Na Bleiburg Field in Austria, this Friday (16.5.) the 80th anniversary of the martyrdom was marked - and already when asked who died there, it is written that spears have been broken for decades Deutsche says.
Austria has banned some kind of mass gathering because apart from the civilians who "fled from the partisans" at the end of the war, many Ustasha and other associated armies gathered there after their capitulation.
To that extent, it is a right-wing extremist celebration of the Independent State of Croatia, according to the opinion of the Austrian Parliament, even though the patrons of the event are the Croatian Parliament and the Croatian Catholic Church.
So this year, despite the ban and in the presence of the Austrian police, only about a hundred people gathered, but it was still official. Because, on behalf of the President of the Parliament and the Government, the Croatian Ambassador to Austria Danijel Glunčić laid a wreath at the memorial to the victims, and the mass was held in the parish church in Blajburg.
The organizer of the meeting, the Honorary Bleiburg Division, appealed against the ban on the assembly to the Austrian Constitutional Court, and there was persistent mention of a certain probability that the highest judicial address would decide in the organizer's favor. If not this year, then certainly some of the next.
However, according to what we heard from Austria, it is not really realistic to expect that. "Currently in Austria, there is no political will for that in any relevant party," Dario Brentin, an Austrian-Croatian political scientist from the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, told us on this topic.
Turning it into a neo-Nazi manifestation
"More precisely, there is no will to revive the Bleiburg Field commemoration or challenge the ban. The Freedom Party of Austria may still have the greatest interest in this, but apart from individuals, there are no indications that political pressure or wider solidarity could develop there," he says.
According to Brentin, the social and political perception of that event, outside of historical facts and the revisionist culture of memory, was shaped mostly in the last decade, when the number of participants in the commemoration increased significantly.
"It attracted the attention of the Austrian public, and then the politicians, thanks to the greater interest of journalists in the irregularities at those gatherings. I consider that perception to be solidified, and through the report of the expert commission and the decision of the National Council, the matter can be considered 'solved'. To put it simply, all or almost all political parties are 'happy' that they no longer have to deal with that topic", adds our interlocutor.
Yugoslav responsibility and Croatian revisionism
"Irregularities" included the highlighting of Ustasha, and therefore also fascist, symbols and slogans. Over time, it became the main revisionist gathering for Croatian political forces of that type.
But the victors, the Yugoslav authorities to whom the British army handed over captured Ustasha, Chetniks and other Quisling soldiers in 1945, also contributed significantly to the later disputes.
Not only because they killed more than tens of thousands of prisoners without trial, so it is clear that there were also innocent individuals among them.
"Today, among other things, we are witnessing the effects of the fact that during communist Yugoslavia it was not possible to freely investigate everything related to Blajburg, that is, what happened immediately after," says Božo Kovačević, a former Croatian diplomat and politician, currently a lecturer at the College of International Relations at Zagreb's Libertas University.
But it is something else entirely, as he further concludes, when extreme nationalist forces try to carry out a thorough historical revision, even forcefully portraying those victims as some kind of fighters for democratic Croatia.
Austria also has its "dirty laundry"
"There is no doubt that executions without trial were a crime. But now these others completely keep silent about the character of the NDH, that it was a joint creation of Hitler and Mussolini, that at its first session its government declared war on the United States, that it implemented racial laws, that the chief Ante Pavelić himself ordered the killing of high-ranking members of his regime who proposed an alliance with the West...", Kovačević enumerates.
"And after the official capitulation of Germany, that army continued to fight against the partisans, one of the victorious armies that defeated that German occupier," he adds.
"The interpretation of history performed by the Honorary Bleiburg Platoon therefore represents absolute revisionism, and it is obvious why the Austrian authorities are not ready to accept it. Such acceptance would mean, to some extent, that the Anschluss of Austria carried out by Hitler, as well as that of Europe to which the Ustashas belonged, is legalized," Kovačević concluded.
But Austrian politics is also facing the growth of right-wing forces, and it seems that none of this is defined forever.
Source: Deutsche Welle (DW)
