Croatia: Bleiburg Massacres Victims Still Hostages Of Communist Ideology

May 17, 2015 by inavukic 43 Comments

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)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Ante Pavelic, antifascists, Bleiburg massacres, Cardinal Josip Bozanic, communist crimes, Communist Yugoslavia, Croatia, Domobrani, Home Guard, Josip Broz Tito, Macelj, Partisans, Tezno, Tomislav Karamarko, Ustashi, victims of communist crimes, Zoran Milanovic

Croatia: oppression of religious freedom stemmed from bigotry of Jewish filmmaker’s tantrum

October 3, 2012 by inavukic 27 Comments

Maribor school excursion flyer Photo: Mario Profaca

A producer on Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Croatian born Branko Lustig, was boycotted in Croatia after telling Zadar primary school children (of Catholic faith who also have Religion as part of school education curriculum) – God doesn’t exist. A Minister in the current Croatian government, swiftly picked up on this boycott with subtle but oppressive and calculated denial of religious freedom that would ultimately benefit the cause of taking the focus away from Communist crimes (WWII and throughout the duration of Former Yugoslavia) and mass murders and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Serbs against Croatian people between 1991 and August 1995.

On Wednesday 26 September, as part of “Modern Jewish Film Festival Zagreb”, Lustig appeared in the coastal city of Zadar to show to primary school children his film “The Last Flight of Petr Ginz” ( Petr Ginz was a Czechoslovak boy of partial Jewish background who was deported to the Terezín concentration camp during the Holocaust. He died at the age of sixteen when he was transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp and gassed).

Prior to showing the film, Lustig delivered a lecture to the seventh and eighth graders during which he said: “God does not exist for me, I do not believe in God. If God existed he would not have allowed the Holocaust to occur, the horrible torture and murders of Jews in Nazi camps, as in Auschwitz camp where I ended up at the age of 11. He wouldn’t have allowed the Srebrenica massacres during the recent war…”

Lustig’s words shocked the school children, and their parents. After all, as Catholics, as Christians, they have been taught to accept God’s will without rebuke, without denying His existence, no matter how harsh His will may at times fall.

Then Lustig told these school children that the film blames the Christian church for the Wars of the Crusaders and that if schools don’t teach their pupils that there were in history Crusader Wars then these schools are very bad schools.

Lustig’s final message to Zadar’s school children that there mustn’t be hatred and divisions between them seems to have, justifiably, fallen on deaf ears or considered bigoted as on Thursday 27 September, in Knin (the town cleansed of Croatians during Serb aggression against Croatia in the early 1990’s), school children boycotted his appearance and the showing of the same film.

Well, Lustig threw a doozy of a tantrum regarding the boycotting of his film in Knin. He expressed profound disappointment and accused, seemingly without any evidence whatsoever, the Principal of Knin’s school of telling his pupils not to attend. Croatian media picked up swiftly; scandal of big proportions erupted as some paddled and wielded their evil tongues in the direction of WWII persecution of Jews by some parts of Croatian population. At the same time parents of school children in Knin were heard, and reported by the media, saying words to this effect: I don’t want my children hearing this blasphemy that occurred in Lustig’s lecture in Zadar.

Lustig, in his bitterness and wounded pride of an Oscar winner, went so far as saying “if in my country I cannot say what I think and feel then fuck democracy.”

To this I would normally say “Hoorah! Bravo, Lustig!” But I cannot; I must not because he does not in this case deserve it!

Lustig gives himself the right to preach and practice democracy and yet denies the same to the Christian children and families who refused to hear his offences against their God.

Also, politically wired undercurrents swelled in this whole affair and there were those who associated the Knin’s school children’s film boycott with the World War II Ustashi collaboration with Nazi Germany. Suggesting that roots of antisemitism are still crawling about Croatia in the form of President Ivo Josipovic’s metaphoric “Ustashi snake”.

The Croatian government did not lift a finger in the defense of religious freedom of their citizens in this whole affair. In fact, oppression and fear mongering became the order of the day, as journalist Mario Profaca writes on Dnevno.hr portal:

“Caught at the very dawn of 2^nd October 2012, in the net of Marija Gerbec Njavro’s Croatian Radio First Program, who bashed fear into their bones with her interview with Ivo Goldstein, Davor Gjenero and the minister for sciences, education and sport, Zeljko Jovanovic, especially as the Minister repeated his assessment that the Knin boycott of Branko Lustig’s film was a ‘second holocaust’, the parents of fourth grade High School children from Zagreb took their children to the bus terminal in silence …

From there, buses took their children, at their own cost, to a compulsory ‘field lesson’ to Maribor where they will visit the Jewish Square and the synagogue. That excursion costs 205 Kunas per person, including health insurance for eventual ‘accidents within Croatia’, and they have insurance beyond Croatia’s borders if they’ve paid an extra 30 Kunas per person.

Parents’ response is totally understandable, given that a boycott of this excursion would be marked as absence from (field) school lessons, and in line with the already known opinion of minister for sciences, education and sport, Zeljko Jovanovic, for Jews this would be – a third Holocaust.”

The politically and anti-democratically calculated content of this school excursion to Maribor shocks even more when we realise that it does not include a visit to Tezno, a suburb of Maribor where a mass grave from Communist crimes is! The mass grave holds the remains of more than 15,000 Croatian innocent people and Home Guards who perished there in the post WWII Communist purges. In their multitudes mass graves of Communist crimes, across the territory of Former Yugoslavia, compared by population magnitude, put the Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime crimes to minor categories; and Tezno mass grave twice the size of Srebrenica 1995!

On his Facebook page Mario Profaca also comments on the Croatian Radio Program episode, referred to above, that “Ivo Goldstein was embittered by the Knin boycott of Lustig’s film who said that watching the film ‘would be an opportunity for the children to learn something about their own history, not only the one from 1941 to 1945 but also the one from 1991 to 1995’.

With that, ‘historian’ Ivo Goldstein has scandalously drawn an analogy between the WWII Holocaust of Jews with the Serbs in the so-called Serb Republic of Krajina during Croatia’s Homeland War.”

Giving a just dessert to the swept-and-mesmerised-by-left-winds journalists of Slobodna Dalmacija newspaper, who in their write-ups on Lustig’s “Godless” existence ask when one should reveal to Croatian children that God doesn’t exist, Dnevno.hr journalist Zvonimir Hodak skilfully extricates a sobering thought:

“If it’s normal for Lustig to force his atheistic views upon children, why would it be abnormal for the Catholic majority in Croatia comprising of 85% of people to react to that”.

The fact that Goldstein thrust his twisted, anti-Croatian, pro-Communist finger into this twisted pie which accompanied Lustig’s film doesn’t surprise me at all. It just saddens me for the fact that it suggests justice for victims of Communist crimes is still far, far away. I know, everyone knows, that Goldstein justifies Communist crimes and sees them as acceptable ways of dealing with WWII woes and foes regardless of the fact that just like Jews, millions of innocent men, women and children were exterminated (by the Communists). Judging from his book “A History”, where Goldstein talks of Serb revenge upon Croatians and Muslims for Serbs perished in the Holocaust, it’s easy to see that his justification of mass murders committed by Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during 1990’s could be viewed (without due condemnation?) as “Serbian revenge for the killings of Serb during WWII”. The fact that Serbs attacked and brutally murdered Croatians and Muslims during 1990’s because they did not want democratic regimes splitting Yugoslavia, the fact that they tried to murder in its bud the democracy that feeds him, means nothing to him.

Not OK. Not acceptable. Not Just. Not humane.

With all respect to Lustig’s film and its message, the humane world must see that Knin boycott of the film was, as journalist Miro Matesic from Dnevno.hr says, simply the exercise of choice that democracy guarantees, or should guarantee. No more, no less. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boycott, Branko Lustig, Catholics, Christians, communist crimes, Croatia, Crusaders, Holocaust, Ivo Goldstein, Jews, Knin, Maribor, Mario Profaca, Miro Matesic, Tezno, The Last Flight of Petr Ginz, Zadar, Zeljko Jovanovic, Zvonimir Hodak

Croatia: Government attempting to belittle WWII Communist Crimes

April 29, 2012 by inavukic 5 Comments

Section of Tezno mass grave - 15,000 victims - Photo: Ben Freeman

While the Croatian Social Democrat led government has declined to continue sponsoring the WWII Bleiburg Tragedy commemorations, its leaders have decided to pay respects to victims at the Tezno mass grave (about 15,000 murdered there).

The only problem is that Tezno mass grave is only one of many places of WWII, and after, where communist crimes against innocent people occurred and commemoration at Bleiburg honours all the victims, everywhere along the locations of the so-called Way of the Cross (death marches), after World War II ended.

It would seem clear that the government’s move to pinpoint Tezno as THE place to pay respects is a move to belittle and degrade the symbol that Bleiburg has become and to ensure that Jasenovac is seen as the place of terrible and widespread WWII war crimes in former Yugoslavia.

This way, they attempt to reduced in importance and severity of the communist crimes committed at Bleiburg and along the Way of the Cross.

Even though the government will not sponsor the Bleiburg Tragedy commemoration it is still to be held on Saturday 12 May. Its sponsors include Western Herzegovina county, Osijek-Baranja county and émigrés from California. It is announced that Tomislav Karamarko, candidate for president of Croatian Democratic Union (largest political party in Opposition) elections to be held in May, will deliver a keynote speech at Bleiburg.

In an interview by Croatian HRT TV News (28 April 2012) Croatia’s Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said that he would not attend the commemoration of the World War II tragedy (massacres) but that instead, he, Boris Sprem the Speaker of the Parliament and President Ivo Josipovic will attend a commemoration at Tezno, Slovenia, on May 15. Milanovic said that “the real victims of the execution” fell there and not at Bleiburg. Tezno was where the scaffold was, not Bleiburg, he added.

Well that is not the truth and Milanovic knows it. Real victims fell in many places.

His use of the word “scaffold” – the platform from which victims are executed – should not have been used for Tezno only as mass graves of innocent thousands of Croatians antifascist Partisans murdered in 1945, after World War II, have been discovered in multitudes.

“As the prime minister of Croatia, I feel the obligation to pay my respects to the people who were killed there in their thousands. We are going to Tezno because the execution site there carries both actual and symbolic weight. Bleiburg may carry symbolic weight for some people, I can accept that, but that’s not the place to commemorate the victims”, Milanovic said for Croatian TV.

Mile Prpa, Portal HR.Svijet, in his article 22 April Bleiburg Tragedy – the Hypocrisy of Politics: “Imagine, to date there have been more than 1,600 mass graves (in some there are several tens of thousands of victims) strewn across Slovenia, Croatia (equally in parts where there were and where there were no Ustadshi), then across Bosnia and Herzegovina, but numerous also across Serbia to Macedonia. Out of the multitude of victims the names of the majority were not known, there was killings of people that were not acceptable to the government, among them about 80% Croatian”.

“Bleiburg is the concept covering the destruction of almost the whole of the Croatian youth of the time, among whom there was a very, very high percentage of innocent or not even couple of percent of guilty, it’s also the concept for mass destruction of the large part of Croatian intelligence of all possible professions from journalists to priests. Bleiburg symbolizes an attack against entire people, everything that was vital had to be destroyed, when it was armed and unarmed and when they posed not even a minute threat. Rarely have people in the newer era, mainly during peace era, experienced so much and such tragedy. And those who have experienced it, have done so under the communist authorities”.

If Milanovic, Sprem and Josipovic are serious about paying respects to places where the “scaffolds” were then they must visit every pit, every mass grave of innocent lives taken by their antifascist predecessors, not just Tezno. Milanovic has been to Tezno as leader of the Opposition (Social Democratic Party) in 2009, he could have chosen another mass grave this year if he doesn’t want to go to Bleiburg. Saying that Tezno is the places where actual executions took place is wrong because Tezno is only one among many.

That is why Bleiburg commemoration is so very important – it is the place where all victims of the WWII and post-WWII communist purges are remembered. Death marches back to communist Yugoslavia started at Bleiburg. In “Bleiburg Massacres” by Count Nikolai Tolstoy one can see the very significance of Bleiburg and why that is the place to commemorate the victims without politics that Croatian current government is playing upon this terrible, sad, sad chapter of Croatian history. Ina Vukic, Prof.(Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps.(Syd)