have died at Tito’s orders, but there has been no trial for the communist criminals who caused the suffering, according to some published court opinions in Croatia during the last decade it was the communist system, not the individual criminals, who murdered (e.g. the 2014 case of Josip Boljkovac)! Communist crimes and their perpetrators have not been prosecuted, not even posthumously! The push in Croatia to label cold blooded murder by communists as political murders appears to be yet another tool of injustice towards victims in Croatia. Tito has not been prosecuted posthumously, either! Every possible excuse under the sun has been used by the government to avoid prosecution of communist crimes in Croatia.

And so, this May 2023, Croatia stands as divided almost never before. It is an independent state, free from former Yugoslavia but the remnants of Yugoslavia are felt and visible at every turn. The independence achieved through the Homeland War of 1990’s appears as something not at all important to the government and majority in parliament. They are more occupied with keeping the communist Yugoslavia spirit and mind alive than with anything else. Sheer cruelty towards own nation!

The reality in Croatia shows that the most powerful state and social institutions in Croatia persistently avoid confronting and distancing themselves from the criminal communist past. Moreover, within the Croatian state and social institutions, the criminal paradigm of Yugoslav communism and its value system, symbols and personality cult are advocated more and more openly and vulgarly.

We count our blessings, though, in all those who will, starting 12 May 2023, be commemorating the hundreds of thousands Croatian victims of communist crimes at Bleiburg, Austria, and the Way of the Cross, across Croatia, at mass graves and pits. Ina Vukic

President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic
At Bleiburg Massacres monument 13 May 2015
Photo: Office of the President, Croatia

Croatian media sources say some 30,000 and Austrian sources say some 50,000 people gathered at the Bleiburg field in Austria on Saturday 16 May 2015 to bow and pay respects to the post-WWII victims of heinous communist crimes.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the terrible deaths suffered at the hands of the communists who still hide their crimes by rubbing shoulders with the allies and the allied efforts to bring freedom and democracy to nations of Europe.

After WWII ended, in May 1945, several hundreds of thousands of Croats – unarmed soldiers of the WWII Independent State of Croatia and civilians – made their way out of Croatia wanting to surrender to the allies but were murdered after the British army refused to accept the surrender and turned them over to Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslav army. A large number were slaughtered in the Bleiburg field itself and many died in the following months on marches across Croatia and Yugoslavia – known as the Way of the Cross.

While none of Croatia’s government top-ranking figures were present in Bleiburg on Saturday, as for instance they were at Jasenovac in April, the leader of the parliamentary opposition – Croatian Democratic Union/HDZ, Tomislav Karamarko, was and so were many political and church leaders, including Cardinal Josip Bozanic, the Archbishop of Zagreb.

Centre: Cardinal Josip Bozanic
at Bleiburg 16 May 2015
Photo: Zarko Basic/Pixsell

“Seventy years ago, a large part of Europe and the world celebrated liberation from totalitarian ideologies of evil, and what Croatia remembers about May 1945 are horrible massacres, crimes against humanity committed under the symbol of the five-pointed star,” said Bozanic at Bleiburg.

The cardinal recalled that in 1945, unlike Western Europe, in Croatia and some other central and east European countries one totalitarian regime was replaced by another totalitarian regime and that Nazi-fascism was replaced by communism.

“For us, the establishment of the communist totalitarian system meant the beginning of new persecutions, imprisonment and killing of innocent people; pits and foibas (sinkholes) and mass graves that have not been located and investigated yet testify to that,” said Bozanic.

“It’s finally the time that those responsible for these terrible victims are named…Croatian social-democracy will never be a true social-democracy until it distances itself from the crimes of Josip Broz Tito, only when they do that will the Croatian Left be born,” said Tomislav Karamarko at Bleiburg.

Front: Tomislav Karamarko,
Leader of the Opposition/HDZ
At Bleiburg 16 May 2015
Photo: hrt.hr

President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović travelled alone to Bleiburg, to Macelj and to Tezno (all a handful from hundreds of mass graves or communist mass murder sites) on Wednesday 13 May, to pay her respects away from the media attention. She laid wreaths and bouquets of flowers, with the following words on her mind and her lips:
“The end of the Second world war and the victory over Nazism, to which the Croatian people significantly contributed, also marked the beginning of one of the most tragic chapters in Croatian history. In just a few post-war months multitudes of captured soldiers and civilians were either murdered or perished from torture and exhaustion…While showing respect to the victims of the Way of the Cross at Bleiburg, in Tezno and Macelj, I have a moral duty to condemn the regime that persecuted and murdered people. A crime is a crime and it cannot be justified by any ideology.”

President Grabar-KItarovic
at Macelj massacre site 13 May 2015
Photo: Office of the President, Croatia

Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic, Parliament Speaker Josip Leko said and Defence Minister Ante Kotromanovic paid their respects to the victims of the Way of the Cross marches on Friday 15 May in Tezno. Crimes committed by Communists at the end of World War II have stained “a just fight” and Croatia today condemns all crimes committed in the name of any ideology, Milanovic and Leko said.

The past cannot be changed, but for the sake of new generations, crimes committed in the name of any ideology must be condemned, Parliament Speaker Leko said.

“I came here for the people who were killed at the end of a war. This is a tragic, horrible event, which puts a stain on a just fight and one should not run from it, nor do I run from it. I am here as Croatia’s prime minister and statesman,” Croatia’s Prime Minister said before laying a wreath at the site.

Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic
at mass grave Tezno
15 May 2015
Photo: Cropix

What a shame Milanovic did not bother to make as lengthgy a speech at Tezno as he did less than a month ago at Jasenovac! But then again, if he were ready to make a speech at Tezno or any other communist crimes mass grave site he would have to condemn his beloved communist regime as loudly as he condemned the pro-Nazi regime at Jasenovac. That of course, is not yet to be – sadly – but perhaps these words spoken at Tezno suggest former communists and today’s followers of the communist Yugoslavia leading criminal Josip Broz Tito, such as Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic, are making small steps towards full condemnation of horrific crimes committed in the name of communism? It’s difficult to say because all of that red gang stays away from Bleiburg – most likely because it has become a worldwide, reciognisable, symbol of communist Yugoslavia and Tito terror and murderous rampage against humanity and human rights.

The topic of Bleiburg massacres and those along “the Way of the Cross”, where communist death camps grew like mushrooms after rain, was a taboo in communist Yugoslavia. Exact records of numbers that perished have not surfaced as yet, not even the number of civilians, and one is well justified in saying Tito’s communists buried them. However, if one considers the fact that towards the end of WWII the government of Ante Pavelic’s Independent Croatia united or blended into one army the Ustashi (Nazi-collaborating forces) and the Home Guard forces (defenders of Croatian territory from internal and external enemies), thus reaching the number of over 100,000 soldiers, that sources say at least 80% of them had followed the order to retreat, it’s likely that those retreating unarmed soldiers took at least 60,000 civilians with them as they reached Bleiburg. It’s important to note that, towards the end of WWII, while many Home Guards were united into the state army with the Ustashi, quite a number of them defected into the communist Partisan forces and there were also many who wanted nothing to do with either Ustashi or the Partisans, and if captured by either were executed. Further hundreds of thousands more were murdered along the years of Tito’s communist purges and Bleiburg symbolises these deaths as well.

These heinous crimes committed at Bleiburg and along “the Way of the Cross” at the end of WWII and after it, had taken away every right from Tito’s communists to call themselves antifascists. Unlike with other antifascist movements in Europe, these crimes committed by the “antifascist” communists removed any chance of democracy Croatia might have had after WWII. Using the legitimacy of antifascist fight (“the good fight”) Yugoslav communists had established a murderous totalitarian regime and a dictatorship.

The Bleiburg tragedy especially serves as a political jumping-board because it has not been closed, it has left many questions unanswered, especially those to do with murder and extermination of innocent people and why Tito’s communists decided to treat the Home Guards the same as they treated the Ustashi, those responsible for the running of the Holocaust concentration camps. Most Ustashi leaders had fled to South America after WWII, were not among the masses of civilians and soldiers murdered at Bleiburg – who, in this terrible way, were made to carry the full burden and pay for all the crimes committed by the Ustashi regime. The victims of Bleiburg paid with their lives without knowing what it was that they had done!

This injustice continues to this day and it’s a problem of ideological dispute in the daily politics of Croatia; this problem is a much bigger problem than the actual murderous event of Bleiburg 1945. The innocent victims of communist crimes have still not received the full recognition and afforded the full piety they deserve because today’s government and left-winged political elites have monumental difficulties in separating innocent victims from the political ideology others pin them to or the murders from the political ideology that sees communism as force for freedom.

Bleiburg massacres were not revenge killings by communist or antifascists against “fascist” regime of WWII – they were murder of innocent Croatian people.

These murdered victims are held hostage before our very own 21st century eyes by the former communists or the so-called antifascists who keep saying murder of innocent people was justified because “fascism was bad and antifascism was the good fight”. Today’s “antifascists” of Croatia derive their reasoning from the former totalitarian communist regime and are in some ways marked or branded by the same totalitarian regime (that is the case with all who subscribe to or are affected by any totalitarian regime). Their daily political discourse is essentially an ideological conflict that makes them enemies of Croatian national interests, not merely members of political parties that make up what is supposed to be a healthy political discourse that will move the nation closer to fairness and full democracy. The innocent victims of the Holocaust, of camp Jasenovac… have never been treated in such horrid ways as victims of communist crimes have been and the only way to justice is that the political elites subscribing to the glorification of Tito’s antifascists make a radical shift in their thinking and turn towards actual human justice – not appalling and meritless political justification. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)