crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
the issue of the restoration of Yugoslavia was also present. The liberals reproached the communists
for being against Yugoslavia, accusing them of separatism and of an intention to change Slovenia into
a socialist republic of the Soviet Union. 7 The partisan-Mihajlović conflict, just then arising in Serbia,
would only enhance those disputes. Slovene liberals from different fractions defended the legitimacy of
the exiled government in London, since it was for them a question of principle. They disbelieved and
contradicted the partisan public statements and propaganda on Mihajlović’s collaboration that reached
Slovenia in late November 1941. Naturally, all of these disputes resulted in a split in the Slovene
political scene. Further talks with the big pre-war parties about joining a united Front were abandoned.
The liberal groups, that had already joined the Front, were expelled from it at the break of 1941–42.
At the same time the communists put all sorts of pressure on their opposition, including executions
of death penalties for exposed political figures, whom they considered to be traitors. This set the civil
war on foot. It started gradually, with individual acts of violence by the VOS. Overt armed conflicts
erupted in the summer of 1942. Such a situation then gradually led some, not all, anti-Communists to
the unavoidable act of collaboration.
After the described split in the Slovene political scene, talks began between the liberals and the
largest pre-war party in Slovenia – the SLS (Slovenska ljudska stranka, the Slovene People’s Party).
Both sides had a long history of differences and were traditionally opposed to one another.
The SLS also had its reservations towards a future reinstatement of Yugoslavia. However, the
liberals gradually succeeded in persuading them to follow the policy of the exiled government in London
on the line of the continuation of Yugoslavia. Together with other parties (the Socialists, a fraction of
the Democrats, a fraction of the Christian Socialists and other minor groups) they established a political
union, called the Slovene Alliance. In its program, the Alliance declared itself for the liberation of
Yugoslavia as a federation, for a United Slovenia, for social changes and so on. The Alliance was in
contact with the London government, the Slovene politicians in exile and other institutions, throughout
the war. After the war, the secret police charged some of its members as agents of the British Secret
Intelligence Service. Such accusations were customary for the political purges in post-war Eastern
Europe. By my estimate, they were part of the ideological paranoia that kept looking for all kinds of
connections and plots of world reaction aimed against the socialist states. For the same reasons, the
archives regarding these issues have been unavailable, until now. 8
The Alliance decided to keep trying to reach a settlement with the communists, which never
happened. The status and dilemmas of the Alliance were similar to those of other pre-war parties
elsewhere in Yugoslavia. Like the Croat Peasant Party (HSS) in Croatia, Mihajlović, and others, they
stood for a policy of waiting for the Allies to invade the Balkans and then call their troops to an open
fight against the enemy. In the meantime, they would provoke as few enemy reprisals as possible, but
keep an organisation (also military) going. They also insisted that all political issues should be left open
and settled after the war, with free elections. A similar policy was advocated by the exiled government
in London. The communists, on the other hand, contested it strongly.
The Communitst Party of Slovenia (CPS), then numbering over 1,000 members (without the
Communist Youth – SKOJ), pressed for differentiation of the Slovenes from the very beginning. Because
of this enforced and forceful differentiation, one of the leading Slovene historians on the Second World
War, Prof Metod Mikuž, wrote that in Slovenia at that point, one cannot find quislings in the exact
meaning of the word, but mainly counter-revolutionaries. 9
The communist propaganda asserted that all bourgeois parties betrayed the liberation of the
Slovene people, that the CPS was the only one worthy of trust, and only under its leadership was the
future existence of the Slovene nation secure. They also proclaimed they were fighting for a United
Slovenia; namely, the programme for the unification of all Slovenes (meaning also those living under
Italy and Austria) was an old one that never failed to mobilise the Slovenes. In World War Two, when
it again seemed to become reality, it became one of the main reasons for Slovenes to join the liberation
fight, even to such an extent, that they were ready to disregard, undermine or underestimate the obvious
revolutionary intentions of the communists in the Liberation Front.
7
Then there were definite idealistic ideas of Slovenia becoming a Soviet republic in a much enlarged USSR.
8
The archives of the secret police in Slovenia were not seized after the democratic elections, as in some other post-socialist countries.
Thus, according to my knowledge of the missing materials, some are unavailable for the public and historians. The archives that were
handed over to public archives contain only a lesser part of the material, mainly those regarding the period 1945–52.
9
M. Mikuž, Pregled zgodovine NOB v Sloveniji (Review of the History of the Liberation Movement in Slovenia), vol. 1, CZ, Ljubljana
1960, p. 302.
27