Slovenia - Country of the Shadows

Communists are still the puppet masters in this small country

(Von Karl Peter Schwartz - Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung“, December 12th, 2010)

Ljubljana – The story started years ago but is still ongoing. In June 2007, Anton Rop, Prime Minister of the Slovenian left-wing government from 2002 to 2004 brought an accusation against his conservative successor Janez Janša. According to Rop, Janša and the Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader planned and organized a series of incidents along the Slovenian-Croatian border close to the city of Piran, in order to manipulate the outcome of the 2004 elections in favor of the conservative party. This suspicion arose from telephone surveillance ordered by the Slovenian Secret Service (Sova). The parliamentary board of inquiry however, could not find any proof for the accusation. Janša sued Rop for libel and the affair dominated the Slovenian media for months.

One year later, during the Slovenian EU Presidency in 2008, the next bomb exploded when Finnish TV broadcasted a documentary about bribery of the Finnish defense company Patria. While Janša’s name was not explicitly mentioned, when speaking about the alleged Slovenian recipient, the letter “J” appeared on the screen. The director of the Slovenian anti-corruption department at that time, Drago Kos, noted: “You can’t expect me to tell you names of people who are on the top”. Again, the “J” was dsiplayed. Kos, claimed Janša, fooled the attorneys in Helsinki on purpose: “He lied. There’s a twenty page transcript of his conversations with Finnish investigators that is brimming over with lies”. From Finland, rumors made their way back into the Slovenian election campaign. Again, Janša sued for libel. For weeks it was the headline story. Voters wouldn’t have believed the accusations, says Janša, but “there was no space left to talk about the government’s work, to discuss programs and the next reforms.” Janša’s conservative party were outperformed by the Social Democrats and have remained in opposition ever since. Rop, who in the meantime had become a high-paid vice-president of the European Investment Bank, withdrew his 2004 accusations against Janša in order to avoid a final judgment. Maybe, he admitted, he was just misinformed. The media however, did not pay much attention to the confession.

With elections coming up in 2012, the Patria affair has reappeared in the spotlight yet again. For two years, the Slovenian attorneys delayed the laying of corruption charges - no one wanted to get their fingers burned by this political affair. Then however, one attorney had the courage to intervene (who coincidentally, is the wife of the agent of the communist secret service who arrested Janša on May 29th 1988 in his apartment in Ljubljana). Janša, at that time working as a freelance journalist, had published in the newspaper Medina an article about the plans of the Yugoslavian government in Belgrade to violently oppress the Slovenian movement for Pluralism and Independence. The legal proceedings against Janša and his three co-accused, held in a military court in accordance with the Slovenian communist leaders’ wishes, equaled a reckoning with the anti-communist resistance. The Slovenian secret service took part in this conspiracy - its director at the time, Tomaž Ertl, was recently decorated by Slovenian President Danilo Türk.” It was a conspiracy in which Slovenian Communists took part”, says Janša. “It is a myth that they followed the State’s interests at that time”. Janša spent two months in solitary confinement and was condemned to spend one and a half years in prison. He was discharged after six months.

This episode helped breed a mass movement for democracy and sovereignty that ended the communist’s political monopoly and led to the independence of Slovenia. Real change however, did not take hold in this small country, now labeled “liberal” and “social democratic”; the former communists longed to regain power. “They are more clever than the former communists in Germany”, says Janša, “they are not fighting for Utopia, but use instead all instruments that are offered to them by the market economy and modern media to stay in power and to embellish the past - not because of ideological reasons, but to hide personal and familial involvement” - they fear to be brought to court due to their illegal enrichment activities. Janša: “The second important reason why they want to stay in power is so that crimes that happened after the war will not be avenged. One mass grave after another has been discovered in Slovenia, and yet no single case ever brought to trial”.

When Janša came back home from prison, his father told him a secret he had kept for decades. As a seventeen year old he had to serve in the anti-communist military movement but deserted to help his parents at their farm. For this, he was brought to the concentration camp Dachau, but then sent back. At the end of the war, he fled the partisans across the Alps to Kärnten, Austria, but was caught by the British army who extradited him along with thousands of other Slovenes. He and three others were the lucky ones to survive a mass execution in Kočevje. The village where Janša grew up was one of Slovenia’s poorest and most disadvantaged areas, without neither cars nor television. Some of the initiators of the communist crimes are still alive, but have never been charged by what are politically controlled courts. The ruling against Mitja Ribicic, as former chief of the secret service responsible for the execution of 243 prisoners, was prevented due to insufficient criminal suspicion.

In the meantime, in the “Patria-Affair” a simple rumor is sufficient for accusing the leader of the opposition. In 1994 a law was created making it possible to unseat a judge that has violated human rights. It has not been adopted. Against the resistance of the opposition, independent media and the intellectual elite of the country, the left-wing majority in parliament ensured that Branko Masleša became the chairman of the High Court. Masleša was the last judge in Communist Slovenia that signed a death sentence.

Slovenia is a small country, numbering a mere two million inhabitants. People know each other; those who changed from convinced communists into smart entrepreneurs over night, and the strings connecting the state’s apparatus to private companies and to the media. In Drago Jančar’s exhibition “The Dark Side of the Moon” the writer contrasted the 1990s official, whitewashed picture of Slovenia with the side of Slovenia that committed human right violations and political crimes. Ten years later, the shadow has become longer and longer.” Soon it will just be the way it used to be”, states Janez Janša.