The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 41REGISTERED AS WORKERS, ERASED AS NON-SLOVENES41- travel expenses (to be able to become foreigners officially, applicants hadto obtain documents issued in their place of birth in the territory of theformer Yugoslavia)- expenses for official translation of documents and certificates issued inother parts of the former Yugoslavia, which were obligatory attachmentsto the application for residence permit or naturalization (the fees for thesetranslations are higher than those for ordinary translations)- expenses paid for the exam in Slovene if a person applied for citizenship(35,000 tolars according to our interviewees)- administrative fees for residence or naturalization applications (up to30,000 tolars), administrative fees for complaints, and administrativefees in Slovenia and the countries of the former Yugoslavia for the issuingof various certificates and documents,- some also had to pay legal consultants when applying for citizenship orresidence permit.In addition, erased people had to pay fines issued by courts for minor offences,because as erased residents without valid documents they were constantlyviolating the law:Suddenly, you couldn’t go to any institution any more, all doors were closed …And all those fines … In the end you had to pay for everything. (Aleksandar, 47)Consequently, families with an erased person had greater expenses thanthe rest of the population but received lower social benefits or none at all, whichonly exacerbated their exclusion and poverty. Moreover, obtaining documentsthat had to be attached to applications for residence or citizenship by natura -lization consumed their time in addition to money:I kindly asked my boss to let me go on vacation. But he told me: “I’m fed up withyou and your papers.” I’d be away for two days. And I had to pay for everything..[…] I got a visa [work permit in Slovenia] for three months, then for six, thennine and twelve. And if you changed company, you had to do it all over again. Iworked all day long, and I had to fix those papers again and again. Non-stop.Three months, and then again. Six months, and all the papers again. (Igor, 44)Apart from expenses, our interviewees also mentioned other obstacles.Some documents - for example, a certificate proving that they had no criminalrecord - had a short validity period (six months) that sometimes expired even beforethe applicant was able to obtain other required documents. Some felt thatthey were trapped in a vicious circle, as it was unclear how, if at all, they couldobtain all the required documents. Aleksandar Todorović experienced it himself:“For example, I sent a request to obtain document A, but it was rejected because