crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
democratic rule in the future (in Croatia, Hebrang had gone as far as to say that the liberation movement
was not introducing communism), and a system based on law, accentuating “national” patriotism, etc.
They both had their separate specific reasons for doing all this, but it mainly happened with the consent
of their reciprocal leaderships and because of the fact, as Banac puts it, that they were “well away from
the Politburo’s eye”.
This, of course, could not go unnoticed for long by the central leadership. Moša Pijade was the
first to criticise the fact that Croatia and Slovenia were developing a state system, which disregarded the
indispensable close contact between AVNOJ and the land assemblies and didn’t wait for the initiative to
come from the centre. Such matters require a unified solution for the whole country, pointed out Pijade,
and these discrepancies should be corrected immediately. 30 Tito did so very soon, to some extent. Other
measures followed later. He disregarded the solutions of the Slovene and Croat Assemblies and passed
two military decrees in May 1944 in his role as Supreme Commander. Both were important, because
they gave a decisive tone to the nature of the communist take-over of power, which followed during the
gradual liberation of Yugoslavia in the second half of 1944 and in 1945.
First, Tito issued a decree on 13 May creating a centralised intelligence service, called the Department
for the Protection of the People, popularly called OZNA. Its primary intelligence task was to fight all
those who were hostile to the liberation movement. OZNA became part of the military structure, being
responsible directly to the Supreme Commander and his staff and to the committee for popular defence
(future war ministry) of the central executive body, the NKOJ. It had a strict hierarchical organisation. The
central Director became Aleksandar Ranković, the organisational secretary of the Politburo of the CC of
the CPY. Land directors were responsible to him, and so on – all the way down to the local (and later also
factory) commissars. Its members were strictly members of the communist party. OZNA was internally
divided into sectors, later departments. At first there were only a four – but the one that was important on
the internal political scene was at work from the very beginning. It covered the activities of other (enemy)
political groups, those inside the liberation movement, as well as the so-called remains of the bourgeois
political parties. It was the basis of OZNA’s functions as political police that continued well after the war.
OZNA kept files on all potential and arrested opponents of the regime and it was from the very beginning
exclusively responsible for the arrests and prosecution of political crimes. From then on it played a key
role in interrogation and in the prosecution (it prepared all of the material) at the military and, later on,
regular courts. There is evidence that the Soviet military mission suggested this reorganisation of the
intelligence sector. 31 It is also a well-known fact that Soviet officers came to help set up this organisation
in the future republics and that future OZNA high officials went for training to Moscow in spring 1945. 32
Tito’s second decree was the Decree on Military Tribunals that came into force on 24 May. It
introduced a unified system of military tribunals. It also expanded the jurisdiction of the military over
all civilians responsible for crimes of war (which in Yugoslavia had a very broad definition), all enemies
of the people (meaning in this case, all political opponents, as well as, i.e. those opposed to the rule
of the people). In this way, Tito cut short all the dilemmas and discussions on the competencies of the
future popular (civil) courts and war-crimes commissions. The decree introduced penalties such as
correctional labour, hard labour, expulsion from the country and the loss of ‘citizen’s honour’ (meaning
political and civil rights). There was no possibility of appeal, although higher courts had to approve
death penalties. The decree also introduced the possibility of amnesty. 33 All the land (future republic)
legislative bodies received orders to comply with this rule and drop their existing laws. Slovenia and
Croatia had to do so by fall 1944.
Then other political steps followed, which overruled the Slovene and the Croat independent policies.
First, letters arrived from the central leadership, criticising different aspects of their behaviour. Kardelj wrote
to Slovenia many times in the spring, summer and fall of 1944, and he even visited both lands in August
and September. The common denominator of all his criticism was a single word – nationalism. There was a
special additional reason for the central politburo’s interest in Slovenia at the time. First, there was the threat
again (as the party saw it) of an Anglo-American invasion in Istria; thus Kardelj rushed off to Slovenia in
30
B. Petranović, M. Zečević, Jugoslovenski federalizam, vol. 2, Prosveta, Beograd 1987, p. 20.
31
D. Biber, “Allied and Soviet missions and intelligence services in the liberation movement”, Borec, XLIII/1−3, (1991), Ljubljana, p. 132.
32
OZNA was aided by special military units, called the KNOJ (Korpus narodne odbrane Jugoslavije – Popular defence Corps of
Yugoslavia). By spring 1946, OZNA was gradually incorporated into the Ministries for Internal Affairs and it was renamed the
Department for State Security – the UDBA (Uprava državne bezbednosti), with organisational and cadre continuity. The only part that
remained with the military was the counter intelligence service – the KOS (Kontraobveščevalna služba).
33
This decree was never made public. It was published for the first time in Tito’s most recent collected works, op. cit., vol. 20, p. 125.
34