Slovenes debate restoring rights to 'foreigners'

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia -- On a bright morning in 1992, Zoran Vojinovic awoke to the jarring realization that he no longer existed.

Not on paper -- when his identity card expired, officials refused to renew it. Not at the hospital -- when he got sick and sought treatment, he was told he had lost his health benefits.

Not in government computers -- when he asked a state agency for help in finding a job, he was turned away as an illegal alien.

Vojinovic, 29, is among 18,000 people in Slovenia known ominously as "the erased ones" -- non-Slovene residents whose names were deleted from the population registry a year after the country declared independence from Yugoslavia.

Under mounting pressure from the European Union, which Slovenia joins in May, voters will decide in a referendum next month whether to restore permanent residency and basic rights to those who suffered what critics call "administrative genocide."

"In Bosnia, fascists walked around doing horrible things with weapons. Slovenia did the same thing with paperwork," said Aleksandar Todorovic, an archaeologist born in Serbia who heads the Association of Erased Persons.

For the erased, it's a question of recovering dignity and the right to drive a car, attend a university, get health care, own property and collect pensions. Permanent residency would also carry the option of citizenship.

Cold-War past

But the Kafkaesque dispute also underscores the murky Cold War-era pasts confronting the EU as it expands eastward to take in a part of the continent stained by nationalism and strife.

Alvaro Gil-Robles, the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, warned Slovenia's government last month that it needs to move quickly and decisively to settle the issue and keep a lid on growing racism and xenophobia.

The debate points out the turbulent history that still taints daily life even in Slovenia, a sliver of stability and prosperity in an otherwise volatile corner of Europe.

Most of the erased were Bosnians and Serbs stripped of their rights in February 1992 after declining offers of citizenship. Many say they were hesitant and confused because of the wars brewing in Bosnia and Croatia, and thought Slobodan Milosevic might retake Slovenia.

"It was a massive illegal act of political vengeance," worthy of Hitler or Stalin, said Matevz Krivic, a former judge for Slovenia's constitutional court, which twice has ordered the government to restore rights to the erased.

Todorovic ticks off a litany of injustices.

Nearly all 18,000 lost their jobs, and at least seven people committed suicide in despair. Some were arrested for simple offenses such as jaywalking and were deported for lack of documents.

Deputy Interior Minister Bojan Bugaric, acknowledging that the erasure was a "mistake," said his office approved retroactive residency for 40 people this week and would issue permits to others. Parliament is expected to enact a law soon laying out guidelines for seeking damages and set a date for the referendum, probably for late March.

But the government is under fire by boisterous right-wing opposition parties who could use the dispute to make gains in October parliamentary elections.

Nationalists have whipped up anti-foreigner sentiment with warnings that compensating the erased could cost up to $3 billion. Recent polls show a majority of Slovenes opposes the idea of compensation.

Ultranationalist lawmaker Zmago Jelincic contends many of the erased are war criminals, swindlers and other undesirables.

"We offered them citizenship for the price of a bad steak," he said. "Nearly 200,000 people took it. A lot of the so-called erased are Muslims from Bosnia...You have to take care of your own country."

Vojinovic, among the few to recently gain citizenship, now has a job supervising a cleaning crew at a shopping mall.

"I was cheated, and Slovenia should be ashamed," he said. "It's impossible to forget this nightmare. But we must go on with our lives."