User talk:Peter Z./Notes on the former Yugoslavia

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The former Balkan State Yugoslavia is indeed a complex affair. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall evidence has emerged that portrays this country in totally different light.

The region has had a truly tragic history since the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918.

  • Parliamentary assassination of Stjepan Radic in Belgrade (1928)
  • The Jasenovac concentration camp of World War Two
  • Way of the Cross,[1] Bleiburg and Foibe massacres (1945/46)
  • Srebrenica massacre of the early 1990s during the Bosnia War (1992–1995)

Dictatorships:


Croatia and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia

Croatia and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia is a subject that is not on today’s Western Scholars mind, at all. Yet the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had a profound effect on the region. So much so that it’s created today’s political and culture scene.

The events of post World War Two are of Biblical proportion. As stated by Joze Dezman[2] a noted Slovenian Historian (Slovenia a former republic of Yugoslavia).

“Slovenia was the biggest post-War killing site in Europe. It was a mixture of events, when in Slovenia there are retreating German units, collaborator units, units of Independent State of Croatia, Chetniks and Balkan civilians; more than 15,000 Slovenia inhabitants were murdered as well. Because of its brevity, number of casualties, way of execution and massiveness, it is an event that can be compared to the greatest crimes of communism and National Socialism."

The events were best documented in the European Public Hearing on “Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes" held in Brussels in April 2008. The commission was mainly the work of Brussels European Union and the Government of Slovenia.

Korcula was part of Dalmatia

In 1918 Korčula (then called Curzola) was part of Dalmatia, a province in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was already more than a century old (Dalmatia itself as a region, dates back to the Roman Empire). According to the Austrian censuses it was predominately made up of Croatians and Italians (and other minorities). With the disintegration of Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Serbia started occupying the region (Italy did the same). This was interpreted back then as the formation of the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia & Slovenia. The new kingdom had the support of Great Britain and France, who were the superpowers of the day. In retrospect this was a tragic move, one that the United States was against. The effects of this political stupidity are still felt today. It is interesting how this newly created state “Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia & Slovenia”, which latter became better know as the ill fated Yugoslavia, was given so much support over the succeeding decades. This part of European history surely needs more academic attention.

Concerns

A large proportion of information (books,articles) concerning the former Yugoslavia reminded me of the Yugoslavian encyclopaedias of the 1970s. The encyclopaedias were written in the same style as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

  • William Benton, (publisher of the Encyclopedia Britannica), stated that: "about the second edition of the encyclopedia that the encyclopedia had a political bias and claimed that its purpose was a propaganda weapon". The Yugoslavian encyclopaedias were also used as a propaganda weapon to show the superiority of Titoism and the Socialist Yugoslavia to other societies and political systems.

Additionally Slavicization of non Slavic regions in Yugoslavia was continued as government policy under the Communist Party of Yugoslavia after World War Two. The regime removed ethnic populations (Germans, Italians & Hungarians). This information can be sourced from reliable scholars.

Information was and still is being presented to the world, an historical perspective of former communist Yugoslavia that was written by a Totalitarian political system.

  • Joachim Friedrich & Zbigniew Brzezinski on Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy:

Characteristics of a totalitarian regime; a total ideology, a single mass party, a terrorist secret police, a monopoly of mass communication, all instruments to wage combat are in the control of the same hands, and a centrally directed planned economy. Totalitarian dictatorships emerge after the seizure of power by the leaders of a movement who have developed support for an ideology. The point when the government becomes totalitarian is when the leadership uses open and legal violence to maintain its control. The dictator demands unanimous devotion from the people and often uses a real or imaginary enemy to create a threat so the people rally around him.

  • Reports and proceedings of the 8th of April European public hearing on “Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes”, organised by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union (January–June 2008) and the European Commission, stated the following: Totalitarian machines

Let us mention briefly Fascism, National Socialism and Titoism in Italy, Austria and Slovenia (a former republic of Yugoslavia). Three Christian nations, with nationalist tendencies, were infected with totalitarianism. The descent into barbarism has comparable structural elements: [3]

  • Abuse of national sentiment to carry out racial and class revolutionary projects;
  • Cult of a great leader, who permits his fanatics to murder, steal and lie;
  • Dictatorship of one party;
  • Militarisation of society, police state – almighty secret political police;
  • Collectivism, subjection of the citizen to the totalitarian state;
  • State terrorism with systematic abuses of basic human rights;
  • Aggressive assumption of power and struggle for territory. (page 197.)

Now thanks to the Internet, this pseudo historical perspective that once was only know to Tito's Yugoslavia, has gone World Wide. This is truly disturbing because the former communist Yugoslavia encompassed peoples descendant of the Roman Empire, Republic of Venice, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and so and so forth.

Peter Z. 07:59, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Media links

  • Press Agency: Columnist Says Silence on Post-War Killings Needs to End (Interview). Ljubljana, 1 April (STA) - Alenka Puhar, an author who has written extensively about Slovenia's Communist past (a former republic of Yugoslavia), has told STA in an interview that post-WWII killings need to be examined and discussed. "We need to talk about it and live with it, with this pain," she said.
  • EurActiv Network Croatian PM pays tribute to controversial war victims (Croatia a former republic of Yugoslavia).

References

  1. ^ Hrcak Portal of Scientific Journals of Croatia by Mr Dizdar's Scientific Journal:
    • An Addition to the Research of the Problem of Bleiburg & Way of the Cross. This paper dedicated to the 60th anniversary of these tragic events represents a small step towards the elaboration of known data and brings a list of yet unknown and unpublished original documents, mostly belonging to the Yugoslavian Military and Political Government 1945-1947. Amongst those documents are those mostly relating to Croatian territory although a majority of concentration camps and execution sites were outside of Croatia, in other parts of Yugoslavia. The author hopes that the readers will receive a complete picture about events related to Bleiburg and the Way of The Cross and the suffering of numerous Croats, which is confirmed directly in many documents and is related to the execution of a person or a whole group of people and sometimes non-stop for days.
  2. ^ International Law Observer Responding to post-Second World War totalitarian crimes in Slovenia Posted on June 22, 2009 by Jernej Letnar Cernic
  3. ^ European Public Hearing on “Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes" Reports and proceedings of the 8 April European public hearing on “Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes”, organised by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union (January–June 2008) and the European Commission. Page 197. Joze Dezman: COMMUNIST REPRESSION AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN SLOVENIA Additional chapter: COMMUNIST REPRESSION Of “INTERIOR ENEMIES” IN SLOVENIA
    • In the greater part of this paper, the author deals with individual repressive measures that Communist rule imposed in Slovenia in the period from the end of the war in 1945 until the beginning of the 1950s. In this period, the Communist authorities in Slovenia implemented all the forms of repression that were typical of states with Stalinist regimes. In Slovenia, it was a time of mass killings without court trials, and of concentration and labour camps.
    • Property was confiscated, inhabitants were expelled from Slovenia/Yugoslavia and their residences, political and show trials were carried out, religion was repressed and the Catholic Church and its clergy were persecuted. At the beginning of the 1950s, Communist rule in Slovenia abandoned these forms of repression but was ready to reapply them if it felt threatened.
    • Thus the regime set up political and show trials against certain more visible opponents later. In the case of an “emergency situation”, even the establishment of concentration camps was planned in Slovenia in 1968, where around 1,000 persons, of whom 10 % were women, would be interned for political reasons. Page 161
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