THE HISTORY OF A NATION IS A WHOLE AND EMBRACES BOTH ITS GOOD AND ITS BAD EPISODES
Speech by the President of the Republic of Slovenia Milan Kucan at the gathering of exiles and other war victims

Brestanica, Rajhenber Castle, 4 June 2000



The Slovene nation on its journey through history has lived through many dark days – nobody knows this better than you. We have been persecuted, humiliated, our land taken from us, our territory reduced, our language taken from us and, during the Second World War, even our very right to existence denied. But we stood firm and we survived. Nine years ago we even established our own state. The Slovene nation has proved its vital strength.

The Nazi war machine subjugated many European nations. It occupied and dominated them with its racially-pure laws. But at the same time it offered and guaranteed the survival of their national identity, even a puppet state, provided they accepted the new German social order. Slovenia, however, was partitioned, divided between three occupying forces, its territory annexed to their three states, and the Slovene people had to submit to death and annihilation. The Slovenes were to face a different fate: as a nation we were sentenced to oblivion, we were to be the victims of a deliberate and radical plan to destroy our nationhood, for which Himmler laid the foundations immediately after the occupation with his directives on the deportation of the Slovene population. All this is already familiar. Particularly to you.

You, the surviving exiles and deportees, are living witnesses to the crime that we, with great pain and suffering, victoriously resisted.

Only the resistance of a nation which recognised that it had been condemned to death could prevent this evil design. Not only the armed struggle of the Partisans, not only the broad network of activists and supporters of the Liberation Front, but also the thousands of Slovenes in concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps and in exile were part of this uprising and this struggle. Every one of you, Slovene exiles, carries within you vivid memories of your Calvary, your hell, your struggle. Memories of that period in your life, which in the minds of your persecutors signified your final uprooting from your native soil. You were guilty of being Slavs and thus, on the basis of racist criteria, an inferior race. They used you as slaves, in line with Gestapo orders: “Do not kill them, but work them until they die.”

Only the Jews in occupied Europe suffered a similar, but in a way unique fate. We are entitled and obliged to bear vocal witness to this regrettably insufficiently-recognised fact: for our own sake, for the sake of our dignity and self-respect, and to help shape the collective conscience and behaviour of Europe towards the ugly heritage of its recent past, shaped and marked as it is by Nazism and Fascism.

The democratic world declared its attitude towards the Nazi and Fascist violence in Europe with resolutions at the end of World War II and immediately after it. These resolutions cannot be changed today, just as we cannot change history. It is not possible to revise what was done at that time and it is not possible to swap roles. The truth cannot and should not be allowed to vanish, nor the distinction and the boundaries between the perpetrator and the victim. So we are duty-bound to hold fast to the letter of these international agreements and decisions reached after the Second World War, because with them democratic Europe determined its ultimate stance towards the horrors of war and violence and began to redress the wrongs committed.

This is also our attitude to the Second World War and it concerns us Slovenes and our state, as it finally dispenses with double standards regarding the victims of war-time violence and has, at least symbolically, in a material sense, begun to set right the mistakes made and injustices perpetrated due to the division of victims into those from the West and those from the East, characteristic of the division of Europe into blocs and of the Cold War. At last, the victims of Nazism are coming to be seen as one, regardless of nationality, religious belief, sex or age. Sadly, for many former exiles, forced labourers and Nazi slaves of different nationalities, this comes too late, but for all it provides important moral compensation. For all of us, for the whole of democratic Europe, this realisation means a concrete affirmation of its anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist foundations. We must, and we wish to, interpret in this way those wider international activities, particularly in Germany and Austria, aimed at resolving the problems of compensation for forced labour and slave labour during the Second World War. Slovenia is not part of “the rest of the world” and cannot be dealt with as such; the Slovene exiles and forced labourers cannot be treated as second class, yet again inferior, yet again humiliated. We justifiably expect that assurances of non-discrimination will be respected and that the demands of rightful Slovene claimants to compensation for forced labour in the Third Reich will be considered on equal terms with all others, with the active and direct participation of the representatives of the Slovene state in the institutions being established to resolve these issues.

The resolutions adopted by the Slovene government before the announced departure of the Slovene People’s Party and the resulting vote of no-confidence, as well as the activities of individual ministries, undoubtedly lend support to these expectations. But resolutions on their own cannot and must not satisfy anyone. Particularly not you, who are justified in your expectations that our common Slovene state will decisively and consistently meet your claims and expectations – because of their indisputable legitimacy, because of the dignity of Slovenia’s citizens, because of the reputation and the position to which the Slovene people have an objective right in the post-war Europe.

The role of the Slovenian Society of Exiles is a very important one here. The more your endeavours are linked to and are in harmony with those of other related organisations, the more effective will be your and our joint appearance on the international stage, where this issue is being addressed. And the stronger will be your justified pressure on those bodies in the Slovene state which, due to their position and from a moral, legal, and material point of view, bear the burden of responsibility for resolving the status of and protecting the interests of exiles, stolen children and the forcibly mobilised – all who were the victims of the same, Nazi-Fascist evil during the Second World War.

It cannot be said that in recent years nothing has been done to heighten awareness and to cast light on the hitherto little-known, suppressed and distorted truth about their fate, and their suffering during and after the War, or to move towards the adoption of a number of laws and other concrete measures. But all this cannot serve as an excuse for the five-year delay in passing a law which would finally complete the legislation relating to the settlement of war damages payments (the Act on the fund for the payment of damages to the victims of war and post-war violence). It is possible, however, to find several weighty justifications for the delay, one of them being the lack of agreement on the level of damages to be divided among the different categories of the 55,000 claimants, among which there are nearly 19,000 exiles.

The present government crisis, which has deep roots, could even further delay the adoption of this law and of other legislation, important for a modern Slovenia, ordered and managed in the best European way. This could have unpleasant consequences for our country. I am certain that we, the voters, will know how to assign responsibility for the emergence of this crisis and its consequences, and that we will entrust our votes to those political parties which give the best guarantees that Slovenia will not keep facing crises due to short-term party interests and that it will develop successfully as a democratic, legal and socially-just state, working for the security and well-being of its citizens, a state highly regarded at home and abroad, which will confidently represent your interests and be prepared to listen to your justified expectations.

Ladies and Gentlemen
The history of a nation is a whole and embraces both its good and its bad episodes. It is not possible to remove some and to keep quiet about others. Our history is simply given to us. We cannot retrospectively change the past. But we can remedy its negative consequences and prevent new wrong-doing and bad decisions. And this is why we have to know our history, we have to wish to know it, exactly as it happened, including its errors and deviations, without concealment or falsification. A nation capable of behaving in this way is a great nation. And we can repeat this with pride – we are a great nation! And we are definitely a nation which will never again allow an occupying force, from any side, to uproot us from our native soil and to drive us onto the thorny path of exile, because a nation which has survived one death sentence will never allow itself to be sentenced again. Those who have once been driven from their land will defend it for ever.