By: Aleš Ernecl
We have already reported on Spomenka Diklić Hribar’s primitive abduction of the Slovenian celebration for an attack on the Prime Minister Janez Janša. We already wrote about how she accused the Prime Minister of “selling us to the Hungarians” and being responsible for Srebrenica, which is crazy. However, her speech contained one more anti-Slovenian jab. She said that Milan Aksentijević, Slovenian traitor, deserves Slovenian citizenship.
At the celebration of the unanimous political decision for an independent Slovenia, in the Presidential Palace, Spomenka Diklić Hribar committed a verbal offence, worthy of the designation “betrayal.” She called for the retired Yugoslav People’s Army general, Milan Aksentijević, who, as a member of the Slovenian Assembly, voted for the preservation of Yugoslavia until the very end and did not stop serving the YPA in the war for Slovenia, to be granted citizenship.
Aksentijević was a delegate in the Slovenian Assembly who opposed Slovenia’s independence until the very end, betrayed Slovenia in the war, received the rank of general because of it, and was expelled, together with the Yugoslav People’s Army, and deleted from the register of citizens at the end of the war for Slovenia.
While it is possible to say that some people were wronged by being erased from the register of citizens, it is difficult to imagine a more justified, more “clean” erasure from the register of citizens than Aksentejebvić’s. He was a serving officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army in Slovenia, who, even after the plebiscite did not bow to the will of the Slovenian people to become independent – for which it had the necessary legal basis – and took part in the attack of the then-aggressor, the Yugoslav People’s Army, on Slovenia. Milan Aksentijević is a traitor. Spomenka Diklić, on the other hand, spoke about him at the Slovenian state and state-building celebration, and said the following:
“I feel it is my civic duty to take this opportunity to remind you of the fate of our delegate colleague Milan Aksentijević, who has lived in Slovenia for the past 62 years, who had Slovenian citizenship, but then the state took it away from him; the reason was his alleged participation in the aggression against Slovenia, but when all of these accusations turned out to be false, only one reason remained: the reason he lost his citizenship was that he advocated for the continued survival of Yugoslavia in the Assembly. So, he lost his Slovenian citizenship due to a “verbal offence.” This is another shame of the Slovenian state, especially as this decision was confirmed by the Slovenian courts, so Aksentijević still does not have Slovenian citizenship – even today!”
Of course, the Prime Minister Janez Janša, for whom Diklić Hribar admitted that he could take “a little more” credit for the independence than her, responded to her speech: “After Aksentijević, despite being a delegate in the Assembly of the Federal Republic of Slovenia, betrayed Slovenia and received the rank of general as the award for it, he was transferred to BiH, where his YPA units massacred civilians. And now he wants Slovenian citizenship too?”
Aksentijević never stopped being a member of the Yugoslav People’s Army, even when only the Serbian Communist Party still stood behind it
The Prime Minister reminded everyone that as a general, Aksentijević was part of all of the massacres in the former Yugoslavia, both in Croatia, as well as in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Right until he was retired. He was captured and imprisoned in Croatia and then replaced, and when the members of the Yugoslav People’s Army, which already became the army of the Serbian Communist Party at that point, got him out of prison, they transferred him to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Aksentijević denied that he had taken part in the massacres in Bosnia and Herzegovina and was extremely angry with the Slovenian national media outlet when it aired a documentary, in which he was filmed with Radovan Karadžić.
This is not just a “verbal offence,” which is how Diklić Hribar described Aksantijević’s role in the war. Aksantijević was part of the Greater Serbia aggression against the other nations in Yugoslavia, including Slovenians. A man like that does not deserve Slovenian citizenship, and it is really shameful that Diklić Hribar called for this at the presidential celebration on the 30th anniversary of the agreement on the plebiscite. Everything that President Borut Pahor did afterwards was a call to overcome divisions in such a corrupt atmosphere. We believe that he sincerely wants this to happen; however, he allowed for the glorification of the traitor of Slovenia at a celebration of unity in the Slovenian presidential palace.