OK, on Tito's early years again. MOU already mentioned the Goli Otok camp. Cant find back those Pavlowitch and other xeroxes, but since I have a hard copy edition, I could easily find another source - and yes, I know, its a controversial one:
The Black Book of Communism of Cautois etc.
Translating:
Quote:Goli Otok [..] became [..] the most important camp. And it was not just any camp, because educational methods were applied that looked strongly like the methods in the Romanian camp Pitesti and that we can perhaps best label as 'Balkan methods'. Like the "hedge of dishonour", that was also called "warm rabbit". The new inmate would have to walk in between two lines of prisoners (prisoners who wanted to regain their good name or improve their circumstances) who beat him up, scolded him and threw stones at him. [..]
Tortures were daily business for the prisoners. Part of the tortures were for example "the tub", in which the prisoner was held with his head over a tub full of excrement, and the 'bunker', a kind of dark prison cell inside a hole in the ground. But the method most used by the guards/"re-educators" [..] was the duty to pulverize stones on the rocky island. To complete the humiliation of the victim the resulting grit was then thrown into the sea.
The persecution of the communists that erupted in Yugoslavia in 1948 and 1949 probably is one of the most expansive of such persecutions in Europe up to that time [..] In proportion to the number of inhabitants and the number of supporters of communism it was clearly a 'mass persecution'. According to official sources that were long kept secret, this repression has made 16,731 victims [..] Of these victims 3/4 was sent to Goli Otok and Grgur. According to the independent analyses of Vladimir dedijer in the camp Goti Olok alone there have been 31,000-32,000 people. Recent research has not progressed far enough to yield exact numbers of deaths, victims of executions, exhaustion, epidemics and suicides [..]
Note the 16,731 thus are not deaths but "merely" prisoners - and though there were apparently many more (over 30k in Goti Olok alone), that still doesnt necessarily mean there were many thousands of deaths there ...
Also intigueing is that the victims were apparently overwhelmingly party members themselves, victims of the internal purges and show trials - like "1937" more than like "1931", thus?
Otherwise the book recounts the Bleiburg and related episodes MOU already mentioned, when the Titoists settled their scores with the defeated fascist troops directly after the war:
Quote:When the German capitulation approached, Pavelic departed with his troops and functionaries and their families (in total ten thousand people) towards the Austrian border. In Bleiburg, Slovene White Guards and Chetniks from Montenegro joined them, after which they surrendered to the English troops, who handed them over to Tito.
Soldiers and police agents in all of Yugoslavia observed long death marches passing by. The Slovene prisoners were brought to Slovenia in the surroundings of Kocevje, where between twenty and thirty thousand people were shot. [..] The way in which many Serbian soldiers came to their end, is sketched by Milovcan Djilas, who did not dare to give the undoubtedly gruesome details [..] 'The troops of Draza [Mihailovic] were destroyed around the same time as those of Slovenia. The small groups of Chetniks that went back to Montenegro, there reported new atrocities. [..]'
Hard to distinguish post-war, popular retaliation from state terror here, though the execution of tens of thousands of enemy soldiers who had surrendered themselves imho falls in the latter category, even if they were fascists. Of course retaliations were commonplace across Europe, and Yugoslavia had seen some of the worst fascist violence, but I cant think of instances of collective mass executions of tens of thousands in Western Europe, or even many in Central Europe (the Baltics, where a guerrilla war still kept raging, excluded).
I've also read (but forgot the details) about mass executions at a site in Slovenia or Croatia, where hundreds of bodies were dumped in chalk quarries or cliffs, I believe also after the Communists took over - can anyone help me place that memory, what it was about exactly?
How any of this compares to Franco's Spain I'm still not sure about, though it should be obvious that in spite of all the above horrors, my antipathies still lean even more strongly against Franco's regime ...
Fbaezer makes a vivid and concise enough case about the Spanish horrors. Still, concentration/forced labour camps with hunger and torture there were in the early Tito years as well (though again, there's torture and torture). An equivalent of the mass executions of people, just because they were "relatives of former socialist or republican town majors", as there were in Spain is perhaps harder to find in Yugoslavia, though one can wonder about the "families" mentioned above who surrendered at Bleiburg and were later executed ... And of course, during the war the Partisans did summary executions and house-burning just like their opponents did.
As for the point about the press being able to "critizise minor things and minor politicians" in Yugoslavia (and not in Spain), I do believe that only holds up for the last ten or fifteen years of Titos reign, definitely not already in the late fourties or early fifties.
All in all, I'll believe that Franco's regime was indeed worse. And even the above in no way parallels the Soviet Gulag of course. But Tito's early clampdowns are, I think, much less acnowledged.
I mean, link is probably okay, it just won't open...
