The world of the third millennium is marked by the experience of striving and hoping for a
peaceful future, and for a civilisation that might be different from the turbulent and bloody past of humankind, particularly over the past century.

The Holocaust is one of the key signs and reminders of where we can be led by ideologies founded on totalitarianism, intolerance, nationalism and racism. There is a fundamental sense in appeals which continually recall and remind the world and new generations of the tragic experience of the Holocaust, and which move states and nations towards tolerance, cooperation, and respect for difference and the universal rule of human rights. What happened to the Jews following the rise of Nazism and during the Second World War was and remains a horror unrivalled in human history. So what – apart from condemnation – can we find in its message for us and for the future?

Most importantly, we should know how it was possible for the Jewish Holocaust to take place, and who else met with a similar fate. This knowledge can point to solutions in settling life in the international community, so that it might in the future be able to prevent such a crime. It is true that before the Holocaust, as well as after it, there was a great amount of violence and mass destruction of people on all continents of the earth, including Europe. History testifies to this. The Nazi concept, the machinery of its doctrinaire state organisation and the premeditated destruction of human lives in the Third Reich, simply attained, thus far, unimagined levels of cynical and soulless perfection.

Between the two world wars there was already every opportunity for humankind to identify the core of earlier aggression. This lay in the doctrine of the superior worth and mission
of individual ideologies, religions, races, nations or civilisations, in the name of which it was supposedly legitimate and even essential to differentiate between people on the basis of race, creed, skin colour, national affiliation, culture and civilisation. Identifying this should have sufficed for the leading European states and politicians to have been capable of political and other action against the rising German Nazism and Italian Fascism. And that is not all. Historical records tell us of how political and church authorities in positions of responsibility turned a blind eye, even during the Second World War, to the well known horrors of mass killings, Nazi camps, gas chambers and crematoriums. State egoism, and interests in which it is possible to trace the germ of what we call today realpolitik, played a decisive role in this.

I mention this because political circles in Europe were also hesitant and compromising
following the rise of aggressive Serbian nationalism, in this way extending the human agony with its powerful traits of genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo. The hesitation was stopped only by the intervention of the USA.

The two million-strong nation of Slovenia, which I represent today, succeeded in exercising the right to its own state only in the process of collapse of the former Yugoslavia. The historic miracle and achievement is that we were able to preserve our national identity during our centuries of journeying through Europe’s political history, in which we were subjected to continuous aggression. And this aggression was at its worst during the Second World War. Indeed the fate of the Jews was also intended for us. Historical documents tell us that the German Nazis, Italian and Hungarian Fascists, planned and, following the occupation and annexation of individual parts of Slovenia in 1941, physically carried out the liquidation of Slovenes. Hostage shooting, deportation to concentration camps, mass relocations, removal of Slovene children to Nazi reform schools, castrations, burning of villages and other kinds of devastation were the forms taken by this aggression. It was only the strong resistance movement that halted the genocide and linked us to the victorious coalition of democratic allies, with which we celebrated victory in May 1945. There was no room for Slovenes in the countries of the Nazi and Fascist Axis.

For this reason we share in all the current the history books and human memory, and will not lose sight of the truth or the difference and boundary between executioners and victims. We support the initiatives for the Holocaust and the genocide against all nations who fell victim to it, as well as its causes and consequences, to find their proper place in the schoolbooks of all democratic countries of the world. This could also help those European and other countries, which have not yet unequivocally faced up to their own (pro)Fascist or (pro)Nazi past, to arrive at some much needed recognition of this past. It would also promote the sensitivity of international public opinion, when it does or will encounter similar phenomena of nationalism and racism, in which the germ of genocide and holocaust must be identified and eradicated in good time.

The democratic world made clear its position on Nazi and Fascist aggression in Europe
through resolutions at the end of the Second World War and directly after it. These resolutions cannot be changed today, just as we cannot change the past. It is not possible to revise the actions of that time, nor is it possible to exchange the roles played then, even though this might be of pragmatic use to some. For this reason we should persevere in maintaining the full force of the international agreements and decisions made after the Second World War. Through these decisions the democratic countries of Europe attempted to put right the injustices of Fascist and Nazi terror. This also involves us Slovenes, and it involves our state.

Slovenia will therefore not agree to those demands which in Slovenia’s preparation for
accession to the EU could be understood as a demand to revoke the decisions and actions whereby in the spirit of Potsdam, the Slovene state of that time punished the criminals of the wartime occupation and those who collaborated with them in crimes against the Slovene nation.

I believe that the international democratic community will support and endorse this position, in the name of its own victims who were sacrificed in order to defeat Nazism and Fascism. And out of loyalty to humanity, of which we are reminded by the Holocaust. But also in order to prepare the legal and other mechanisms of European institutions, so that they might respond in good time to all forms of revived racist or segregational doctrines and political activities which might once again aim to destroy the principles of dignity and freedom for each human being, regardless of faith, political conviction, foreignness or social position. These signs, which are in part a function of the vagueness of human memory, are plentiful in Europe.

In view of its historical fate, Slovenia gives close scrutiny to them in its own region and elsewhere, for our own sakes, and for our common future in the uniting Europe.

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