Slovenians in the Anti-Fascist Struggle in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Building the Federal Foundations of Yugoslavia (1941-1945)

Abstract

Understanding the socio-historical processes after the April War of 1941 and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia presupposes a deeper knowledge of opposing national perspectives since 1918, when this country was created, of the events between the two world wars, as well as their multidimensional characters, since they largely determined wartime polarizations and alignments. The Second World War is one of the most problematic historical periods in the post-Yugoslav area, from a scientific and political point of view. With numerous relief and insufficiently explored components, it still belongs to the so-called “hot memory”. The disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1941 was greeted by its peoples and political subjects with different visions of whether (and if so: how) a new Yugoslavia should be established. The anti-fascist struggle was led by a partisan movement with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) playing a dominant role. Each Yugoslavia (“old” and “new”) also meant “a new constitutional concept of the relationship between its main peoples/political groups” (Dejan Jović). The history of the Slovenes, wrote Edvard Kardelj at the end of the thirties of the 20th century, “is nothing but a long chain of oppression and trampling of a small nation”. After the First World War (the “Great War”), the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the collapse of Austria-Hungary divided the Slovenes among four countries. The parcelization of the Slovenian ethnic space did not end there. The territory of Slovenia (Drava Banovina) after the fragmentation of Yugoslavia in 1941 was divided between Germany, Italy and Hungary, into six parts, with different administrative regimes. The Slovenian people were torn apart, humiliated, threatened with destruction and disappearance from the ethnic map of Europe. This people was one of “the most fragmented in Europe and all the occupiers planned to wipe it out through persecution, assimilation and denationalization. Research on refugees and exile is closely related to issues of human rights, nationalism, genocide and ethnocide. This issue has a humanitarian, political, legal and moral dimension. Part of the exiled Slovenes also came to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1941, which was part of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Slovenes have a specific place in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina since the end of the 19th century. They also contributed to the development of the National Liberation Movement ( NOP) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by acting in an illegal revolutionary movement and partisan units, as well as participating in the constitution of the new government and defining the future internal structure of post-war Yugoslavia. The war in the territory of occupied Yugoslavia was, among other things, a civil war that destroyed the idea that this monarchist state can be restored in the form in which it was created in 1918. The ranks of the NOP included Slovenians who lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina before the war, as well as those who came as exiles in 1941. Major events related to the construction of the “new” Yugoslavia took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which Slovenians participated, important for the history of Slovenia as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina. By actively participating in the anti-fascist war, the engagement and visions of their prominent representatives at the top of the NOP (Edvard Kardelj and others) and in the activities of the AVNOJ in 1943, determining and making its landmark decisions, the Slovenians had a significant share in the victory and establishment of a new, federal the Yugoslav state and the construction of the statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Complex Yugoslav federalism, with scattered forms and models, represented a specific historical phenomenon.