Denial and Discovery

The total number of people liquidated may never be known, but figures of one hundred to one hundred and eighty thousand have been voiced by some, up to onequarter of a million by others. Despite the scholarship and masses of documents proving the contrary, the Yugoslav government denied that the Bleiburg-Maribor massacres or any subsequent liquidation of anti-communists occurred. As late as 1976, special teams were active in Slovenia and southern Austria covering up evidence of the crimes. The American and British governments, implicated in the forced repatriation that led to the slaughter, also sought to cover-up or at least ignore the crimes. With the departure of the communist regime in 1990, the truth began to come to light. In caverns in Slovenia and Croatia, researchers using spelunker's equipment descended into the mass graves long before sealed. They found layer upon layer of human bones, crutches, rope, and wire used to bind the victims. Many of the skulls had a single bullet hole in the back. Estimates ranged from 5,000 victims in one cave to as many as 40,000 in another. When news was made public, other mass graves were reported throughout Croatia and Slovenia. No one had ever spoken publicly of them before.

In 1990 the Croatian Parliament formed a commission which included foreign experts to determine, for the first time, the full extent of the post-war massacres. In May of 1994, an international symposium was held in Zagreb to explore the Bleiburg Massacres, and in May of 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of Bleiburg, scholars from around the world gathered again in Zagreb and at Bleiburg to set about the formal process of determining how many perished. Since every marked grave was destroyed; it presented a difficult undertaking requiring years of grizzly exploration and detailed research.

In 1996, the world's attention turned to more recent war crimes as new mass graves were found throughout Bosnia and Croatia and the Bleiburg massacres were again relegated to history in the Western press. The crimes of 1945, like those of 1995, will no doubt go unpunished. Whatever the final result, it will never again be said that Croatia did not suffer in post-war Yugoslavia.

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