Jewish Congress Hails Austrian Move to Ban WWII Bleiburg Event
This post is also available in this language: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp
Commemoration in Bleiburg, Austria in May 2015. Photo: EPA/OSKAR HOEHER/EXPA.
The World Jewish Congress, an international organisation representing Jewish communities, praised on Monday the Austrian parliament’s adoption of a proposed ban on the annual commemoration of the killings of Croatian Nazi-allied troops and civilians at Bleiburg in Austria by the Yugoslav Partisans at the end of World War II.
“That event has become a flashpoint for the glorification of the ‘heroes’ of the fascist pro-Nazi movement that ruled wartime Croatia and was guilty of appalling acts of mass murder against Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croats,” the World Jewish Congress said in a statement.
The Austrian parliament on Friday adopted the non-binding resolution calling on the interior minister to ban the commemoration on Austrian territory.
Initiated by the Green Party, the resolution was supported by almost all political parties, including Prime Minister Sebastian Kurtz’s Conservatives. The far-right Freedom Party voted against.
The World Jewish Congress’s executive vice-president, Maram Stern, said that the move by the Austrian legislators “sends a clear message that there is no place in Austria for such flagrant acts of historical revisionism”.
Stern added that “no society can avoid a reckoning with the unsavoury chapters of its past” but said that “sadly, Croatia has repeatedly eschewed such a confrontation, though recent actions of its newly-elected president, Zoran Milanovic, suggest a break with this deep-seated repugnant attitude”.
The annual Bleiburg event is controversial because some participants display symbols of Croatia’s Nazi-allied Ustasa movement, which killed Jews, Serbs, Roma people and others during WWII in the Independent State of Croatia.
The Austrian Interior Ministry has banned the display of two Croatian Ustasa movement symbols – the letter ‘U’ with a grenade, and the checkerboard coat of arms of the Nazi-backed WWII-era Independent State of Croatia.
The Catholic Church in Carinthia in Austria last year rejected a request from the Croatian Bishops’ Conference to hold a mass at the Bleiburg commemoration because it said the event was being used to promote nationalist ideas.
The event commemorates the massacres by the Yugoslav Partisan army in the Austrian border area of Carinthia of tens of thousands of Nazi-allied Croatian troops and civilians who were fleeing the collapse of the Independent State of Croatia at the end of WWII.
This year the event in Austria was cancelled because of restrictions imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Catholic religious services were held in Sarajevo and Zagreb instead, sparking fresh controversy.
Some 5,000 people joined an anti-fascist march in Sarajevo against the holding of the mass in the Bosnian capital, claiming that it glorified people who were involved in crimes committed by Croatia’s WWII-era, Nazi-allied Ustasa regime.
