Unofficial and official parts of the Bleiburg commemoration convey different messages, and it would be interesting to hear stances of participants of the event on the Ustasha movement and on the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), historian Hrvoje Klasic has told N1.
A ceremony to commemorate tens of thousands of Croatian civilians and soldiers of the defeated Nazi-allied NDH was held in Bleiburg, southern Austria on Saturday. At the same time, dozens of activists from Croatia, Slovenia, Italy and Austria gathered in Bleiburg to protest against the memorial service assessing it as “an Ustasha event.”
VEZANE VIJESTI
According to Klasnic, the exact number of victims will never be defined, as it varies between 20,000 and 70,000.
“The numbers vary. Besides Croatians, thousands of Serbian and Montenegrin Chetniks, Slovenian collaborationists were killed too, there was a bit of everything. I think this was the biggest disgrace of anti-fascist movement and I think this is something one should be ashamed of,” stressed Klasic. “Those who did it dishonoured not only their names but the names of those who fought honourably in the 1941-45 period,” he added.
