The Mass commemorating the Bleiburg victims from 1945 which is to be held in Sarajevo on Saturday is an “attempt to change history” and “has a political background,” Croatia’s former President, Stjepan Mesic, told N1 on Friday.
“Of course Sarajevo is not the place for such an event because in Sarajevo, as in many other places, so many crimes were committed during the war, killings went on for four years,” he said.
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“When the Third Reich capitulated, the Ustashas and the Chetniks should have as well, but they didn’t,” he said.
Amid a Yugoslav army offensive aimed at defeating pro-Nazi and anti-communist forces, tens of thousands of mostly pro-fascist Croat soldiers and their families fled in 1945 toward Austria to seek help from the British army, only to be turned back by the Brits right into the hands of anti-fascists.
In and around the Austrian town of Bleiburg, allegedly thousands of the so-called Ustashas were killed.
The Yugoslav forces saw the slaughter they committed as punishment for the tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma and anti-fascists killed by the Ustasha during WWII.
After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Croatia began commemorating the Bleiburg victims with a large gathering near the Austrian town every year but it was cancelled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The organisers of the event, the Honorary Bleiburg Platoon, said it will be held in different cities instead, among them in Sarajevo.
It will take place at the Sarajevo Sacred Heart Cathedral and will be led by Bosnia’s Catholic Archbishop Vinko Puljic.
According to Mesic, what happened in Bleiburg is not being portrayed adequately by the Church.
What really happened was an attempt to break the siege and that took about nine to ten lives, Mesic said.
“This is how many died in Bleiburg. The truth is that the civilians were let go,” he claimed.
Mesic said that killings took place for four years before that and that racial laws were implemented which eliminated the lives of Roma, Jews, the Orthodox and anti-fascists. The Ustashas used women and children as a living shield and the partisans knew that and let them all go, he said.
“Fascism was killing those who were different, based on race, while anti-fascism fought fascists, against those who wanted to create the world in which some would be slaves and others would be superhumans,” he explained.
Mesic argued that “a good part” of Croatia’s leadership today is behaving “as if nothing happened before Bleiburg.”
“How many were killed in Jasenovac (Ustasha-run concentration camp), but also consider the Roma, who didn’t even make it to Jasenovac, the Roma were taken to Gradina and killed with clubs,” he said.
He explained that nearly all the Roma children in his place of birth “didn’t show up to school one day” and that he found out they were all taken away.
“Not to mention how many Jews were killed. Those who joined the Partisans were saved,” he added.
Mesic accused the Church of hypocrisy, arguing that “if you accuse someone of retorsion, then you have to say retorsion to what.”
“Killings were taking place for four years and the Church didn’t want to see it,” he said.
Mesic then argued that the Catholic Church never wants to mention that “more than 100 Catholic priests, led by Svetozar Rittig, the Priest of Zagreb’s St. Mark's Church, participated in the People’s Liberation War.”
He then criticised Croatia’s PM, Andrej Plenkovic, and the country’s President, Zoran Milanovic, for “acting like nothing happened but that Bleiburg just came up” and that this behaviour serves them for election purposes.
The Mass “commemorates the downfall of the Ustasha state, and the plaque in Bleiburg should be changed at the place where it says ‘in memory of the Croatian army’,” he said.
“The Ustashas were not Croatia’s army, they were a military formation of a political party. The Croatian army ended World War II on the side of allies and not on the side of the Third Reich,” he concluded.
