Bleiburg Repatriations - Commemoration Since The End of Yugoslavia

Commemoration Since The End of Yugoslavia

With the transition to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, the interest in revealing information about Bleiburg tragedy grew, and it continued to be abused for revisionist purposes in the Croatian mainstream. In May 1994, an International Symposium for Investigation of the Bleiburg Tragedy was held in Zagreb, Croatia and Bleiburg, Austria, where several authors discussed deaths at Bleiburg estimating them in the tens of thousands, later published by Školska knjiga as Od Bleiburga do naših dana. The Republic of Croatia, by an act of the Croatian Parliament in 1995, started to officially commemorate the victims at Bleiburg, at a time when Franjo Tuđman and the Croatian Democratic Union were in power.

More recently, the commemoration became less of a political event, the radicals were largely marginalized and the focus of the commemoration turned to actual victims. Many top-ranking politicians and Catholic and Muslim clerics visit the Bleiburg site annually. Prime Minister Ivica Račan visited the site in 2002. Prime Minister Ivo Sanader visited the site in 2004. For the 60th anniversary commemorations in 2005 a large crowd was in attendance, with speeches by Croatian parliamentary speaker Vladimir Šeks and head of the Muslim Community of Croatia, Mufti Ševko Omerbašić. In 2007 a new altar was installed at the site, inaugurated by Cardinal Josip Bozanić before some 10,000 people.

In 2007, the Slovene government started plans to make the mass grave site in Tezno a memorial park and cemetery. In 2008, the Croatian and Slovenian governments reached an agreement of cooperation on organizing military cemeteries, similar to earlier agreements Slovenia reached with Italy and Germany.

The current prime minister of Croatia, Zoran Milanović, visited Bleiburg in September 2008. He stated that all victims had the right for a fair trial, and that his motive was human, not political. In 2009, Croatian President Stipe Mesić criticized the Parliament's representatives who did not react to people in the crowd displaying Ustaša markings, which are illegal in Croatia, at a state-sponsored event. In 2010, the Croatian president Ivo Josipović said that he won't attend the yearly May commemoration as long as there's Ustasha iconography present, but he did make a separate visit to the Bleiburg memorial in June that year, in addition to his visit to the Tezno memorial.

In 2012, the Croatian Parliament decided to revoke the funding for the May commemoration in Bleiburg. Croatian prime minister Zoran Milanović said the government won't fund what they see is a political event in Bleiburg that concentrates on the NDH rather than the victims. In 2012, the Croatian leadership laid wreaths only at the monument in Tezno.