REPAINTED REDS RULE IN SLOVENIA
by Borut Prah

In 1946, having learned English in Swiss high school just a few years before, Ljubo Sirc* made his first bad mistake: he was observed speaking English with the British Consul and his wife.

This was a serious enough offence to include him in the 1947 Communist show-trial in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Before being sentenced to death, one of his interrogators was Zdenko Rotar.

Eventually, Ljubo Sirc escaped and became a professor of economics in Great Britain. Zdenko Rotar, his interrogator, stayed at home and was promoted to a professor of sociology of religion in Ljubljana; his qualification being that he was in charge of the persecution of priests in the 1940's.

Professor Sirc and Professor Rotar would probably never have met again had it not been for the 1989 total collapse of Communist states, which also included Slovenia. Consequently, in 1992, Slovenia held its first presidential elections. Having been a member of Liberal International since the 1950's Sirc was asked to run for President on the ticket of Liberal Democratic Party, the strongest political party in Slovenia. He accepted and made his second bad mistake: he did not detect the Communist pedigree of the Slovenian Liberal Democratic Party.

His main opponent was Milan Kucan, running as an Independent. Kucan was the former President and Secretary General of the League of Communists of Slovenia and his main advisor in the 1992 elections was - Zdenko Rotar.

In spite of Kucan's well-known associations with unsavory Communist policemen, he was elected with a large majority, simply because the whole Liberal Democratic Party voted for Kucan rather than their own candidate - Ljubo Sirc.

After that, one no longer needed a DNA test to check the ancestry of Liberal Democrats. Indeed, there is a direct link between the murderous Communists of the 1940's and the present Slovenian leaders. To avoid any further mistakes, this link and the current activity of the Slovenian Liberal Democratic Party are worth documenting.

The Slovenian Liberal Democratic Party, formerly the Socialist-Communist-Youth organization, is led by the current Prime Minister of Slovenia, Janez Drnovsek. The party is at present trying to induce the Slovenian Parliament to infringe several articles of the Constitution with regards to private property. But what else is the hallmark of Communists?

This time, their purpose is to subvert the existing legislation which provides for the restitution of property to all those who have been wrongly sentenced to the confiscation of their property or whose property was nationalized. Several articles of the Slovenian Constitution are being violated:

• right of private ownership and inheritance.
• right to rehabilitation and compensation to anybody sentenced wrongly in accordance with the valid law.
• right to the restitution of wrongly confiscated property.
• right to compensation for any illegal act of state authority.
• requirement that courts should act without undue delays.
• prohibition of retrospective legislation unless it is required by public interest and does not interfere with acquired rights.

Even the last item is indefensible; it certainly is in public interest to restitute confiscated and nationalized property, given the Communist's exceptional ability to mismanage property. As for acting without undue delays - six years have passed since the legislation on restitution had been enacted and fifty years since the property was taken and compensations had been owed by the State. Enough is said when several 1997 decisions by Slovenian Constitutional Court proved violations of human rights by Slovenian Agency for Privatization.

Such disrespect for the most important articles of Slovenian Constitution can only mean that Communism is alive and well. Communist instincts in the Liberal Democratic Party are blatantly evident. They want to retain all property for themselves and for their underground Party. They hate the entrepreneurs as class enemies; although these could contribute much to the revival of stagnant Slovenian economy - their enrichment would reinforce the opposition parties. They reward the leaders of the move to dispossess Communists' victims with important foreign policy posts: Igor Bavcar to Slovenian minister for European Cooperation and Zoran Thaler to the Slovenian Foreign Minister.

If there ever was a good reason why the recently proposed Lustration Act is needed is this: the Slovenian Parliament appointed a commission to investigate mass murders which occurred after the war ended in 1945. The Liberal Democratic Party actually agrees that the killing of tens of thousands of Slovenians had been done by the Slovenian secret police under the command of Ivan Macek, a secret police general and a revered member of Slovenian Communist leadership. But, the Liberal Democratic Party refuses to admit that the mass murders of 1945 were the crime for which Slovenian Communist Party was responsible.

Enough of fooling the world with innocent names! Like the Holy Roman Empire which was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire, the Liberal Democratic Party is neither liberal nor democratic. They are simply repainted Reds trying to enter NATO or European Union the only way they know how, by cheating and stealing.

* During World War II, Ljubo Sirc returned from Switzerland to Yugoslavia and joined Tito's partisans. The partisans had problems with the shooting instructions in English that came with the British-made howitzers and Sirc was able to help. When the war ended they made him an official interpreter for English language. He almost lost his life over this promotion, but on the long run it turned out quite well. Dr. Sirc was an Earhard Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, Member of the Mont Pelerin Society and the Director of CRCE, London. He is an editor of the journal Communist Economies and Economic Transformation. (CRCE fax 44-171-233-1050)