The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 99THE ERASED PEOPLE YESTERDAY, TODAY ANDTOMORROW. EROSION OF STEREOTYPES AND THEIRREVERSIBLE ROAD TO REDRESSING INJUSTICEIf seventeen years after the unlawful administrative erasure 1 of 25,671 2people from the register of permanent residents of the Republic of Slovenia weexamine their political, legal and social situation today, we can observe positivechanges. The public and political attitude towards “immigrants” has indeed remainednegative, while the nationalism we witnessed in the National Assemblyduring the years after Slovenia gained independence (Zorn 2007) is today moreconcealed. And yet, what gives hope is the fact that one part of the political elitehas begun to use the discourse of human rights and refer to the state ruled bylaw when speaking about the erasure. This differs greatly from the discoursesthat prevailed in the past, when responsibility for the erasure was imputed tothe erased people and when stereotypes and prejudices were spread to reinforceexclusion and to avoid the implementation of the Constitutional Court ruling. 3Among the examples of this change in discourse let us mention three speeches:1 The erasure from the register of permanent residents implemented by the administrative bodies of the Republic ofSlovenia was not based in law, as was established by the Constitutional Court. It mainly (but not only) affected peopleborn in other republics of the former Yugoslavia who had Yugoslav citizenship and as a rule also the citizenship of ano -ther republic of the former Yugoslavia, but lived in the former Socialist Republic of Slovenia where they had permanentaddresses. When Slovenia became an independent country, on 25 June 1991, the citizens of the former Socialist Republicof Slovenia automatically became citizens of the new country, the Republic of Slovenia. According to Article 40of the Citizenship of the Republic of Slovenia Act, all citizens of other republics of the former SFRY with permanentaddresses in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia had the right to apply for Slovenian citizenship within six months fromthe date of independence. Those who did not obtain citizenship (because they failed to apply for whatever reason, ortheir application was refused or discarded or the procedure was terminated), lost permanent resident status. Theywere deprived of permanent resident status arbitrarily; local authorities implemented the measure in accordance withinstructions from the Ministry of the Interior, at that time headed by Igor Bavčar and the State Secretary of the Interior,Slavko Debelak. With the loss of status, they also lost all economic and social rights tied to permanent resident status.The detailed description of the circumstances surrounding the erasure is beyond the scope of this book. For more onthe erasure itself, see Dedić at al. 2003 and Lipovec Čebron and Zorn 2007.2 This figure is the result of the internal examination of databases conducted in January 2009 by the Ministry of theInterior.3 Constitutional Court Ruling No. U-I-284/94 dated 4 February 1999 and Ruling No. U-I-246/02 dated 3 April 2003.