The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 204204 THE SCARS OF THE ERASUREcompelled to reflect on what it means to be a member of a nation. Being designated,against their will, as non-members of the Slovenian nation (understoodboth as narod in the narrow, ethnic sense of the word and as nacija, thus citizenshipfrom which they were automatically excluded), the erased people wereforced to evaluate anew their feelings of belonging. 22 To illustrate this, we givebelow several excerpts from interviews with the erased people, which reveal theambivalence of national identity. Fatima, for example, spoke of the difficulty ofdetermining her ethnicity, because at the time when she was born the idea thatshe was a Yugoslav sufficed for her to develop a sense of belonging, so ethnicitywas not inscribed on her birth certificate:My father was joking when I was born … My father is a Croat, so he said, “Writedown Martian.” I mean, when they asked about my ethnicity. So I had there [inher birth certificate] a dash, I didn’t have Slovenian, or Croatian, or any … Likethat, we were Yugoslavs, it’s how it was then. (Fatima, 35)Grappling with the long-lasting (for many still uncompleted) procedures associatedwith legal status regulation, certain erased persons resorted to inge -nious solutions which illustrate their instrumental understanding of nationalidentity. Put differently, some tailored their identity to the situation, opting forthe one that was the most advantageous and associated with fewest obstacles.For example, the erased person with the pseudonym Željko, who had no statusor papers, decided to apply for Bulgarian citizenship because his father had connectionswith Bulgaria:And I didn’t have any papers. Nothing … So I wondered what to do. And I cameup with a winning formula – and it was, I finally remembered my nation, and itwas, in fact, that I began to function in the national way. So I went to the embassyin Bulgaria, which at that time had already started accession negotiations withthe EU. The Bulgarian passport was already in the EU. Although they still werenot in the EU, but you could travel with the Bulgarian passport everywhere. So Iwent there and I told them that I was … a Bulgarian, like that, that my fatherwas a Bulgarian citizen. [...] Some of these papers, not many; it was like two orthree papers that we had at home, I saw them. So I wrote to my sister to send methose. She sent it by post. Then I went there with those papers. (Željko, 49)22 Here I emphasize the right to residence, which may or may not involve the feeling of belonging to the environmentof a specific national community. Another issue that is very important is the interpretation of the right to nationalidentity of any kind (or none at all). The erased people were deprived of this right and branded as disloyal becausethey did not apply for Slovenian citizenship. Along with being denied the Slovenian national identity, they were ascribedmembership of an arbitrarily chosen nation of the former Yugoslavia, which did not necessarily match theirpersonal affinities.