REMEMBRANCE DAY OF BLEIBURG VICTIMS BEING MARKED

ZAGREB, May 15 (Hina) - A holy Mass will be served in the Bleiburg field, Austria, on Sunday, on the occasion of the remembrance day of Bleiburg victims and victims of the Way of the Cross. Present at the commemorative service will be those who survived that plight in May 1945, a delegation of the Croatian National Parliament (Sabor) and representatives of Croatian political parties, associations, societies as well as Croats from Bosnia- Herzegovina. At the end of World War Two, Croatian soldiers, fearing retaliation by the then Yugoslav army, decided to surrender to the Allies (English) in Austria. Their families and numerous civilians followed them. However, according to previous arrangements with the Partisans, the Allies handed them over to Partisans in the Bleiburg field on May 14 and 15, 1945. That exodus included about a half million Croatia's soldiers and civilians, and many of them were killed in the Bleiburg field on 14 and 15 May 1945. It was one of the gravest tragedies of the Croatian people in this century. According to data collected by the commission for the establishment of war and post-war victims, in the second half of May 1945, the Yugoslav army returned columns of over 200,000 captured Croats from the Austrian border to the then Yugoslavia. Many of them died of exhaustion or were killed on the long marches, later called the Way of the Cross. In Slovenia, there were more than a hundred execution sites. According to testimonies of the survived, the Yugoslav army killed a few dozen thousand captured people in the forest between Tezno and Bohova, and buried them in trenches dug by Germans during the war. Recently another mass grave with remains of Croatia's soldiers and civilians was found out near Maribor, Slovenia. The grave was discovered while builders were doing preparations for constructing a ring road around this Slovenian town. The future ring road should go over 70 metres of WW II trenches. So far, 10 metres have been dug over and 140 skeletons have been unearthed in that section of former trenches. In the outskirts of Maribor (some 80 kilometres north-east of Ljubljana), about 50 doctors and juniors and seniors of Zagreb- based Faculty of Medicine were killed in the mid-May 1945. They were retreating with the wounded, their patients from a hospital in Krajiska Street, Zagreb, the Croatian aforementioned commission said. Another big execution site was on the foot of Pohorje Hill. The area was afterwards circled by the barbed wire, and the soil covered by lime. The soil has sagged at many spots and cracks are visible. Executions in the surroundings of Maribor lasted 14 days, and according to some sources 70,000 people were killed. According to historians Mate Rupic and Zravko Dizdar, mass executions of Croatia's soldiers, Slovenia's conscripts and some of arrested Serb forces in WW II called Chetniks as well as of Cossacks began immediately upon their surrender in Slovenia, and went on in Croatia and other republics of the former Yugoslavia. In the former Yugoslavia, 460 mass graves of Croatia's soldiers and civilian prisoners. Rupic and Dizdar stressed that those suffering were very painful and undoubtedly left a deep trace on the Croatian national being. (hina) ms