Slovenia's National Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Communist Violence is being observed on Tuesday for the first time after recently the cabinet of the outgoing Prime Minister Janez Jansa, decided to declare 17 May the national memorial day of Communist victims.

The outgoing government explained that it was necessary to commemorate such days in a bid to prevent recurrence of the most tragic episodes from the Slovenian past and to raise collective awareness of “all the dimensions of the Communist violence” and to highlight the need to commemorate victims and persecuted people from that period.

The authorities decided to designate 17 May in memory of 17 May 1942 when Slovenian Partizans, led by the Communists, executed 43 ethnic Roma, in their camp outside Ljubljana.

The remains of those 43 victims from the camp were exhumed from a mass grave in 2017. On that occasion, historian Mitja Ferenc condemned that war atrocity and warned that that crime had been seldom mentioned. The Partizan unit  is believed to have decided to  kill those Roma out of fear that they could report them to the occupying Italian authorities.

Left political parties in Slovenia, which are likely to form the new cabinet under the helm of Robert Golob, slam the Jansa government’s decision on this memorial day as an act of provocation. They accuse the outgoing government of waging a sort of “kulturkampf” against the left when it comes to the issues from the past that have nothing to do with the present-day Slovenia.