Partisans – Croatia, the War, and the Future

Unpalatable Turn of Events Post-Croatian Operation Storm

August 4, 2023 by inavukic 11 Comments

Front images: Croatian Operation Storm veteran retired general and former MP Zeljko Glasnovic then and now

In May 1991. 94% of Croatian voters at the independence referendum voted “Yes” for Croatia to secede from communist Yugoslavia and become a free, independent democracy. This, its people’s human right to self-determination, was brutally attacked by the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serbs. Today, August 4, 1995, was the start of 84 hours of magnificent, brave and victorious Croatian military liberating operation “Storm”, recapturing thousands of square kilometres of Croatia’s territory occupied by Serb forces. So, this year, like every year, Croatians celebrate the anniversary of the great and successful Croatian military operation that was launched when all peaceful attempts to liberate the country from Serbian clutches failed. It is a celebration of the heroism of the Croatian defenders and the Croatian military victory over the Serbian occupation army. These days, the Croatian media announced the order of events marking Operation Storm Day, the Day of Victory, Homeland Gratitude and Croatian Veterans’ Day: wreath-laying, speeches by political and military officials, mass and an evening concert, which will be broadcast live on national television. But there will be multitudes of Homeland War veterans who will not attend these official events out of grave disappointment with Croatia’s government and the President and their undermining and undervaluing the crucial value of the Homeland War for today’s independent Croatia. The HDZ government’s coalition with those associated with rebel Serbs and Serb forces that terrorised Croatia in the 1990’s is a constant wound and a constant injustice. The ever-increasing presence of communist Yugoslavia manner and mindset is eating away at the ideals and reasons Croatia fought so hard for during the Homeland War.

One would think that in 28 years that have passed since then Croatia would have made greater progress in becoming a fully functional democracy that cherishes above all else the people who in any way helped defend it from the brutal aggression and install it as independent state. But from year 2000 former communists and their descendants took power and instead of lustration, that should have occurred after the War wholly ended in 1998 when last occupied territory was reintegrated into Croatia, Croatia sank deeper and deeper into a state reminiscent of communist Yugoslavia. Corruption, nepotism, dysfunctional judiciary, celebration of former communist regime, humiliation of Homeland War veterans …

And so, while many will celebrate during this weekend this great victory of Operation Storm it is wise to do so by having in mind the sad reality that prevails on the streets of Croatia and sharpening one’s axes, so to speak, to make changes and to rid Croatian corridors of power of former communist operatives and their descendants. To illustrate this sad reality, I have chosen to translate into English two Facebook posts written by retired general of the Croatian Army and the Croatian Defence Council, and former Member of Croatian Parliament – Zeljko Glasnovic:

“From 1991 until today, more than 3,200 Croatian veterans have committed suicide. Almost an entire brigade of the Croatian Army. The number is certainly higher. There is still no accurate data on HVO (Croatian Defence Council) members who took their own lives. One Croatian veteran cut his own jugular veins, another doused himself with gasoline and burned himself alive, a third shot himself in the head with a pistol, a fourth hanged himself from a house, a fifth killed himself with a chainsaw, a sixth killed himself on the occasion ofMesic’s inauguration (Stjepan Mesic President)… and the most widely known, General Slobodan Praljak, innocent, drank a shot glass of poison, like a glass of bile in front of the world public. These are just some of the examples among hundreds of other comrades of theirs who suffered a similar fate because they suffered for years from the “cancer of the soul” better known as PTSD. They survived shells, bombs, bullets, camps, Great Serbian aggression, and war, but they could not survive this kind of peace. They were stronger than the horrors of war, but they could not deal with the horrors of peace, with robbery, with corruption, with extortion, with injustice and humiliation because they felt left behind and rejected after being used. Every third day, a Croatian veteran commits suicide. In the last 5 days, unfortunately, two more brave warriors left us, who did not last under the pressure of injustice, misunderstanding and condemnation.

Who is to blame for this situation among veterans? Who closes their eyes? Who failed? Where did we go wrong? The state failed them, which abandoned many of them to mercy or disfavour of fate, left them without work and status and declared many of them unfit for work. The policy that skilfully manipulates them, diminishes their contribution and disenfranchises them has failed. A society that stigmatises and systematically puts them on the pole of shame because of the alleged ‘privileges’ they have achieved has failed. Those veterans’ associations that, instead of taking care of the veterans’ psyche, were concerned about their political goals, also failed. The media have also failed, as they are instructed not to talk or write about it, and if they do, they do so in an extremely underestimating and sensationalist manner. Our families, who sometimes did not understand what we go through after the war, also failed, why we feel like a burden to others, why we cannot come to terms with injustice and why we persistently return to that most difficult period of our lives. In the end, we defenders (war veterans) also failed because we allowed ourselves to be mocked, belittled and deceived by those whose backsides we defended while they hid in their cabinets during the war so that in peace they would once again create a state that we never dreamed of, for which we never fought, the state we never wanted.

We never needed decorations, ranks or awards, we needed above all the true freedom we cried so much for, the respect we never got and the preservation of what we fought for.

After the end of the Homeland War, we probably expected too much when we thought that the Croatian people would never again allow the re-occupation of the land that was soaked in the blood of the veterans and raised from the ashes on their bones. However, moral criminals from the former Yugoslav Communist regime legally revived in peace and returned the failed creation that we had defeated in the war and thought we had destroyed forever. They took over the government, the cultural space, the media, all state institutions, and above all, they took over the mind and mentality of the people. Let’s not fool ourselves, WE handed it all over to them ourselves without firing a shot.

On a decorated tray.

No paper and pen.

No voice.

Without force.

Without resisting.

In peace.

Voluntarily.

Indifferent.

The average age of a Croatian veteran who fought and died in the Homeland War in the nineties was only 23 years. When I say average age, it means that there were also 17-year-olds. They were still only children who picked up a rifle overnight instead of a book. When a veteran who went to a psychiatric examination in Vukovar was asked if he was thinking about suicide, he answered: ‘Yes, but about mass suicide.’

When my brother left Manjaca (concentration camp) after 15 months, I didn’t recognise him. He experienced a clinical death. But he said: ‘Croats should build a monument to Milosevic (Slobodan Milosevic) on Ban Jelacic Square (in Zagreb), because if he hadn’t attacked them, most of them wouldn’t even know who they are.’ They erased the people’s collective memory and any feeling for the national state. My mother, who was raped twice, ended up in the communist prison in Petrinjska when I was only six months old because someone accused her of trying to sabotage the party elections. All that, and even more, so that today former SKOJ (League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia) members would sit in government, whose offices are headed by former secretaries of national defence, and their chief advisers are Udbas (Yugoslav Secret Services). Is that the Croatian state?! After 30 years, we can freely stop wondering why veterans take their lives en masse and start questioning ourselves, how much have WE as a society contributed to the fact that after everything they have done for this country, they raise a hand against themselves?I end with words from a sermon by Bishop Vlado Kosic:

‘Mary is sad when she looks at our Croatian veterans who created, defended and liberated Croatia with their blood, and then they were categorised as unnecessary, as a surplus against which the media and domestic traitors throw mud, and these do not even deserve to wash their feet. They, in their disappointment, no longer know what kind of country they fought for, so almost 3,000 of them have already raised their hands on themselves. I am calling out all previous politicians and people of influence and position, who hid this situation – you killed them, you are to blame that so many veterans committed suicide, you killed them, you are to blame for their disappointments, and the whole society is responsible, and above all the politicians and traitors of their own homeland who worked and are working against the interests of Croatia, for which they were ready to give their lives.’” (Zeljko Glasnovic, 11 July 2023)

—

“The falsification of history continues in Croatia. Non-existent events are celebrated, non-existent anniversaries are celebrated. The term ‘anti-fascism’ came out of Stalin’s kitchen. The ideological successors of Bolshevik satanism use it even today as a smokescreen to cover up communist crimes. Croatia is pure proof that history repeats itself as farce and tragedy.

While the Croatian Parliament is debating the recognition of the Holodomor as genocide committed against the Ukrainian people from 1932-1933, at the same time, under the guise of anti-fascism, Croatia is celebrating the crime against its own people. Mass graves of victims of communist crimes are being dug out day by day. Until 2011 MUP ( Croatian Ministry of Internal Affairs) recorded more than 700 mass graves in which victims of thepartisan communist regime crimes committed during and immediately after World War II were buried. It is estimated that around 90,000 victims were buried in them. A greater number of mass graves are located in Slovenia. The battlegrounds from eastern Herzegovina to the Macedonian border have not yet been explored. In Serbia, the state commission made an individual list of about 70,000 victims of partisan-communist terror after the entry of the Red Army into Belgrade in 1944. In May 1945, aiming to cover up mass graves the Yugoslav regime issued order known as Order No. 1253. Until 1990. relatives and friends were forbidden to visit the sites of those mass graves. Even today, the successors of the (Partisan) Sixth Lika Division, in conjunction with the mainstream media, stand guard over those places of execution. The mentality sedimented in the party single-mindedness is trans genetically transferred into the present. Yugoslav nationalists know that a lie has more emotional appeal than the harsh truth. Communist regimes have crippled the future generations and left behind a moral and spiritual wasteland. The implementation of the so-called menticide (crime against spirit and mind) continues today. Along with the destruction of the ability to think critically, along with lies and manipulations, they keep us in shackles even today.

At the Yalta conference, Stalin may have stated the truth for the first time in his life when he told Churchill: ‘Satan is a communist and he is on my side.’ Tens of millions of people were killed, tortured, and deported in the Soviet Union alone. Tito’s regime is a microcosm of what happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s rule. A few years ago, a non-government organisation named “Memorial” in Russia was abolished after they found a record of 2 million Stalin’s victims. The Red Army raped 355,000 women in Romania alone, 800,000 in Hungary, or a total of 10-15% of the female population. In Germany, 2 million women aged 8-80 were victims of rape. In Berlin alone, 20,000 women committed suicide after the mass rape of typhoidal men from the Red Army.

Today’s heads think identically to their predecessors and if they had the chance to exercise such power, all of us would end up with a bullet in the back of the head like the Dominican Father Dominik Barac who was killed in 1945 only because he wrote the book ‘Philosophy of Communism’ in which he exposed Bolshevik satanism. 1923 Bolshevik satanists formed the Ministry of Disinformation and continue to implement this regime to this day. In China, if you want to work in the public sector, you must first write a declaration that you are not a member of any religious community. This ideological lobotomy is written into their DNA, it is at the core of their being. It has merged so much with their spirit and mentality that even if they took the red chip out of their heads, they would continue to lobby for that regime. It is a pathological, incurable disease in which there is no remorse even on the deathbed, but instead we have statements like ‘I am sorry I did not do more…’ (ordered, killed, raped…). Communism is the biggest fraud in the history of mankind. Today in our country THEY celebrate it. They celebrate rape, killing, terror, abuse, expulsion, brutality, mistreatment, deprivation of human rights – in one word, they celebrate DEATH. And they don’t celebrate it just anywhere. They are holding their freak manifestations in the Brezovica forest in the vicinity of the mass graves where the remains of 6,000 victims of the partisan-communist terror who were brutally murdered are buried.

Over their bones, the regime and the monsters that led the innocent to their deaths celebrate. They even declared a non-working day (a public holiday) to celebrate the murderers of their people. We are still waiting for them to declare a non-working day in honour of the Chetniks to celebrate those who killed Croats in the Homeland War in the middle of Vukovar! While communist symbols are abolished from Lithuania to Hungary, communist guerrillas – the scourge of humanity – are celebrated in the Republic of Croatia. The best example of national masochism.”(Zeljko Glasnovic, 22 June 2023)

Ina Vukic, translation into English

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bishop Vlado Kosic, Communism, communist crimes, Croatia, Croatian Homeland War, Croatian Operation Storm, genocide, mass graves, Partisans, Serb aggression, war veteran sucides, war veterans, Zeljko Glasnovic

Tito’s Crimes Should Never Be Forgotten

October 25, 2017 by inavukic 8 Comments

Robin Harris
Photo: http://www.unicath.hr/

The leaders of Croatia’s antifascist movement repeatedly identified themselves with Tito. They offered no apologies for Tito’s methods and the Communist Party’s crimes.

Tito, in fact, behaved as Communists do, promoting revolution by the mass liquidation of potential opponents, by subverting every independent institution, and by bringing all power within the Party’s control.

By Robin Harris,

(source: standpoint.co.uk )

Progressive opinion affects to take symbols lightly. Thus public acceptance of blasphemous plays and obscene exhibitions, the burning of a national flag, and insults to heads of state are all supposed to be evidence of intellectual liberation. Particularly in former Communist countries, where symbolism has altered in ways that disorientate the new as well as the old Left, the cry quickly goes up that any concern for symbols is an “obsession” or a “distraction”.

In Eastern and Central Europe, though, the Left’s indifference to symbols is an affectation. The modern leftist turns in a flash into a snarling neo-Communist — lacking only a Party membership card and Kalashnikov to revert to the older variety — when his own myths are challenged. Moreover, his assumed indifference to tradition quickly becomes intolerance of “extremism”, if any unwholesome, or ambiguous, symbol emerges from shadows on the Right.

On Friday September 1, Zagreb City Council voted to change the name of one of the most prominent squares from “Marshal Tito Square” to the “Square of the Republic of Croatia”. The decision was greeted by some solemn shaking of heads in the Western media, where it was depicted as an assertion of reactionary nationalism. Credibility was lent to this by the fact that the campaign to change the name was spearheaded by Dr Zlatko Hasanbegović, the former Croatian culture minister, who fell foul, when in office, of agitation from George Soros-backed NGOs, whose tax-financed budgets he was minded to cut. Hasanbegović is a nationalist historian with a taste for controversy and what, for politicians in Croatia, is an unnerving willingness to argue intellectual positions. He is not, however, a fascist, anti-Semite, or racist (he is a Muslim, and so has received his fair share of Islamophobic abuse). In any case, the majority for the change was provided by the conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the centre-left party grouping attached to Zagreb’s mayor, Milan Bandić.

The square’s name change was historically significant. It clearly symbolised a break with the country’s past. But it became involved with another dispute about symbols, which has, despite the sound and fury, no historical significance at all. Near the Jasenovac concentration camp, where a large number of Serbs, Jews and political opponents of the quisling Independent State of Croatia (NDH) were killed by the Ustasha authorities, a private memorial was raised a year ago to members of the HOS (Croatian Defence Forces — a rightist paramilitary force) who died fighting in the war for Croatian independence in the early 1990s. On the memorial was inscribed the Ustasha salute “Za Dom Spremni” (“Ready for the Homeland”). The salute was apparently used by many HOS fighters — though who knows with what understanding of its true significance? The memorial plaque has since been moved a few miles away. What to do generally about totalitarian symbols — including the Communist five-pointed Red Star (“Petokraka”) positioned near the sites of mass graves of Communist Party victims — is now the thankless task of a government-appointed commission. Meanwhile, a well-funded, internationally-supported “antifascist” movement currently seeks to link cases of real or imagined nostalgia for the Ustasha regime — which collapsed 70 years ago — with the movement to cleanse Croatia of the remains of the Communist regime — which have a disconcerting degree of life in them still.

But what is this “antifascism”? There the historical evidence is clear. Antifascism is not a catch-all category of democrats. It is a Communist construct. It is, indeed, meaningless without reference to Communist ideology. Its exponents quickly manifest this even today by their willing defence of the record of Communism, their espousal of a recognisable (anti-Western) Communist world view, and their unshakeable conviction that the only threat to civilisation comes from the Right, not the Left.

Until the recent upsurge of leftist anarchism in America, there was, significantly, no antifascism in the US or Britain. Yet these countries were the key components of the Western alliance against the Axis powers in the Second World War. The absence of any antifascist movement in the US and the UK is not just because there was no significant indigenous Anglo-Saxon fascism (Mosley quickly fizzled out); more importantly, it is because there was no significant indigenous Communism — whose creation antifascism is.

Antifascism was a propagandist device to broaden support for Communist Party aims among non-Communists. It was a tactic to gain power, at which point power would be wielded exclusively by the Party itself. The intermittent emergence of antifascism was just a sign of the Communist Party’s temporary weakness. Between the two world wars the promotion of antifascist “Popular Fronts”, most successfully in France, encompassing the democratic Left but serving the Party, was authorised by Moscow. In 1939, however, Stalin opted for the alternative strategy — alliance with Hitler — and antifascism was immediately discarded.

Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito in 1960
(Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

The Yugoslav Party under Tito, like other European Communist parties, obediently followed the new line. The much-trumpeted “rising” of the Communist partisans was not in response to Ustasha atrocities — the NDH had been formed on April 10, 1941. It was an authorised response to Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union — on June 22. With energetic prompting from Moscow, the Yugoslav Party now took up antifascism as a device to rally opposition to the Axis occupiers and the quisling regimes in Zagreb and Belgrade, but with a view to imposing a classic Marxist-Leninist revolution. The term “antifascist” was meanwhile used to legitimise what were presented as non-Party institutions of an alternative government — as with AVNOJ, the Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia. Once the Communists attained power and squeezed out or liquidated non-Communist elements, under way by 1944, antifascism was relegated from its prominence in the Party’s ideological arsenal. Only in 1990, when the Communists knew that they were facing a reckoning with real democracy, did the Party revive antifascism. So, for example, while the Party changed its name from the League of Communists of Croatia (SKH) to the less threatening Party of Democratic Change, and then the Social Democratic Party, the Communist veterans’ organisation, SUBNOR (Alliance of Associations of Fighters in the People’s Liberation War), was retitled the Alliance of Antifascist Fighters. In short, antifascism never existed independently of the Communist Party, and though millions of genuine democrats have fought oppressors who may, at a pinch, be described as “fascist”, those freedom fighters had nothing in common with the ideological artefact of antifascism, except occasionally as useful dupes.

This, then, answers the question: what is antifascism? And what is its link with Communism? But the further question is: What is Tito’s role in it?

The old plaque on Tito Square, now intended for the Zagreb historical museum, makes a large claim. It reads: “Marshal Tito Square. Josip Broz Tito, politician, leader of the antifascist movement, President of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, 1945-1980, 1892-1980.” (Emphasis added.) An array of campaign groups turned out — in only modest numbers, despite the media attention — to protest against dethroning their hero from his square. The television pictures told the story of their identity and their marginalisation. Everywhere big red flags bearing the hammer and sickle were waved. The only Croatian flags present were those of the old socialist “People’s Republic”. Some protesters wore items of Yugoslav army uniform — the same worn by the Serbian/Yugoslav army forces which in 1991 attacked Croatia.

The leaders of Croatia’s antifascist movement repeatedly identified themselves with Tito. They offered no apologies for Tito’s methods and the Communist Party’s crimes.

But a glance at the list of groups supporting the protest suggests that some very special apologies were in order. Were the “Women’s Network” aware, one wonders, that Tito initiated sexual relations with his first wife when she was just 14? That he later denounced her, and his second wife — and a host of other Party “comrades” — to the NKVD when he was in Moscow in the 1930s? Did the homosexual activists know — as a forthcoming book by a Croatian historian will shortly detail — that at the Goli Otok concentration camp, to which Tito despatched his political enemies, the authorities publicly humiliated and beat homosexuals, whom they considered “bourgeois decadents”?

The Jewish community, represented at the protest, has, of course, reason to detest the behaviour towards them of the wartime Ustasha, who fully collaborated in the Holocaust decreed by the Reich. But should Croatian Jews be grateful to Tito and the Party? In 1945 well-known Jewish businessmen were killed and their businesses seized by the Communists. When the Communists arrived, Jewish properties confiscated by the Ustasha were not returned, but were again seized and enjoyed — and are often still enjoyed — by the Communist elite and their privileged, cosseted progeny — the so-called “red bourgeoisie” who provide the bulk of the ruling class of “post-Communist” Croatia.

As for the Croatian Serbs, whose leaders were prominent in the protests — whatever privileged positions they disproportionately occupied under the Party, notably in the repressive apparatus, they would be well advised to reflect on the long-term cost of those benefits. That cynical Communist policy of divide and rule meant that in 1990, when democracy arrived in Croatia, Serbs were both distrustful and distrusted and as such automatically seen as hostile to the new state — which the Serb rebellion prompted by Belgrade (still then led by Communists) confirmed. If Tito’s Yugoslavia left hatreds so raw and wounds so deep, who can seriously conclude that Communism offered a cure or even a palliative for atavistic nationalism, as its apologists still claim?

Tito’s persona still, however, evidently holds a certain attraction. It is of more than historical interest to understand why. The answer seems to be that Tito, though an orthodox Communist — his quarrel with Stalin was caused by ambition, not doctrine — was also something else, and this “something else” turns out to be that he was a heroic “antifascist”.

Tito, in fact, behaved as Communists do, promoting revolution by the mass liquidation of potential opponents, by subverting every independent institution, and by bringing all power within the Party’s control. He authorised the killing of tens of thousands of people, many without trial, others with staged trials — soldiers, conscripted Home Guard members, unpolitical civilians, Catholic priests, monks and nuns, doctors, nurses, teachers, journalists, businessmen, women and children. The mass graves, where people were thrown in alive to be slowly suffocated by the weight of those who followed, are still gradually being excavated. For fear of annoying influential Communist cadres, who had joined anti-Communists to create the fledgling Croatian state in 1991, these horrible crimes were for many years left unmentioned. Until recently, most Party and secret police archives were similarly inaccessible. There was no lustration of Party members. Not a single trial within Croatia has been held of a Communist official: only in Munich, after Germany managed to secure their extradition, were two high-ranking Yugoslav secret police officials given life sentences for a politically authorised murder on German soil in 1983.

The new Croatia’s first president, Franjo Tudjman, apparently admired Tito; but Tudjman never dreamed of imitating Tito’s personality cult, whose effects must still be remembered when assessing the Marshal’s reputation. Leafing through the snapshots portraying Tito’s gaudy, greedy, self-indulgent, spendthrift, pointless political life, it requires an exercise of imagination to take the performance seriously. Yugoslavia solved nothing internally. It achieved nothing externally. But heroic myths, imposed by expert media control over 35 years, so brainwashed its population that they became a heaving, wailing, neurotic, human wreck when the dictator’s death was finally announced. Only a system in which all hold on reality had been lost could have solemnly announced as its watchword for the country’s future that lapidary slogan: “After Tito — Tito!”

Tito’s achievements, such as they were, have largely been forgotten, along with most of his crimes; only his antifascist credentials are still burnished. Yet antifascism, like the smile on the Cheshire Cat, reminds us, in a disembodied form, of what Communism was, what the Communists did, and what their successors would like to do, if they had the chance. It should go the way of Tito’s plaque

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: antifascists, communist crimes, communist liquidations, communist Ygoslavia, Croatia, For Home Ready, Inependent State of Croatia, Josip Broz Tito, Partisans, Ready For Home, Robin Harris, Ustashe, Za Dom Spremni

Victims Of Communism On Island Of Korcula Croatia

February 3, 2016 by inavukic 34 Comments

If you’re not with us then you are against us, and, therefore, you must be liquidated – that was the motto Yugoslav communist Partisans lived by during and after WWII.

“I did not even dare write about all the horrendous torment victims of Partisans on Korcula endured – Partisans in the village of Zrnovo were particularly cruel,” reports the Croatian Cultural Council (Hrvatsko Kulturno Vijece) portal as Franko Burmas having said.

The launching in Zagreb on Friday 29 January 2016 of Franko Burmas’ new book “Victims of communism on Korcula – searching for truth“, published by the Croatian Victimology Society and Biblioteca Documenta Croatica, brought back with live disquiet the horror stories I remember hearing throughout my childhood. The imagery of merciless brutality created by those stories in which hundreds upon hundreds of individuals from the relatively sparsely populated island who did not subscribe to Josip Broz Tito’s communist plans perished – murdered or thrown into pits alive – hit me with deep distress.

Franko Burmas (left) Zvonimir Separovic (right) Zagreb, Croatia 29 January 2016 Photo credit: www.news.korcula.net

Franko Burmas (left)
Zvonimir Separovic (right)
Zagreb, Croatia 29 January 2016
Photo credit: http://www.news.korcula.net

Narod.hr reports that Zvonimir Separovic, president of Croatian Victimology Society, Rade Kastorpil, president of Croatian matica in Blato/Korcula and the author himself, Franko Burmas, spoke extensively about the book, which serves as a testament of evidence of the brutality of Communist crimes on the Island of Korcula. It was just as well that an entertainment segment was included with this launch – thus making the revelation of this ugly truth of WWII and Post-WWII Island of Korcula bearable. The doyenne of the Croatian National Opera, Dubravka Separovic Musovic, accompanied by Eva Kirchmayer-Bilic on the piano offered a most welcome moment at this launch of evidence of crimes no person should ever be faced with, let alone endure.

But sadly, the world still lags far behind in condemning communist crimes than where it is and has been for decades with view to the crimes of the Holocaust. It is books like this one written by Franko Burmas that hold a candle for a brighter future where all crimes regardless of which political persuasion they hide behind are equally condemned and equally smothered with outrage and unforgiving wrath.

” Victims of communism on Korcula – searching for truth” by Franko Burmas is a witness to communist Partisan crimes committed during and after WWII on the Island of Korcula. Numerous pits in the ground and locations where executions of innocent people occurred – e.g. Vranina, Sibal’s feet, Paklenica, Butina, St Luke’s cemetery in Town of Korcula, St Cross cemetery in Blato on Korcula … all give witness to the “hatred and killing, trampling upon freedom, to the terrifying and unbelievable crimes, to the times when people did not know what awaits them tomorrow, where they are going, what to do,” says Franko Oreb in his Foreword to the book.

Section inside Butina Pit,
post-WWII communist crimes mass grave
on Island of Korcula –
Butina Pit mass grave
Photo taken October 2012

Franko Oreb says further in his Foreword that the truth of which this book speaks is horrific and painful and that it constitutes evidence of the terrible crimes committed by the communist regime in which people were swiftly punished, imprisoned, abused and murdered guided only by their suspicions, without bothering to provide for court trials or proof of guilt. It happened often that their death was not revealed and so even the official government office “Register of Deaths” did not include their names.

Oreb says that the book reveals a perfidious and a repressive face of government authorities connected to well-organised network of political and Party structures with the goal of keeping that regime alive and their status within it. The regime of those times successfully hid its crimes for a very long time causing a public veil of silence to cover them so that much dust and forgetting fell over the victims.

Old town Korcula, Croatia

The book itself is also a kind of Korcula’s martyrdom record in which the names of the victims of WWII and Post-WWII period Korcula are written and recorded. It’s a record of 85 grim and ghastly murders, some persons among them were from Dubrovnik brought to Korcula by Partisans as prisoners and liquidated there. Franko Burmas is a university trained and graduated lawyer with many years of experience and collection of data, including interviews with some people directly associated with the events, which have formed the foundations and factual body of his book. There were priests and intellectuals among the mass murder victims against whom the communist regime operators directed terrible lies and defamation saying they were enemies of the nation. And yet, all they did in life was dedicate their lives to the service of their people, to defending the faith, morality and the national sanctities. A list of more than several hundred of liquidated victims, thrown into pits, needs to be added to the ones named in the book as communist left no trace of names or the number of people they threw into pits such as Butina.

Blato, Island of Korcula, Croatia
August 16 2012
funeral for earthly remains
of communist crimes victims 1943
(including brother of dr Zvonimir Separovic)
Photo: Ika/HRSvijet

Alena Fazinic asserted: “searching for the truth brought the books author to conclude that liquidations were really an ingrained part of the communists managers’ system (who later to become authority holders – from those at the country’s top to those in the small communities such as Korcula) – if you are not with us you are against us, our enemy, and, therefore, you must be liquidated.”

That is how the communists of Yugoslavia kept people in fear and that means obedience and submission.

Franko Burmas’ book also points to the fact that after WWII the communist practice continued: through fear, persecution, imprisonment, torture, even by murder stop every attempt at freedom of thought and living. Burmas has documented his book well, with many photographs and documents and is to be congratulated for joining those heroes of today who have no fear in speaking out about the crimes of former Yugoslav communists. Now, all Croatia truly needs is a proper and just condemnation of these crimes and lustration from its important social points and public and justice administration all those who are or were associated with the operatives of communist Yugoslavia. Croatia needs names not just a reference to the system and the more names of those criminals brought out into the public the better for the murderous system did not exist on its own – individual people kept it going. And the most awful truth of this trail of horrid communist crimes is that “Korcula” from this book was replicated multitudes of thousands of time throughout Croatia of the former Yugoslavia, but also the other states there. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Zgb)