The three-day symposium called "The Bleiburg Tragedy or the Croatian Way of the Cross 1945" is being held under Seks's auspices. It was organised by the Croatian Way of the Cross Association, in association with the Honorary Bleiburg Platoon from Klagenfurt, Austria, on the 60th anniversary of the events.
According to Seks, "a crime in its most radical form" was committed at Bleiburg field in Austria at the end of the Second World War, "with the knowledge and approval of the Yugoslav authorities, in keeping with the customs of the communist dictatorship".
"We remember the horrors from 1941 to 1945, as well as those from the post-war period, and one of those occurred at Bleiburg in mid-May 1945... when genocide was committed against thousands of unarmed and helpless men, women, children and the elderly, civilians who had never been in the war," said Seks.
He also recalled that "an endless procession of people met with a horrible death on their way to Dravograd and Bleiburg. They were killed arbitrarily, without trial or examination of the justification".
"We don't want history to be suppressed, forgotten or revised ever again," Seks said, underlining that historians should establish the full truth on scientific grounds. He added the exact number and identities of the Bleiburg victims were still unknown.
The chairman of the committee which prepared the symposium, scholar Dubravko Jelcic, said the symposium was being held in a climate of restoration of communism.
"The communists used the 60th anniversary of victory over fascism to once again try to impose their ideas that communism is identical to Western European antifascism," he said, underlining that the "Yugo-communist interpretation of events from 1945 is useless".
Jelcic commented on President Stjepan Mesic's recent statement at a commemoration for the victims of the Jasenovac WWII death camp. Mesic said he did not like comparisons between Bleiburg and Jasenovac and that "no one at Jasenovac was responsible for anyone killed in foibe (karst pits) or anyone killed at Bleiburg, but many at Bleiburg were responsible for someone's death".
Jelcic said he was "surprised by the fact that the president... discriminates citizens because some for him are undoubtedly innocent, while he suspects the innocence of others, those who were never put on trial".
In May 1945 many Croatian soldiers and civilians started retreating towards the Austrian border to surrender to the Allies. They were stopped at Bleiburg by British troops who handed them over to the Yugoslav partisan army.
According to the Croatian Encyclopaedia's 2000 edition, about 95,000 Croatian soldiers surrendered at Bleiburg. Some prisoners, soldiers and civilians were killed near Dravograd, Maribor and other locations in Slovenia. The encyclopaedia does not specify the number of the victims, saying that various estimates have been given. The majority of those who survived was forced to return to Yugoslavia. Many were killed during death marches, known in Croatia as the Way of the Cross, while many were taken to camps.
Croatian Society of Victimology president Zvonimir Separovic dismissed claims that not all victims were the same and should be distinguished.
He dismissed journalist Slavko Goldstein's claims that genocide had been committed at Jasenovac, but a war crime at Bleiburg, and that the latter had been committed party out of revenge. Separovic said the crime at Bleiburg had been a post-war crime committed by "those who liberated, who conquered and then cleaned and killed, without holding trials but committing violence".
Journalist Marijan Bosnjak wondered if it was possible that the partisans had not known about the mass killings which lasted for weeks after the end of the war operations. He said that if partisan leaders headed by Josip Broz Tito had known about it or ordered it, that made him one of the biggest criminals in Croatian history.
Historian Ante Beljo said there were indications that Tito had known a lot about what had been going on.
The symposium pooled about 30 scholars and historians expected to help establish the full truth about the Bleiburg events.