By: Mag Igor Omerza
Good grief, not again, some of my readers (and non‑readers) might think, because on 12 January 2026 my almost thirtieth book is coming out. Its title is “Janez Janša – Kaplar”. It is the sixth work in the series “Great Figures of Slovenian Independence and the UDBA”. I should add that I had already written about the UDBA and the great independence figure Janez Toplišek, codenamed “Potres”, in my book “From Belca to Velikovec, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb”, though at that time I had not yet labelled it as part of an “independence” series.”
It is ungrateful work to write about oneself. The French thinker Blaise Pascal wisely said: “Not even the most righteous man in the world may be a judge in his own case.” This applies even more to me, as I am certainly not the most righteous in the world, but I can still share a few facts and details about my new book.
This book, like my many other works on the secret political police (popularly known as the UDBA), is factual literature. I do not invent stories; I cling to the surviving documents like a drunk to a fence. And let me add: life writes tales that even the wildest imagination could not invent. That is why my books also belong to the genre of political thrillers, not fictional ones, but those based on real events.
In any case, my new book has 428 pages. It is richly illustrated. Here and there I wander into party meetings or into the judicial system of the Yugoslav People’s Army. The KOS (the colloquial name for the army’s secret political police) also has its place in the book. Most of the documents “appearing” in the book are new, though some have already been published in my previous works on the UDBA. I could not avoid this if I wanted to present a complete picture of the UDBA’s attitude toward Janša, because we come closest to the truth through the whole.
I included absolutely every secret document in which Janez Janša’s name appears, even those where he is mentioned only marginally. I did not want to make any selection. If the entire UDBA archive had survived, I would of course have had to make a careful choice.
Let me emphasise that the first secret document in which Janez Janša appears is dated April 1983, and the last one April 1990. The UDBA assigned him the code name “Kaplar”. Why such a surveillance codename? Probably because he dealt extensively with military issues, though in reality also with pacifism and with civilian service. More broadly, he was one of the most important “troublemakers” disturbing the peace of the undemocratic and collapsing socialist regime. The Yugoslav military leadership tried to imprison him twice; once (in the JBTZ trial), with the help of Slovenian communist politicians and their private secret political police (the UDBA), they succeeded.
Space does not allow me to describe the book in more detail, so let me add just one more thing. Let’s take a look.
Aco Vasiljević, the chief KOS interrogator in the JBTZ trial, said in “Duga” in February 1993: “I think that (Janša, during the KOS interrogations in detention in June 1988 on Metelkova, fn. I.O.) correctly concluded that the Slovenian State Security Service helped the army by informing it that the document had been stolen and that it might be in his possession, so that he could be eliminated from the political scene. Let us recall: at that time elections for the president of the youth organisation were taking place, and he was a candidate. Later, circumstances changed and he turned the trial into great political capital, creating a different image of himself, since together with Igor Omerza and Igor Bavčar he formed a group that we, in our Bolshevik jargon, called the bourgeois right in Slovenia. Among them, a nationalist orientation and a clear commitment to an independent Slovenia predominated…”