Archives for February, 2007

This one can only erase lead.

This week marks the 15th anniversary of a now infamous moment in Slovenian history: the removal of 18,000 people from Slovenia’s permanent registry of citizens. Back in 1992, with the country freshly divorced from Yugoslavia, the Slovenian government demanded that the roughly 100,000-strong community of Yugoslav residents (i.e. Croats, Serbs, etc…) register for citizenship. Back then I don’t think anyone imagined that the ensuing mess would take decades to sort out or lead to the chaos it is today. But here we are.

Here’s what we know: of the 100,000, eighteen thousand people were “erased” from the registry, effectively destroying their lives. Most of the erased insist that this was done to them despite the fact that they actually applied for citizenship as demanded of them. The government insists that this is not the case. A common public perception is that the erased were (at least passively) hoping for Yugoslavia to prevail, and that they got off relatively fairly in comparison with other loyalists in other Wars of Independence.

This week the major issue was compensation and this is where things get really ugly. The official Association of the Erased filed a draft compensation claim yesterday, and they promised to take it all the way to the European Court of Human Rights if they have to. (ETA: Ten years.) Public opinion is very squarely against compensation. In fact, a referendum on whether to restore the rights of the erased ended with 95% of voters against. (It should be noted, though, that there was a low turnout and that some people boycotted the vote.)

Chris Colin recently wrote up a lengthy and thought-provoking piece on the subject for Mother Jones. You can read it here. It’s hard not to feel sympathy for some of the characters that appear in his story. Anyone who has tangled with Slovenian municipal bureaucrats knows that it’s a near hopeless fight, especially the longer it goes.

And this is one fight that’s not going to end anytime soon.