The 27th of April is a public holiday. It is called the Day of the Uprising Against the Occupation, despite the fact that no meeting was held on this day in the year 1941. However, at a meeting held the day before, the establishment of an “Anti-Imperialist Front” was discussed. This was at a time when the Communists and the Nazis were still allies. Dr Andreja Valič Zver believes that this is a day of the “Slovenian schism”, while Dr Jože Možina believes that it is a “falsified holiday.”
The nature of the 27th of April was described by journalist and historian Dr Jože Možina for the magazine Domovina: “On the 27th of April, nothing happened for democratic Slovenia. Unfortunately, this holiday, which was falsified already in the previous country, in the previous regime, has been unhappily transferred to the present time. It used to be the day of the Liberation Front, and today, it is the day of resistance against the occupier, but it has nothing to do with that name.”
What was really going on?
Možina then went on to say that the political situation in Slovenia at the time of the occupation was as follows. The elected democratic parties, such as the Slovenian People’s Party, the Liberals, were in alliance with the Western Allies when Yugoslavia was attacked, while the Communists were in a collaborationist alliance with Hitler because of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (as per the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).
“Then, in order to cover up this period of collaboration, they attributed the attributes of resistance against the occupier to an insignificant meeting that took place on the 26th of April (it was even so insignificant that they mixed up the date). In order to cover up the fact that, when Yugoslavia was attacked, it was not they who were active in the resistance against the occupier. Most of them were passive,” Možina pointed out.
On the nature of the meeting, Možina said that the 26th of April meeting was relatively unimportant, but was attended by some of the members of the Friends of the Soviet Union association. He explained that this was a pre-war organisation which was, in a sense, “an agency of the Soviet Union and Stalin”. However, at this meeting, the debate was not about resistance against the occupier, but about the creation of the Anti-Imperialist Front. This was only renamed the Slovenian People’s Liberation Front after the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin alliance due to the German attack on the Soviet Union.
“The aim of the Slovenian communists has always been the communist revolution, the seizure of power. And if we are talking about Slovenian communists, their goal was also the creation of Slovenia within communist Yugoslavia on the Soviet model. A Stalinist-type Soviet republic, for example. This is completely contrary to democracy,” Možina pointed out.
The 27th of April is the day of the Slovenian schism
We asked the former head of the Study Centre for National Reconciliation and historian, Dr Andrea Valič Zver, for her comments on the matter. She pointed out that on the 26th of April, the representatives of the Communist Party gathered, having already decided a few months before to take a reckoning with the so-called bourgeois camp. The “Anti-Imperialist Front” itself was directed against the Western democracies under attack, i.e. Great Britain, the USA, and France.
“This holiday, in view of everything that happened later, in view of the beginning of the terror, especially in Ljubljana, carried out by the striking fist of the Communist Party – the Intelligence and Security Service (VOS), in view of the murder of civilians, the murder of people who were not in favour of the Communist takeover of power, of the Communist resistance against the occupier… We can see that this is a purely Communist holiday. I find it difficult to support the thesis that this is a holiday of Slovenian resistance against all the occupiers who have oppressed us. It seems to me that it is a Communist holiday and that it is a day of Slovenian schism. We are still divided, even though the reconciliation process has taken us a few steps forward. This is hard to deny,” said Andreja Valič Zver.
She pointed to the abolition of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Communist Violence as one of the biggest mistakes of the Robert Golob government. This “once again dug into the wounds in the Slovenian national body.” “People want to light a candle on a grave, to remember their dead in peace and quiet, to have death certificates. We must not forget that more than 12 thousand Slovenian boys, girls and children still do not have death certificates. They are not properly buried. Now we are talking about burial sites, but they are not burial sites, they are killing sites,” explained our interlocutor.
Andreja Valič Zver also highlighted the efforts of MEP Dr Milan Zver to have a commemorative plaque in the European Parliament to remind Europe and the world of the tragedy of the Kočevski rog and other killing sites.
The wrong holiday has been abolished
“What should we do with the 27th of April? In the present situation, when the “freedom rollers” have a majority in the National Assembly, it is difficult to foresee a successful outcome of the initiative to abolish this day. Perhaps it should be re-transformed accordingly, or we should wait until the democratic pole gets a majority in the National Assembly, and then this part of the schism is done with once and for all,” concluded Dr Valič Zver.
Žiga Korsika
