So much of your daily life – your job, your health, your home – hinges on the fact that your name is in a government database. Are you a legal citizen of your country, with everything that entails? You are, until an anonymous bureaucrat hits a key one night and strips it all away, turning you into an illegal immigrant. It happened in Slovenia in 1992.
“I took my son to register for secondary school. The clerk rifled through the papers, then stared at me as if refusing to see the boy standing right next to me. Finally, she said: ‘But you don’t have a son. He doesn’t exist.’” I can’t forget the look on the face of the woman who was telling me this story. It was a mixture of deep hurt and bewilderment, with a pause after every sentence, as if she were walking through a minefield. During the research for my book Erased, I compiled countless stories like this: stories I once would have thought impossible.
On 26 February 1992, the Slovenian government quietly deleted 1.3% of its citizenry overnight. The criterion was frighteningly simple: anyone born in another part of the former Yugoslavia who was a permanent resident of Slovenia (regardless of whether they considered themselves naturalised) suddenly lost their citizenship, their right to reside, their healthcare, their pension: everything. They were transformed into illegal immigrants overnight, without prior notification, and with no right to appeal. The goal was to cleanse Slovenia of a Balkan “fifth column” and pivot closer to Europe.
I have long felt this dark piece of Slovenian history to be an ugly stain on the conscience of my nation; but its spirit is spreading across Europe and beyond. The horrors of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean and the English Channel are regularly witnessed and documented, the victims dying at the very gates of “fortress Europe”. But even if you are already inside the fortress, even if you consider yourself fully naturalised, you are perhaps no longer safe. In an age of constant video surveillance, there is nothing fantastical about an official refusing to renew a permit, or unearthing a minor “offence” committed decades earlier, to strip away your citizenship.
The spectre of “remigration” is haunting Europe, and its shadow looms ever larger. What Slovenia did in 1992 has become a blueprint for a quiet, bureaucratic form of state terror.
The woman who told me about her son lived in a village equidistant between two towns. During her pregnancy, she had to choose between two maternity hospitals. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, the town she had picked was across the new border in Croatia, while her village remained in Slovenia. And so, on that fateful day in 1992, her son ceased to exist. His story had a happy ending: Slovenia is a very small country, and if you have a wide enough network, you’ll eventually find someone who knows someone. So the boy emerged from the ranks of the disappeared and was able to attend school. But for those without friends in high places, things rarely ended happily.
One man was rushing to work, speeding, when he was pulled over by the police. Unable to find him in the registry, they took him to an asylum centre. He had been born in Serbia, but Slovenia’s only border with the former Yugoslavia is with Croatia. So they deported him there instead. Croatia was at war with Serbia at the time, and the man was treated as a prisoner of war. He was lucky: had he been born in Croatia, he would have been conscripted and sent straight to the frontlines.
For six years, 1.3% of the population hid and survived however they could. They worked illegally for subsistence wages, at the mercy of bosses and landlords. One man locked himself in his flat, eating old canned food, refusing to open the door to anyone. It was a wise strategy. There were cases of the erased returning home to find their locks changed: someone had simply claimed and occupied their flat, realising the victim would have no recourse to call the police.
There were also stories of profound kindness: a citizen who officially contracted every disease imaginable because he kept lending his healthcare card to the erased; a waitress who walked out of her shift with a first aid kit to treat an injured, erased man who had just been thrown out of the hospital. Relying on the kindness of strangers, however, is a lottery I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
In 1998, the Slovenian constitutional court ruled the erasure unconstitutional, and the immediate threat subsided. But the long road to restoring rights and securing measly compensation for the victims turned into a gruelling odyssey that, for some, continues to this day.
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A monument has since been erected for the erased in Ljubljana, and a park named after them. But it is always easier to build a monument than to issue an apology, let alone settle dues. The UK has its own unresolved equivalent in the Windrush generation – and their monument is standing, too.
Many of the erased never doubted their status because they considered themselves Slovenians. Overnight, they were expected to deport themselves to countries they had no meaningful connection to. I was reminded of their fate when reading about the US administration’s “operation second look”, which entails ICE agents scavenging decades-old files for minor administrative discrepancies in the hope of stripping people of their citizenship.
As it so often does, Europe follows America’s lead. Gregory Bovino, the former US Border Patrol “commander-at-large”, was recently in Europe and treated like a rock star. At a rightwing gathering in Portugal he noted that he and the Austrian ethnonationalist Martin Sellner are “on the same sheet of music”. Perhaps the original Slovenian experiment in “remigration” was indeed exactly what it was claimed to be back then: a step closer to Europe, but a meaner and more sinister version of Europe.
