By: Dr Metod Berlec
The opposition Slovenian Democratic Party’s protest rally last Thursday at Congress Square in Ljubljana reminded me of the protest rally on June 21st, 1988, at the same location, and the protest rally on March 28th, 1994, at Republic Square in Ljubljana.
The first was organised by the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights (Bavčar Committee) in support of the jailed JBTZ quartet (Janša, Borštner, Zavrl, and Tasič), while the second was organised by representatives of the originally democratic forces under the leadership of the then Janša’s SDSS. I attended the first protest as a high school student and the second as a university student. Both protests were filled with emotions and people’s outrage at the actions of the ruling nomenclature. Especially the first one was extraordinary for me because at that time – during the era of single-party rule and socialist Yugoslavia – more than thirty thousand people gathered (estimates range up to 50,000). The Congress Square was packed, as was the Zvezda Park. It was evident that people had had enough of the totalitarian communist regime, enough injustices, enough of the federal army, with the help of the Slovenian Security and Intelligence Service and with the assistance of the Slovenian political leadership under the leadership of party leader Milan Kučan, arresting Slovenian boys. People had had enough of socialism, which led us into poverty and misery. Enough of the SFRY…
Similarly, but somewhat differently, it was about six years later at Republic Square, in front of the building of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia. They were removing the hero of the Slovenian spring and the war for Slovenia, Janez Janša, as the Minister of Defence, and we protested vehemently against it. We were aware (as Janša wrote in the supplemented Trenches – The Path of the Slovenian State 1991-1994 in 2014 and in the recently published book 1994 – The Depala vas Conspiracy) that the political reckoning after Depala vas meant only the continuation of the process that began in the spring of 1992 with the fall of the DEMOS government, that is, the soft restoration of the regime. “At the same time, it laid the groundwork for a systematic return to the starting point of the Kučan period before 1990, along with the vocabulary and totalitarian symbolism of that time. In terms of personnel, this phase ended with the rehabilitation of the UDBA through the state decoration of Tomaž Ertl and the appointment of Fišer and Masleša to the top of the judiciary during the Pahor government. Symbolically, this was marked by the Yugoslav Communist rally in the Ljubljana Stožice in April 2013, where the Slovenian and European flags and both anthems were missing, which did not bother the entire state leadership.” The return to the totalitarian past is more than clearly continuing under the current leftist Golob government, which abolished the Museum of Slovenian Independence and buried the former head of the Slovenian UDBA, Janez Zemljarič, with state honours. We will not even mention the participation and speech of Minister of Culture Asta Vrečko at last year’s 86th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Slovenia in Čebine.
PEOPLE ARE DISAPPOINTED WITH THE RULING COALITION, WHICH INCREASINGLY OPERATES UNDER CLIENTELISM, CORRUPTION, AND THEFT.
This recent mass protest gathering at Congress Square in Ljubljana (the adjacent Zvezda Park was also full, meaning there were about 20,000 people at the protest) was organised under the slogan “Enough!” and similar to the two (protests) mentioned earlier, people, full of dissatisfaction with the existing authority and disappointed with the political establishment, which is leading today’s Slovenia in entirely the wrong direction, peacefully demanded that this government resign. People are disappointed with the ruling coalition, which increasingly operates under clientelism, corruption, and theft; with a government that, under the leadership of the egocentric and arrogant Robert Golob, does not work in the interest of the Slovenian people, the Slovenian population, but for the interests of immigrants from the south, in the interests of illegal migrants from the Middle East and Africa. For the latter, without consent (or rather, despite vehement opposition) of the local population in the area of the former border crossings Obrežje and Središče ob Dravi, it intends to establish asylum centres. Instead of sending the Slovenian Army to our southern border and stopping this illegal migrant flow, the government calmly allows it or even shamelessly encourages it with its foolish actions (such as removing the protective fence on the border). At the same time, Golob’s government is pursuing a pro-Arab policy on the international stage. Together with some left-wing European governments, it calls on the European Union to recognise Palestine. In doing so, as stated by Lior Hajat, a representative of the Israeli Foreign Ministry on the X network, it advocates for the rewarding of terrorism. In doing so, it sends Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organisations the wrong signals, indicating that “murderous terrorist attacks” on Israel will be rewarded with political gestures…
P.S.: On behalf of the Demokracija Magazine editorial team, I wish you blessed and peaceful Easter holidays!