Heather McRobie and Anes Makul: Yugoslavs in the twenty-first century: ‘erased’ people
[Heather McRobie is studying human rights in South East Europe at the University of Sarajevo, and previously worked at the Amman Center for Human Rights Studies in Jordan.
Anes Makul is a Bosnian journalist and researcher working on nationalism. He has worked for over two years as a journalist on Bosnian daily newspapers, recently spending a year researching Bosnia's economic crisis.]
Earlier this month, the Slovenian Parliament adopted a Declaration on Yugoslav communities, a document which presents a general attitude of Slovenia's legislative body towards ethnic groups from the former Yugoslavia who live in Slovenia. This marks a step forward in respecting international human rights standards, as since 1991 thousands of so called “erased” people living in Slovenia who had their origins in the former Yugoslav republics remained unrecognized in Slovenian citizenship laws. In the language of the post-Yugoslav, ethnically-based rubrics of the region, the “erased” are ethnic Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Kosovan Albanians and Roma. These people had their origins in former Yugoslav republics, but do not qualify or identify as ‘Slovenian’, having lost their official identity in their country of residence with Slovenia’s independence. While a handful of the “erased” have since managed to acquire Slovenian citizenship, many more left Slovenia with their official identity there still in limbo, and a significant number continue to reside there without citizens’ rights, despite the binding decision made by the European Court of Human Rights in 2010 which urges Slovenia to give permanent residence to the erased people.
Beyond the still-unresolved case of the “erased” in Slovenia, there is another group of erased people on the territory of former Yugoslavia – the Yugoslavs themselves. At the beginning of the 1960s the Yugoslav state authorities allowed citizens of the federation to declare themselves ‘Yugoslav’. Most of the people who declared themselves Yugoslavs were children from mixed marriages, and the permission of the state so to do was a welcome change for them, as they felt it was the most appropriate way to express their national identity in a multi-ethnic reality. When Yugoslavia collapsed, around 5 % of the state’s citizens called themselves Yugoslavs. But after the protracted and painful collapse of the state, Yugoslav identity became undesirable for new political leaders and many former Yugoslavs changed their national identities into ethnically-based national identities: under this schema, ‘Yugoslav’ was a false identity from which the new nations were liberating themselves. But such an attitude ignored an inconvenient truth: even today, there are a number of people who claim to be members of the Yugoslav nation, and they want to be officially recognized as Yugoslavs. Most of them are organized in the NGO “Our Yugoslavia” and on several occasions they have urged authorities in Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Serbia for official recognition as Yugoslavs. The only success they achieved in Croatia and Serbia is the registration of the organization, while the Bosnian branch of the organization is not recognized yet because the Ministry of Justice of Bosnia and Herzegovina refuses to register them while Our Yugoslavia has the name of the former state in the title. The last letter from the Ministry is just a few weeks old....
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Anes Makul is a Bosnian journalist and researcher working on nationalism. He has worked for over two years as a journalist on Bosnian daily newspapers, recently spending a year researching Bosnia's economic crisis.]
Earlier this month, the Slovenian Parliament adopted a Declaration on Yugoslav communities, a document which presents a general attitude of Slovenia's legislative body towards ethnic groups from the former Yugoslavia who live in Slovenia. This marks a step forward in respecting international human rights standards, as since 1991 thousands of so called “erased” people living in Slovenia who had their origins in the former Yugoslav republics remained unrecognized in Slovenian citizenship laws. In the language of the post-Yugoslav, ethnically-based rubrics of the region, the “erased” are ethnic Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Kosovan Albanians and Roma. These people had their origins in former Yugoslav republics, but do not qualify or identify as ‘Slovenian’, having lost their official identity in their country of residence with Slovenia’s independence. While a handful of the “erased” have since managed to acquire Slovenian citizenship, many more left Slovenia with their official identity there still in limbo, and a significant number continue to reside there without citizens’ rights, despite the binding decision made by the European Court of Human Rights in 2010 which urges Slovenia to give permanent residence to the erased people.
Beyond the still-unresolved case of the “erased” in Slovenia, there is another group of erased people on the territory of former Yugoslavia – the Yugoslavs themselves. At the beginning of the 1960s the Yugoslav state authorities allowed citizens of the federation to declare themselves ‘Yugoslav’. Most of the people who declared themselves Yugoslavs were children from mixed marriages, and the permission of the state so to do was a welcome change for them, as they felt it was the most appropriate way to express their national identity in a multi-ethnic reality. When Yugoslavia collapsed, around 5 % of the state’s citizens called themselves Yugoslavs. But after the protracted and painful collapse of the state, Yugoslav identity became undesirable for new political leaders and many former Yugoslavs changed their national identities into ethnically-based national identities: under this schema, ‘Yugoslav’ was a false identity from which the new nations were liberating themselves. But such an attitude ignored an inconvenient truth: even today, there are a number of people who claim to be members of the Yugoslav nation, and they want to be officially recognized as Yugoslavs. Most of them are organized in the NGO “Our Yugoslavia” and on several occasions they have urged authorities in Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Serbia for official recognition as Yugoslavs. The only success they achieved in Croatia and Serbia is the registration of the organization, while the Bosnian branch of the organization is not recognized yet because the Ministry of Justice of Bosnia and Herzegovina refuses to register them while Our Yugoslavia has the name of the former state in the title. The last letter from the Ministry is just a few weeks old....