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Formal Address by the President of the Republic of Slovenia at the ceremony marking the National Resistance Day

Begunje na Gorenjskem, 27.4.2008  |  press release, speech


Formal Address by Dr Danilo Türk, the President of the Republic of Slovenia, at the ceremony marking the national holiday "National Resistance Day"
Begunje na Gorenjskem, 27 April 2008
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Klikni za povečavoRespected veterans,
Mr Prime Minister,
Excellencies,
Slovenian citizens,

Today’s celebration is a celebration of the fundamental values of freedom, courage, ingenuity and culture. In our time these values are perceived as normal. They do not excite the imagination. We live peacefully with them and, sometimes, we happen to neglect them. In today’s peaceful conditions, this is easy to understand. However, it is right that we remember from time to time that we were not given today’s normality without sacrifice and struggle.

It is right that we celebrate the national resistance day in our country. It is also right that, every year, we think about the meaning of that resistance for our nation, our present and our future.

For centuries, the Slovenian people lived in the belief that its fate was to exist without independence and to leave the important decisions about its existence to others, those who were bigger and stronger. This belief was not pure invention; it was conditioned by historical circumstances. For much of its history, the Slovenian people lived divided, scattered across several provinces of the erstwhile monarchy that ruled over a number of nations. As a political concept, the idea of a united Slovenia took shape quite late in the day. The integration of Slovenia made slow progress.

Klikni za povečavoIn the period when the world was caught up in the tumult of the Second World War, the process of Slovenia’s integration was not yet completed. At that time, the Slovenian nation still lived in its culture of smallness, nourishing the notion of its own insignificance and unreadiness to take important decisions. Suddenly, however, it was faced with big questions, which demanded crucial decisions.

The decision to resist the occupation was the most momentous decision of that time and required a complete break with the past. It required a clearly defined position on the existence of the nation and on the nation’s readiness to finally take its fate into its own hands. Moreover, it required that this leap be achieved through armed struggle, a struggle against a much larger military power and against the ruthless totalitarian ideologies of Fascism and Nazism. The decision to resist demanded great heroism.

“The nation itself shall write its judgement!” This phrase from the great Slovenian dramatist, Ivan Cankar, acquired a new fateful meaning in the context of the struggle against the occupier. It called for resistance and an awareness of the necessary human toll.

Klikni za povečavoHere in Gorenjska, the decision and active resistance were quick to appear. Preparations for resistance began even before the constitution of the Liberation Front. In 1941, the first year of resistance, Gorenjska contributed over a thousand Slovenian partisans, more than half of all the combatants in the national liberation struggle in Slovenia. From these beginnings, a significant military power grew up during the Second World War that by the end of the war numbered about 35 000 combatants. This is how powerful the fight against the occupier was! During the struggle, particularly here in Gorenjska, certain forms of resistance emerged which deserve special respect. Alongside the armed struggle, a widespread network of activists, an effective courier service, 14 workshops and a printing press were in place. In the latter, the famous facsimile of ‘Zdravljica’ (The Toast) by the greatest Slovenian poet, France Prešeren, was printed in 1944.

The general wave of resistance spread over the whole of Slovenia and created an extensive, almost state-like structure with its own monetary system, a network of concealed hospitals, schools, workshops and printing facilities. The nation’s vigour drew strength from the rich national culture which was the connective tissue of the resistance. The national liberation struggle confirmed the vitality of the Slovenian nation and all the capabilities, which ultimately – more than half a century later – enabled it to gain own state, membership of the United Nations, in NATO and, finally, a distinguished place in the European Union currently presided by Slovenia. Such a development would simply not have been possible without the successful national liberation struggle during the Second World War.

At the time, the struggle was confronted with a harsh military occupation and violence against civil population. Here in Gorenjska, the German occupation was especially ruthless. Many people suspected of cooperation with the resistance movement were tortured and killed. As many as 1 270 civilians were shot in Gorenjska. The Begunje Prison became a symbol of the inhuman treatment of patriots. People were deported in their masses to concentration camps. Many villages were burned to the ground – Rašica, Dražgoše, Kokra, Gozd pod Križem, Radovna and many others.

The toll of death and suffering brought on the Slovenian nation during the Second World War was high, too high. In this regard, there were also doubts that are sometimes voiced: Was it right and reasonable to start an armed resistance in the circumstances of the German occupation, which, in Gorenjska, were particularly difficult?

Hearing such doubts, we should recall the way in which the doyen of Slovenia’s gaining independence, Dr France Bučar, summed up the essence of the resistance against the occupier. Describing the resistance and the Battle of Dražgoše, which had been one of the first epic chapters of the resistance, he stressed that it was precisely the resistance in these places that had sent a clear sign to all of Europe that, in 1941, the spirit of resistance had already grown from more than a spark and, under suitable conditions, promised to spread into a devastating fire against the Nazis. And that is indeed what happened.

However, at the beginning, at the time when the decision was taken, it was by no means certain that the resistance would be victorious. Simply for that reason, the decision to take up the challenge of armed resistance deserves all our admiration.

But the importance and the greatness of the resistance can only be fully understood in its wider, global dimension. The Second World War was no ordinary war and the military occupation of our territory was no ordinary occupation. Much more was at stake. In global terms, the moral destiny and the direction in which the whole world was to develop were implicated; in our case, it was the survival of a nation that the occupier intended to wipe out that was at stake. That period and that specific military occupation cannot be discussed properly without first establishing these two basic facts which defined everything that happened during the Second World War. At stake were the survival of a nation and the fate of the world.

Only in this context can we understand the nature and development of the military occupation and the characteristics of the violence perpetrated by the occupier, in particular violence against the civil population. The imprisonment, torture and killing of civilians and forced mobilisation into the occupying army which were carried out were serious breaches of international law which took place to an extent unprecedented in any earlier occupation. The deportation of nationally conscious Slovenians also belonged to such offences. A total of 63 000 people were deported from Slovenia and many of them sent to concentration camps or labour camps. Both German and Italian occupiers went down in world history as committing these criminal acts. Dachau and Rab, Gonars and Mauthausen and many other concentration camps will remain in our historical memory as symbols of inhumanity and the breach of international law.

No form of denial or attempt to diminish the criminal nature of such heinous offences against civilians can ever succeed. Throughout world history, these awful crimes will continue to be examples of the evil which so cruelly marked the world in the twentieth century.

The origin of this evil is known: Fascism and Nazism, two criminal ideologies of the twentieth century, created political conditions in which serious atrocities took place. Without Fascism, the Slovenian and other minorities in Italy would not have been oppressed back in the period before the Second World War. Without Fascism, moreover, the Nazi regime would not have come to power. And without Fascism and Nazism, there would have been no Second World War. Without Fascism and Nazism, we would not have the consequences of the Second World War to deal with, there would have been no post-war revenge and settling of accounts with genuine and suspected war criminals. And Eastern Europe would not have suffered Stalinist rule and human rights violations after the War.

Nowadays, this often seems to be forgotten. We sometimes hear – even from the highest authorities in our neighbourhood – that suffering started some time around the end of the Second World War. Such statements are neither convincing nor credible. Selective memory is always ethically questionable. But memory that wilfully substitutes effect for cause is, ethically, completely unacceptable. Such deformation of history should be opposed – clearly and with determination, but always with a measured, cultured and dignified response.

In Slovenia, we should always remember that during the Second World War we were on the right side, i.e. on the victorious side which wiped two brutal ideologies – Fascism and Nazism – off the face of the earth. Victory brought us the Treaty of Peace with Italy, which is one of the components establishing the fundamental arrangement of the world after the Second World War. The Treaty of Peace with Italy provided our nation with compensation for moral and also to a certain extent material damage.

The post-war regime however, has unfortunately not provided compensation for material damage to the many persons displaced or refugees from Slovenia, victims of Nazism. The Republic of Slovenia should, therefore, make further efforts to resolve this issue in the same way as other Central European countries have.

We must be clearly aware of all this whenever we hear attempts to alter the historical facts. Nonetheless, we should respond in a deliberate fashion, without being overemotional, always with the calm and dignified attitude of victors. In combat we were determined and victorious, let us retain our dignity and self-confidence when remembering that victory. The ethics of victors requires from us nothing less.

The victory over Fascism and Nazism also contributed to other achievements in the areas of politics and international law but, in particular, it gave us a self-confidence which the Slovenian nation had never experienced before in history. We are no longer a nation that is going to leave crucial decisions to be taken by others. We have a State uniting the population of Slovenia and, on the basis of our sovereignty, we have a self-confidence. And it is precisely this self-confidence that dictates the knowledge that the basic achievements of our resistance against occupying forces should not be taken from us. We need to be quite clear that there is no power, no ideology and no untruth that could turn back the course of history. The achievements of the resistance against the occupier are irreversible.

However, alongside the victory there are other facts we should not overlook. The Second World War, in a manner of speaking, pushed the world out of its moral hinges. Fascism and Nazism were at the origin of this with human rights violations and intimidation of people under their regime; all this started even before the war. Such offences were perpetrated on a vast scale and, during the war, increased in scope until they became the most massive war crimes in human history.

At today’s celebration we must also commemorate and remember the victims of the Holocaust. Millions of Jews were systematically killed in the most massive, most horribly organised genocide in human history. Their suffering should continue to serve as a permanent warning, reminding us of what can happen to a people facing the threat of destruction if it does not organise its own resistance. Slovenians, too, were among the peoples condemned to destruction. Without resistance, the danger of destruction would have been even greater. However, through its resistance, its readiness to accept sacrifices and to take its fate into its own hands, the Slovenian nation showed the way for a nation to survive and be victorious in war.

The aftermath of the end of Second World War also brought some tragic events and serious crimes, such as the mass prosecution and executions of defeated forces. Over 12 million people, mostly Germans but also other nationals of the Axis Powers, were forced to leave their homes after the war. Many members of the defeated armies were victims of execution There were no court judgments and there was no mercy. This wave of violence spread over all of Central and Eastern Europe, and Slovenia was no exception. The remains of those killed during that time are still being discovered today. Everyone deserves a decent funeral and respectful treatment.

Now that we are discovering the dreadful consequences of that time, we need to understand that our country was just a part of a much larger picture and a whole age when the whole world was morally out of joint. Our country was endangered, as it had been many times before, but it was only a part of a much larger drama. We should not, therefore, weigh ourselves down with heavier burdens than are our due. In understanding this business, let us act like Europeans. A serious and responsible attitude to our shared European history obliges us to understand the whole story and our part in it. But nothing less and nothing than that.

Our responsibility concerns the fate of our people and our victims, including both the victims of war and the victims of revolution violence. All the deceased deserve to be allowed to rest in peace. Now, more than 60 years after the end of the war, those of us who are alive also deserve peace and reconciliation. However, in Slovenia even today we handle the issue of reconciliation with a lack of tolerance and, very often, in a far too politicised a manner. Slovenia’s National Assembly failed again this year to conclude the debate and adopt legislation related to the war. The political will to achieve this is still lacking.

We expect too much of symbolic acts of reconciliation, especially those performed by other people. There is too little understanding that reconciliation is built every day, that it grows in people’s hearts and that in order to flourish, it depends on each and every one of us. Too little attention is paid to the fact that, at the personal level, a great deal has already changed and we have already come a long way down the road to reconciliation. And lastly, there is too little understanding that the road to reconciliation starts with oneself, admitting one’s own mistakes and forgiving the mistakes of others. Only after that is the road to reconciliation truly open. The recently published letters of Bishop Anton Vovk, dating from the immediate post-war period, demonstrate his profound ethical feeling. Underlining the readiness to start with oneself and one’s own mistakes, they contain an important message: all of us are concerned, not just one side, not just the other side, but all of us.

This year’s National Resistance Day commemorating resistance against the Occupation is an opportunity to remember and reflect on all of this – the greatness of the war of national liberation and the global dimension of the fight against Fascism and Nazism, the historic destiny of our nation and ethical core of our recent history. However, we need to think about a future, a future for which we wish to be worthy of the memory of the best from our past. Reaching this goal will not be easy. It will require great effort.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the onetime Secretary-General of the United Nations, once wrote, “Never measure the height of the mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.”

This also applies to the development of our country. Although we it sometimes appears to us that we are on the peak today – Slovenia never before achieved as much as it has since independence – we should be aware that difficult tests still lie ahead. Our State is not yet a model of the ‘State governed by the rule of law and a social State’. We still have a great deal to do. We need to halt the processes that drive our people below the poverty line. We need to find ways to increase the value of all we create. We need to increase our wealth through greater added value. We need to base our development more on our own knowledge, entrepreneurship and creativity. And when comparing ourselves with others, we should be more self-critical and less self-satisfied. A great deal of work awaits us.

We shall have to work hard. But let us not doubt our success. We hope to be worthy of the memory of the victims and the greatness of the war of national liberation. We shall therefore continue their tradition, which is reflected in the values of freedom, culture, resourcefulness and courage. It is my firm belief that we will be successful. We have self-confidence. We need only add our heartfelt joint efforts. And that is possible, too.
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