ZAGREB, May 14, 2020 – Croatian President Zoran Milanovic will visit the Dobrava Cemetery near Maribor in Slovenia on Friday where he will lay a wreath to post-WWII victims, and later he will meet with his Slovenian counterpart Borut Pahor.
President Milanovic is travelling to Tezno where he will lay a wreath at the memorial and grave of post-war victims, which he also did on two occasions when he was prime minister, in 2012 and 2015.
Yugoslav armed forces killed between 15,000 and 20,000 members of the Ustasha armed forces and civilians, mostly Croats, in Tezno in May 1945.
Tezno is one of more than 500 mass grave sites in Slovenia.
Milanovic will not participate in a memorial commemorating the Bleiburg victims which will be held on Saturday in Zagreb’s Mirogoj ceremony.
“My stance is known. That was a war crime, quite serious, without going into the context of what occurred, on what date and how that could have been avoided. But victims are one thing and it is something else to commemorate something that is pure politics. Victims are victims and they are commemorated in Tezno,” Milanovic said in Jasenovac three weeks ago, when he announced that he would not commemorate the Bleiburg victims.
The Bleiburg commemoration is held in tribute to tens of thousands of Croatian civilians and soldiers of the defeated pro-Nazi Independent State of Croatia (NDH) who surrendered to allied forces there in May 1945, but were handed over by British troops to Yugoslav forces. Several thousand were killed in the Bleiburg field in Austria, while others were killed or perished during so-called death marches back to Yugoslavia.
After the wreath-laying ceremony, Milanovic will meet for talks with Pahor, with whom he already met in Slovenia at the end of February which was his first foreign trip after assuming the office of president.
