Appeal to European Parliament

European Parliament Hrvatski domobran Koprivnica Allée du Printemps Svilarska 6 B.P. 1024 F-67070 – Strasbourg 48000 Koprivnica, Croatia

Dear Sir/Madam, on July 9, the Parliament of Republic of Austria passed a decision calling on the federal government to prohibit the Commemoration of the victims killed by the Yugoslav communists after the end of the World War II.

The commemoration in has been held since 1951 in memory of the hundreds of thousands of people: soldiers and civilians, who were killed, without a trial, many in an unimaginably cruel way.

At the very end of the World War II, in fear of the Communists, many left their homes and marched in countless columns towards Republic of Austria, hoping that the Allies would protect them. Instead, they handed them over to the Communists, even though it was certain that they would be killed. This was the beginning of the most difficult period in Croatian history, better known as the Way of the Cross. Among the communists who carried out these massacres, there were a large number of people who had been members of the Serbian fascist units (Chetniks), only a few months earlier. They recognized a historic opportunity to come closer to achieving the goal they fought for in the war - to weaken Croatia by massively killing Croats. That way, strategic preconditions would be created for the expansion of Serbia to the west. To the territories that once belonged to Croats.

There is a great number of historical evidence about the genocidal plans of the Great Serbian Ideology and the methods Serbs intented to use. We will list a few:

- Vuk Karadžić: "Serbs everywhere" from the 19th century

- In 1902, Nikola Stojanović published an article in the magazine "Srbobran" "Until the extermination of ours or yours"

- Stevan Moljević: "Homogeneous Serbia"

- Valerian's memorandum from 1941, which uses lies as a strategic weapon against Croats

- Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts from 1986

We would like to remind You that the World War I also started as a consequence of the Great Serbian Ideology, when a Great Serbia terrorist killed the Austrian heir to the throne. We would also like to remind You that the disintegration of Yugoslavia resulted with the war precisely because of the attempt to realize the Great Serbia Ideology, which was de facto partly realized by the ethnic cleansing of the half of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There is a demographic evidence of how massive the communist crimes were. If we compare the censuses of 1931 and 1948, testimonies, material evidence - excavated mass graves, we will see a big difference. We will mention only a few of those mass tombs. When Republic of was building the highway around , they dug out 1179 skeletons in a 70m long trench. By sounding, they determined that the total length of the trench is about 930m, and the density of the bones is the same, which means that over 15,000 people have been killed in that place alone.

In the town of (lit. Evil Pit) in Republic of Slovenia, the communists brought people tied with a steel wire to the edge of the vertical shaft of the Barbara Pit mine. Tied in groups of three, the person standing closest to the mine shaft would be shot in the leg, pulling the rest of the group with them in their fall into the pit. When they filled the shaft, with over 3000 people, the others were walled up alive in the mine. Among them young girls, the owners of the braids on the photo (see attachment).

Similar events took place in Kočevski Rog, Macelj, etc. About 1,600 mass graves were registered throughout Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where people who were extradited to the Communists in Bleiburg and those captured on their way to Austria ended their lives. On 7/17/2020 excavation of the pit near Zagreb was completed. Remains of 814 victims have been excavated there, a significant number of whom were patients from Zagreb hospitals who were systematically taken to the execution site. It is not uncommon in Croatia for the remains of communist's victims to be exhumed during construction works. The vast majority of these victims are Croats.

For decades, communist Yugoslavia made considerable efforts to prohibit the Commemoration in Bleiburg so that these victims would fall into oblivion. We would like to point out that tens of thousands of people have been gathering at this Commemoration throughout the decades and that despite this, no serious incident has ever been recorded. The initiative to prohibit the Commemoration is largely a consequence of the actions of those political forces that still want the victims we are talking about to be forgotten. Specifically, the ideology of the Great Serbia project and sympathizers of communist ideology.

In a series of documents, the European Union condemned communism and pointed out the need for member states that had the communist regime to remove its consequences as much as possible. Also, the need was accentuated to preserve the historical memory of victims of the totalitarian regimes.

Here is a list of some of those documents:

- Resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly No. 1096 from 1996 (Measures to dismantle the heritage of former communist totalitarian systems)

- Resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe No. 1481 of 2006 - Declaration of the European Parliament on declaring August 23 the European Day of the Remembrance for the Victims of the Stalinism and the Nazism from 2008

- Resolution on the European Conscience and Totalitarianism from 2009

- the European Commission report of 22 December 2010 on the memory of the crimes of the totalitarian regimes in Europe

- the Warsaw Declaration on the occasion of the European Day of the Remembrance for the Victims of Totalitarian Regimes from 2011

- A joint statement made on 23 August 2018 by representatives of the governments of the EU member states in memory of the victims of communism

- European Parliament resolution on the importance of European memory for the future of Europe from 2019

We believe that Republic of Austria, as the country from which was one of the greatest criminals, the founder of the nazi ideology (one of the most evil ideologies in the last century) Adolf Hitler, should have much more understanding for the victims of the criminal regimes as we hope that the reccommendation regarding the commemoration would be withdrawn. We expect the European Parliament, on the basis of the above-mentioned documents that condems communism, to ask the Parliament of Republic of Austria to repeal the above-mentioned recommendation that prohibits the Commemoration of the victims of communism in Bleiburg.

Koprivnica, 10/30/2020 President of Hrvatski Domobran Koprivnica Mr.sci Ivan Biršić

To take note: The Austrian Parliament European public

Barbarin rov, Huda jama

Košnica near ….