crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
names of about 14,000 victims. 1314 Since 1995, police and the public prosecutor’s office have been,
with intermittent spells of higher or lower intensity, working on project Reconciliation, whose intent
is to search for evidence of criminal liability of persons involved in crimes that do not fall under the
statute of limitations (war-crimes, genocide). The project has not met expectations from the criminal
law perspective. Even if the police were not able to collect enough relevant evidence to indict a single
person, at minimum the police recorded a lot of important testimony, which was of great help to the
public and to everyone working on the subject of secret mass graves. 1415
Methodical record-keeping 1516 of mass graves only began in 2002, accompanied by a huge response
in the media triggered by discovery and excavation of 431 victims from two shafts in Zgornja Bistrica
in Štajerska. Questions about when the Government will acquire a list of those locations, and when and
how it will start to manage them were ever more frequently asked. The government of Slovenia issued a
statement committing itself and other governmental bodies to do all in their power to find mass graves,
mark them, and, where necessary, to relocate the posthumous remains. 16 17
The government assigned seven
tasks to the newly established Governmental Committee for Settlement of Questions on Secret Mass
Graves (Governmental Committee), including “recording of data about the number and locations of mass
graves of representatives of the non-victorious side of World War II – the collected records will later serve
the standardization of the mass graves”. 1718 By the end of 2007, Mitja Ferenc had catalogued 571 secret
mass grave locations, with the cooperation of experts on individual grave sites, criminal investigators,
victims’ relatives and others. 1819 The research did not only include post-war murder sites, but incorporated
all secret graves, including those from wartime as well as mass graves of those who fell in the war’s
closing combat, which were not taken care of or were not known. 1920 Because these mass graves did not
“exist”, any search for them, and research of them, is complicated after so many decades. Written records
of post-war murders are rare, and about their locations, even more rare. This leaves us with no choice but
to rely on oral sources and to determine the locations in the field according to the oral data.
The management of mass graves is impossible, or at least seriously limited, due to the lack of legislation.
The Law on Wartime Graves was passed only in June 2003 and was supposed to identically regulate, within
the framework of the competent ministry (Ministry of Labour, Family and Social Affairs), the safeguarding 2021
of all mass graves of all people killed during or because of the war. But its broad implementation is still being
blocked due to differing opinions of parliamentary parties about the inscriptions on the monuments.
The locations of posthumous remains can be divided into four groups. The largest group are
pits that had to be specifically excavated for the execution and concealment of crimes. Around 450
of the recorded mass graves belong to this group. They can be found all around Slovenia, even in
very inappropriate places. They are mostly located in light forests, forest clearings or on forest edge
meadows as well as on locations which were later used as ponds, scrap heaps, parking lots, orchards;
on outer walls of cemeteries, riverbanks, rivulets, steep slopes, even near small chapels etc. Some of
the sites were revealed by nature, others were uncovered during construction work or by relatives and
associations searching for them, but only very few of them where opened under planned operations,
with the exception of the mass graves of German and Italian soldiers which are being continually
relocated under agreements with both countries. 2122
13
Parish Memorial Plaques, 1 st book, Ljubljana 1995; 2 nd book, Ljubljana 2000.
14
An analysis of the completed work has been conducted in a report to the prosecutor’s office by the Senior Criminal Inspector and leader
of the project ‘Reconciliation’ Pavel Jamnik; Pavel Jamnik, “Project Reconciliation”: Findings of the Police Investigations of Post-War
Killings: Final Report, Ljubljana 2004. Police conducted around 850 interviews and sent about 60 reports and 11 criminal indictments to
the prosecutor’s office.
15
Records of every mass grave site contain nine different sets of data: identification, description, location, sources and literature, photos,
comments, cadastre, oral sources and extracts (in total 29 different categories).
16
Statement of the government of the Republic of Slovenia about a wholesome plan to manage mass graves of post-war mass killings, and
at the passing of the Law on Wartime Mass Graves, 22. 11. 2001.
17
Decree of Establishment of the Governmental Committee for Settlement of Questions on Secret Mass Graves, 33. session of the
Government of the RS, 21. 6. 2001.
18
Mitja Ferenc, Recording of Secret Mass Graves in RS, as of 31. 12. 2007. A computer database is in the archives of the author, the
Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Labour, Family and Social Affairs.
19
The few rare mass graves that were already relocated during the war or after it or whose posthumous remains were partly extracted and
reburied elsewhere, have also been recorded, as according to the Law on Wartime Mass Graves.
20
Official Gazette RS, no. 65/2003.
21
Agreement between the governments of the Republic of Slovenia and the Italian Republic on the management of wartime graves, Off.
Gaz. RS, International Agreements, no. 10/1997; Agreement between the governments of the Republic of Slovenia and the Federal
Republic of Germany on wartime graves, Off. Gaz. RS, International Agreements, no. 6/1999; MD, Agreement between the governments
of the Republic of Slovenia and the Republic of Croatia on management of wartime graves, Draft.
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