The 30th Anniversary of the Erasure from the Slovenian Register of Permanent Residents
Blog Editor’s Note
By Barbara Gornik, Science and Research Centre Koper
On June 25th, 1991, Slovenia formally declared its independence and adopted legislation related to internal affairs, citizenship, and sovereignty. Article 40 of the Citizenship Act (1991) provided that citizens of other republics of former Yugoslavia could acquire Slovenian citizenship if they met three requirements: they had acquired permanent resident status in Slovenia by December 23rd, 1990; they were actually residing in Slovenia; and they had applied for citizenship within six months of the Citizenship Act entering into force. According to the official data, approximately 171,000 out of 200,000 citizens of the other republics of former Yugoslavia were granted citizenship under Article 40 of the Citizenship Act (Zorn, 2009).
For various reasons, a proportion of citizens of other republics of former Yugoslavia residing in Slovenia did not attain Slovene citizenship. Some of them were not properly informed about the deadline for submission of the application, some of them did not wish to acquire citizenship, some of them could not apply, and some of them were not eligible to obtain Slovenian citizenship. All these individuals became foreigners, as stipulated under Article 81 of the Aliens Act (1991). They reasonably expected to be able to maintain their permanent residency status, as had all foreigners of other nationalities who were living permanently in Slovenia at that time.
However, Article 16 of the Aliens Act (1991) required that a permanent residence permit could be granted if a person had been living in Slovenia for three years on the basis of a temporary residence permit. In contrast to other foreigners living in Slovenia, no such permits existed for citizens of the Yugoslavian republic before the break-up. Consequently, this bureaucratic error disabled them to keep their permanent residence status.
On February 27th, 1992, the then Minister for the Interior, Igor Bavčar, dispatched the Official Communication to local administrative units, instructing officials to start “clearing up the records” and managing the status of all citizens of other republics of former Yugoslavia who did not apply for citizenship of the Republic of Slovenia within the stipulated deadline (Ministry of Internal Affairs 1992a). As a result, 25,671 individuals, citizens of SFRY who had not attained Slovene citizenship, were removed from the Register of Permanent Residents of Slovenia. These persons became known as the “erased.”
Men, women, and children, whose names were removed from the Register of Permanent Residents on 26 February 1992, were ordinary people who once, as citizens of a common state, enjoyed full access to political, economic, social, and other rights and were not in any way problematic, disloyal residents as repeatedly claimed by the government. Some of them were internal economic immigrants from other republics of former Yugoslavia, who held common Yugoslav citizenship, while others were born and raised in Slovenia. Most of them had spent a significant part of their lives in Slovenia, where they had developed personal, social, cultural, linguistic, and economic bonds in their private and family lives. After the erasure, some left Slovenia, others stayed on the basis of temporary work permits, while some had no choice but to live without legal residency status or even stateless.
But what were the governmental rationalities which served as a base for the politics of the erasure? What was the mind-set involved in this particular practice of government, which rests upon many irrational elements and relies on imaginary with a strong resonance to define the internal “enemy” as an undesirable part of the population within the newly established state?
My observation is that erasure was built upon the raison d’État in the sense that it did not attempt to strengthen the Slovene nation on the ethnic level, but rather at the level of political and economic in regard to the state and its population as a whole. This logic particularly resonates from the Official Communication dated June 4th, 1992, sent to the government by the Minster for Internal Affairs Igor Bavčar. Bavčar explained to the government that the question of recognizing the permanent residency of citizens of other republics of former Yugoslavia displays a “political connotation as well as financial effects” (Ministry of Internal Affairs 1992b). He expressed hesitation in regard to continuity of their rights because “granting residence permits to foreigners needs to be well considered since once permission is approved it becomes difficult to revoke, which is especially important when dealing with problematic individuals such as criminals, offenders, disturbers of public order and individuals from the Yugoslav People’s Army” (Ministry of Internal Affairs 1992b, emphasis added).
The erasure was also grounded in the “removal” of people who were socially and economically undesirable. As further stated in the above-mentioned Official Communication, the dilemma of whether to recognize the rights appears to be “essential, since it comes to deciding on the existential rights, which have to be provided by the state” (Ministry of Internal Affairs 1992b). The permanent residence permit namely linked the holder to 27 different rights in the field of social care, including pension rights, education, health, and access to the labour market (ECHR 2012, 46). As far as those rights were concerned, they had considerable economic weight, as recognized by representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
But how did the government determine the group of people to be erased? As already indicated, erasure was not directed against all foreigners from other republics of former Yugoslavia, nor did it affect citizens of other republics of former Yugoslavia randomly. The erasure affected only those citizens of other republics of former Yugoslavia who had not applied for Slovenian citizenship or whose application for citizenship was not accepted by the officials or whose application for citizenship was rejected. Even if the primary problem of the erased was not that they could not acquire citizenship but that they were not able to keep their permanent residency status, acquisition of Slovene citizenship represents a very important element in understanding the erasure.
Namely, citizenship is generally understood and defined with reference to the state as well as the notion of belonging. Citizenship is also a means of organizing the relationship between the state and the individuals it governs (Gilbert and Powell 2008, 192) by producing a particular subjectivity and consequently structuring the possible field of the individual’s actions and shaping choices and aspirations of individuals and groups. Approaching citizenship from this perspective offers a chance to view citizenship not merely as an institution but more as a strategy of governing individuals’ loyalties, expectations, and practices (Procacci 2004). Such understanding of citizenship may imply that the erased, who for various legitimate reasons did not wish to obtain Slovene citizenship, failed to express their allegiance to the newly established state. In the context of the political uncertainties accompanying the Yugoslav break-up, the government justified the erasure as a method for eliminating individuals who did not confirm their commitment to the Republic of Slovenia thorough the acquisition of citizenship.
And what role did ethnicity have in the governmental mindset of the erasure? It is important to understand that ethnicity is not simply a biological category, genetic descent defined according to one’s birth, or an ancestral line of the historical founder population sharing the same language, customs, and social norms. In modern nation-states, ethnicity typically works as a political technology—that is, it is how individuals are governed based on particular political reasoning that leads us to recognize our self-identity as members of a community, a nation, or a state. Ethnic identity, just like citizenship, can be thought of as the extension of the state’s power, constructing a subjectivity that makes individuals perform assigned tasks and behave in prescribed ways.
The ethnic origin of the erased residents of Slovenia can thus be understood as an important reason for the erasure because it implied an individual’s allegiance to the political adversaries of the Slovene nation-state. The erased individuals were not perceived merely as foreigners in the ethnic sense, but mostly as foreigners displaying certain political loyalties to the political structures that were at that time in direct antagonistic relationship with the newly established Slovenian state. The case of the erased shows that the doctrine of ethnocultural nationalism prevailed where it implied the political dimensions of ethnic identity (i.e. political loyalty) but not ethnicity (e.g. ethnic origin) as such. A similar argument is found in Wimmer’s (2004) view that soldiers from other national backgrounds are viewed with distrust since political loyalty is now no longer perceived as a matter of fidelity to one’s lord or of good pay, but of national background.
The case of the erased proves that the demands for absolute subjection to the political order are especially acute in the context of separation, emancipation, and establishing of new states and political systems, because antagonism between the new and old regimes generally does not allow in-between positions; even less do they tolerate political opinions supporting political opponents. This is what Richard Devetak (2004, 27) calls “the modern norm of loyalty—namely allegiance to a single nation: one person, carrying one passport, declares allegiance to one flag, one nation, one sovereign state.