Under Slovenia lie graves, many never to be found







Unlike its neighbors, Slovenia — the first country to secede from Yugoslavia in 1991 — largely escaped the bloodshed of the 1990s Balkan ethnic wars. Its mass graves are older, and its youngest war survivors are nearing 70-year-old. Some wonder why they should dig up a painful past that has been buried so long.






The Slovene government began listing "concealed graves" in 2003 and has confirmed some 200 of them — some containing a few bodies, some thousands — since 2006. But a government commission checks only whether graves exist where locals claim they were. When found, sometimes by accident, experts simply make an estimate on the number of bodies, register them, cover them again and mark the place.

Exhumations are ordered only if bones are in the way — as they were in 1999, when more than 1,100 remains were found during construction works for a highway near Maribor, the country's second largest city — or if police or judge order them, which is usually when full identification is possible or if there is a known perpetrator. Those cases are rare.

In the latest find, a team of five people began digging on a sunny Autumn day in a cornfield near the village of Mostec in southeastern Slovenia, acting on testimony from a local who was a nine-year-old at the time.

"We slept outside, on the hay and sometime after midnight, we heard the screams of those people being lined up there," Joza Peterkoc, 74, said at his home about a kilometer (less than a mile) from the site. "After the shooting, it was all quiet." In wartime poverty, he said he even took and wore a victim's shoes found nearby.

Behind yellow police tape just 500 meters (yards) from village homes decorated with flowers, an excavator dug into the soil until until he heard a shout: "Stop, here they are!"

A gravedigger slowly descended into the pit, where a skull, a set of teeth, and bones lay scattered and crusted with dirt. A wire lay twisted into an 8-shape, designed to tie victims' hands behind their backs.

The worker checked the depth of the bones, and then the excavator looked every few meters (yards), digging other holes, until he was sure there were no more bones to be found. Then, the earth was again thrown over them and a small tin sign was posted with crosses marking the site surrounded by fertile cornfields.

The 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) trench could contain far more remains. Locals say that up to 10,000 people might have been slain and buried in the area they dubbed an "industrial slaughterhouse." But the work is over for this year and the commission is awaiting a new budget season.

Exhumations, collecting all DNA samples and storing them where relatives can potentially come seeking them would cost a fortune.

"In some ideal world, that would be possible," said Marko Strovs, who heads the government commission.

But, Ranka Ivelja, an investigative journalist for the daily Dnevnik, said the graves remain a "political, not purely ethical problem."

Even decades after the war, "the past divisions still live," she said.



In Huda Jama, where a mass grave was discovered last year in a former mining shaft, a memorial chapel stands in memory to the victims. But a Home Guard veterans' group and some rightist parties have demanded an additional plaque saying: "We, too, have died for our homeland."

Janez and Justin Stanovnik who fought on different sides in the war illustrate the debate. Appearing on TV last year to discuss mass graves, Justin Stanovnik, who was a member of Home Guard, insisted he would only attend a commemoration for victims if the antifascists admitted their crimes.

Janez Stanovnik called that "an attempt to achieve victory for the defeated."

The government insists that neither finances nor ideological debate affect it, pledging to find all the graves. "There is a wish not to contribute to further divisions, but to secure, above all, a reverence for all the victims," it said in an e-mail.

Some have faith that the truth will come out inevitably, when Slovenes decide that they can no longer live on top of the country's painful history.

"Archaeology is merciless," said Joze Dezman, a historian. "There will come a generation that will realize that it's not normal to have garbage thrown over bones somewhere, or a kindergarten built over a bone-filled trench."


Associated Press Writer Ali Zerdin contributed to this report from Ljubljana, Slovenia.