Slovenia's Vanishing Act
Invisible Men: The Association of the Erased protests in Ljubljana.
News: The former Yugoslav republic made 18,000 people disappear in the blink of an eye. Now it wants the world to forget its experiment in ethnic cleansing.
January 11, 2007
|
|
It should be strange talking to someone who doesn't exist. But Zoran Ilič, stubbing out a cigarette in my Ljubljana apartment, is disappointingly ordinary: watery blue eyes, a refrigerator's physique, likable laugh lines across his face. For all that's happened to the amiable middle-aged locksmith, what's hardest to comprehend lies over his right shoulder, around the sparkling river and polished cobblestone outside my kitchen window. Modern, thriving, and lovely, 21st-century Slovenia is increasingly hailed as an enlightened jewel in Europe's crown. How could such a place do what it did to Ilič?
If you're picturing snipers and bombed-out buildings, you're thinking old Balkans. Slovenia prides itself on being a safe, prosperous, sophisticated exception — a peaceful place where you can have breakfast under a palm tree in Piran and lunch atop the Julian Alps in Bovec. "God's blessing on all nations," its big hearted national anthem begins. The national hero isn't a general but a poet. The euro was adopted in January. These days the newly hip country spends its days polishing its vanilla image; in the offing are the presidency of the European Union and a general luxuriating in global capitalism.
Ignorance of Slovenia is a forgivable sin — President Bush once confused it with Slovakia — and anyway, it's generally a good thing if you're a former Yugoslav republic that's stayed out of the headlines. Slovenia seceded from the failing socialist federation in 1991 with scarcely a murmur. After a crisp little 10-day war, the country made a quick shimmy toward Europe, pointing out to anyone listening that it had always belonged in that more civilized association anyway. In the 15 years since independence, Slovenia has reinvented itself as the sole Balkan "success story," as the breathless write-ups routinely put it; a pearl squeezed forth from the frictions of communism and capitalism, East and West, ancient and modern. Balkanism, with all its grim complexity and bloodshed, has become a shelled facade receding in the rearview mirror.
But objects in the mirror are sometimes closer than they appear. Which brings us to Ilič's nightmare. He moved to Ljubljana in 1969, leaving his tiny Serbian village for "the big city." A Yugoslav could move about freely then, and Ilič loved his new home immediately. He began a career as a locksmith, married a Slovene, started a family, and embarked on a pleasantly ordinary life.
In 1992, Ilič was at a municipal office, filling out some form or other. From behind the counter came an odd reply: Not only was Ilič not a Slovenian resident, the cheery official informed him; there was no record of his existence whatsoever. This would have been merely aggravating, in a head-slapping, DMV kind of way, were it not for the dawning dread: Ilič's pension, health insurance, driver's license, and right to legal employment had all disappeared with his identity — he couldn't even check out a library book. Any hope of this being a computer glitch vanished when he returned to the office a few days later. A similar fate had apparently befallen others, and he stared as the armfuls of documents they'd brought in were shredded before their eyes.
"I was watching them put holes in people's paperwork," Ilič recalls. "Everyone was crying and screaming; some women fainted. Later, the suicides. We were told we didn't exist anymore, by these people behind the counter we'd gone to school with." The consequences went beyond red tape. "Suddenly at block parties, our neighbors would have a little to drink and then start telling me to 'go home.' Even my wife's family told her to 'leave this guy.' Everything had been fine before." He shakes his head. "It's like that glass there," he says, pointing to my kitchen counter. "One day you just bring it down to the basement."
Ilič was one of more than 18,000 nonethnic Slovenes who awoke one day to find they'd been completely deleted from the country's registry of permanent residents. (For proportion's sake, that's the equivalent of 2.6 million people in the United States.) The "Erased," as they came to be known, were almost exclusively "new foreigners" from other ex-Yugoslav republics — Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Kosovars, and Roma (not to be confused with "old foreigners" such as Italians or Hungarians). Many had called Slovenia home all their lives, and ethnic distinctions had been effectively meaningless under the Yugoslav umbrella. Their crime? Failing to gain citizenship in the chaotic first months after Slovenia's declaration of independence, when, in what seemed like an obscure bit of bureaucracy, as many as 200,000 minorities were asked to register as citizens in the newly formed country — a requirement waived for their Slovenian-born neighbors.
The Slovene government has maintained that the Erased were victims of their own failure to turn in their paperwork — a failure reflecting their hostility toward Slovene independence, their allegiance to Yugoslavia, and so on. "Why should those who hoped for the Yugoslav Army to return be given certain privileges?" Andrej Umek, a senior member of the Slovene People's Party, asked the New York Times. But Matevz Krivic, a former constitutional court judge and now an advocate for the Erased, believes the registration issue is a red herring. "With 80 to 90 percent I've interviewed, I say, 'For God's sake, why didn't you apply?,' and they answer, 'I did!'"
Most of the Erased did eventually acquire citizenship, but for the 18,305 who didn't, it's been a miserable and often untenable existence — the product of what the human-rights group Helsinki Monitor has called "administrative genocide." Families have been forced into poverty, pensions canceled, children denied schooling or informed their parents don't exist. It's unknown how many Erased have died from lack of medical care, though human rights groups have documented many instances. Some were deported, others driven to leave on their own. Twice, in 1999 and 2003, the country's constitutional court has ruled the mass denationalization to have been illegal, but the government has ignored these rulings.
A number of recent developments may force the Slovenian government to finally resolve the matter, though considerable political leverage evaporated once the country was admitted to the EU. In March 2006, the outgoing commissioner for human rights for the Council of Europe reiterated his call for Slovenia to restore full rights to the thousands still without legal status. In July 2005, the United Nations Human Rights Committee called on Slovenia to seek similar resolution, and four months later Amnesty International urged full reparation for the Erased and guarantees they wouldn't face future persecution. Last July, a group of Italian and Slovenian lawyers filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Erased at the European Court of Human Rights.
There's also been a change among the Erased themselves. Though the vast majority still keep their identities hidden — deportation's always a possibility, public disdain a certainty—a growing number are coming out of the shadows to participate in the loosely knit Association of the Erased. For all the suffering he's seen, Aleksandar "Aco" Todorović, the association's founder, tells me the most difficult part has been watching his nation so successfully convince itself and the outside world of Slovenia's general virtuousness. This February marks the 15th anniversary of the country's illegal act of denationalization, and the matter will be thrust into the spotlight again, possibly forcing an old term back into circulation at this unlikely moment in Slovenia's history: ethnic cleansing.
The article pictures Slovenia as a human rights violator, without properly presenting all sides of the problem. It makes it sound like Slovenia imposed some undue bureaucratic burden on the "Erased" in 1992, as a result of which the "Erased" failed to obtain citizenship. This is a misrepresentation. Actually, the process was very easy, and the vast majority of the "Erased" would be granted citizenship automatically, had they just followed the procedures. There were plenty of reminders in Slovenian media in 1991 that non-Slovenian born foreigners have to file the paperwork if they want to maintain legal status beyond 1992. There was ample time (at least 6 months) to prepare the paperwork. The vast majority of people in that situation filed the paperwork: 200,000 non-Slovenian-born ex-Yugoslavs obtained citizenship this way, by filing the paperwork properly on time. About 20,000 did not, for several reasons. Not because it was hard, but because they either chose not to, or simply did not care to do so, or decided to move out of Slovenia, or because they simply did not take it seriously. True, some are innocent victims of the situation; they did not know, they made a mistake, they are sorry. If it was only about such people, the problem would be easily solvable. However, in 1991, many of the "Erased" opposed the independence of Slovenia, some actively by force. Many did not want citizenship in 1992, because they did not believe in Slovenia. Instead, they moved back to other former parts of Yugoslavia, unfortunately only to find war and misery. So, they returned to Slovenia a few years later, and started demanding citizenship rights. And not just that, they also demand hefty sums of money for compensation of loss of status.
Regardless of whether they never left or returned back to Slovenia after a few years after 1992, Slovenia did not deport them. But it could. They were violating Slovenian immigration law. I have never ever heard of any Erased acknowledge this fact. Many other countries would deport them. So why did Slovenia not deport them? How about because Slovenia actually cares about families and human misery?
If we are to compare numbers to the United States, as the author does, one should also say that the 200.000 non-Slovenians who were granted citizenship in 1992 amounts to 10% of the population of Slovenia. So, this is as if U.S.A. suddenly granted citizenship to 30 million non-Americans!! Slovenia actually did this, in real life. Few countries in the world have ever been as generous in giving out citizenship to non-natives, especially in such a short period of time.
Also, the figure of 80% of Erased who supposedly filed for citizenship, but were denied, is just false. I think the author was simply misled. Did you verify the 80% anywhere else but through what the "Erased", or their representatives, told you? When did they file? On time, or several years later? Did they submit complete applications? Where is the hard evidence?
Yes, it is trendy to cry foul on human right violations. It is easy to accuse some ex-communist country, knowing that many people will buy it, due to the general human-rights violation stigma of ex-communist countries. And it is heart-breaking to write individual stories, depicting the consequences of one's own actions. But we all have to live with the choices we make in life. And the "Erased" made their choice.
Ask yourself, if a group of foreigners lived in your country and started threatening your sovereignty with arms, would you be inclined to granting them citizenship rights? And if your country offered them citizenship, but they would not take it, what would you think when they came back a few years later accusing your government of human rights violations?
I support individual case-by-case resolution of the problem. I do believe that many Erased indeed are innocent victims and had to go through a lot of hardship as a result. If there truely were bureaucratic errors in some cases, Slovenia should apologize and somehow compensate for it. However, I don't like it how some of the Erased are painting Slovenia dark in the international community, by selectively omitting facts not in their favor. Those that can demonstrate good intentions, plausible stories of why they did not apply, and willingness to contribute to Slovenia's society in the future, should be given a chance for citizenship. But it should be treated as a favor, not as a right. And there should be no financial compensation for those that failed to file on time.