New efforts in Spain to come to terms with its fratricidal past could reopen old wounds in other parts of the world.
The government of new Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is proposing changes to the 2007 Law on Historical Remembrance, which supporters say would fully respect the "right to the truth" of the victims of Francisco Franco's fascist regime, during and after the Spanish Civil War, reports Radio Free Europe (RSE ).
The proposed measures include a more systematic approach to the opening of mass graves, but also the exhumation of the late dictator's body and its removal from the mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen, near the Spanish capital. However, this proposal met with opposition in Spain, especially among Franco's devotees.
Sánchez's government and its supporters argue that the mausoleum and the huge 150-meter-high cross serve only to glorify the fascist regime, while many of Franco's victims still lie in unmarked graves across the country. A similar desire to renounce the fascist legacy is behind the proposed exhumation and possible repatriation of the remains of foreign fascists who sought refuge in Franco's Spain after World War II. At the very top of the list of unwanted deceased are two well-known Croats - Ante Pavelić and Vjekoslav Maks Luburić, who fled in 1945 and settled in Spain, where they were both buried, RSE reminds.
Pavelić was the founder of the ultra-nationalist Ustaše movement and the leader of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which included parts of present-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He introduced racist laws that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma, as well as anti-fascist Croats and other political opponents.
Luburić was the commander of the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp.
However, the question arises, if their remains were to be exhumed, where would they be sent.
Their political careers and crimes are associated with the NDH and some Spanish media mentioned Croatia as their country of origin, but both Pavelić and Luburić were actually born in the territory that today belongs to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Pavelić was born in the village of Bradina, near Konjic, about 60 kilometers south of Sarajevo, Luburić is from the village of Humac in southern Herzegovina, according to RSE.
Dragan Markovina, a Bosnian-born Croatian historian and political activist, told RFE/RL that he does not support the burial of the remains of Pavelić and Luburić in Bosnia or Croatia. He predicts that their graves would become places of pilgrimage for their nationalist devotees. However, he is not sure that returning the remains of Pavelić and Luburić would increase tensions in the region. "I think that tensions cannot be higher than they are now," said Markovina.
"There are already huge divisions in Croatian society. This was best seen during the recent World Cup, when the national team that won second place was met by two Croatias: nationalist and civic".
The situation is just as bad - or maybe even worse - in Bosnia, according to Markovina. "Distrust is greater than ever before between all three nationalist elites and those who vote for them, as well as between these elites and certain left-wing anti-nationalist forces," the historian told RSE. "I don't think tensions would flare up more than they are now, but returning the remains would harm the education of future generations."
Markovina recalls that even in Madrid, Pavelić's grave occasionally served as a symbolic place to confirm nationalist aspirations. "There was the case of the current president of the Croatian Football Association, and then Real Madrid player Davor Šuker, who posed with a group of people in front of Pavelić's grave." That photo was taken in 1996, but was published in 2010. Markovina says that the current Croatian Minister of Health Milan Kujundžić and many others did the same.
Historian Hrvoje Klasić, speaking to RSE, also points out that Benito Mussolini's devotees gather once a year in the birthplace of Benito Mussolini, and that Croatia does not need a shrine where fascist sympathizers will gather at a time when "Ustasha greetings can be heard in football stadiums and the streets". Klasić claims that there is no reason for the remains of Pavelić or Luburić - both born in Bosnia - to be returned to Croatia, because they "have no connection" with that country.
However, even Pavelić's daughter reportedly opposed moving her father's remains to Croatia. According to Jakov Sedlar, a Croatian director close to the political right, it is because Franjo Tuđman did not build the state based on Pavelić's vision. She told Sedlar this in an interview ten years ago in Madrid. Pavelić's daughter passed away in 2015 and was buried next to her father and mother at the San Isidro cemetery.
Croatian journalist Inoslav Bešker said that he is categorically against moving the remains. He says that modern Croatia is no place for the likes of Pavelić and Luburuć and that it is up to the Spanish and Bosnian leaders to find a solution. Pavelić and Luburić are long dead, says Bešker, but "playing with their bones in the media alarmed the spirits in Croatia and Bosnia".
Meanwhile, politicians in BiH are consciously playing with ethnic tensions ahead of the October elections.
The leader of Bosniak Muslims, Bakir Izetbegović, makes statements that critics consider incendiary and emphasizes his friendship with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Croatian member of the BiH Presidency, Dragan Čović, seems determined to advocate for the establishment of a third Croatian entity in Bosnia. The President of the RS, Milorad Dodik, is arming his police and threatening secession - and none of that disqualified him from running for membership in the BiH Presidency.
While Spain tries to remove reminders of its fascist past, including the remnants of fascist leaders who fled to Franco, trends in the Balkans are going in the opposite direction. Across the Balkans, the region's anti-fascist past - including the struggle waged by Tito's partisans against the Nazis and their domestic collaborators - the Ustashas and Chetniks - is being revised and in many cases dismissed, while local fascists are being rehabilitated.
Franco's Spain was a refuge for the Nazis
During the Franco dictatorship, Spain was a safe haven for Nazis from many European countries. Some of the most famous are the Belgian Nazi Leon de Grell, the Nazi commando who gained fame by liberating Mussolini from the hands of the Allies, Oto Skorceni, the high official of Nedić's Serbia, Vladimir Velmar Janković.
After the war, Pavelić initially fled to Argentina, where he survived an assassination attempt in Buenos Aires in 1957 by Serbian emigrant Blagoje Jovović. After that he moved to Spain, where he felt safer. He died in 1959 and was buried in the San Isidro Cemetery in Madrid.
After escaping from Yugoslavia, Luburić fled directly to Spain, and settled in a place near Valencia where the Franco regime gave him a new identity (Vicente Peres García, or Don Vicente). He was killed in his home in 1969.
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