(The) Erasure – Mass Human Rights Violation and Denial of Responsibility: The Case of Independent Slovenia

The case of the erased residents of Slovenia – when approximately 18,000 people who were mostly of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ethnicity, were erased from the permanent residence registry of the Republic of Slovenia – represents one of the most severe cases of administrative ethnic/racial discrimination and human rights violations in the post-communist East and Central Europe outside the conflict area. The erasure caused “civil death” of the people who were affected by the measure, depriving them of civil, political, social, and economic rights. In 2007, 4 years after the 2003 Constitutional Court decision, declaring the 1992 erasure an unconstitutional act of the state and requiring the legislator to adopt measures to reinstate the statuses of the erased people, the problem remains unsolved and unaddressed both systemically and individually, and the situation of erasure persists. This article presents the case and analyses of the framework that made the erasure possible in terms of the preparation of the majority of Slovenes to accept and even support the violations and politicians to renounce their political responsibility to those who have lost the right to have rights. This article is based on the insights of the research project Contemporary Citizenship: Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion (2000–2003) led by Vlasta Jalušič. The analysis of the case of erased was published in Jasminka Dedić, Vlasta Jalušič, and Jelka Zorn (eds.), The Erased: Organized Innocence and the Politics of Exclusion, translated from Slovenian by Olga Vuković and Marjana Karer (Ljubljana: Peace Institute, 2003), at . The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewer for the extensive and most helpful comments.

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Y chromosome STR polymorphisms in a Serbian population sample

Eight Y chromosome short tandem repeat (STR) polymorphisms (DYS19, DYS385, DYS389I, DYS389II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393) were analyzed in the sample of 114 unrelated males living in Serbia. A general STR allelic frequency pattern in Serbians corresponds to other European populations with the exception of loci DYS19, DYS389II and DYS385. Out of ninety identified haplotypes, 74 (64.91%) appeared in single copies. The most frequent haplotypes (DYS19-DYS385-DYS389I-DYS389II-DYS390-DYS391-DYS392-DYS393) 16-14/15-13-31-24-11-11-13 and 15-15/19-12-28-23-10-12-12 were found in four copies (3.51%). Total haplotype diversity was 0.9947+/-0.0021.     

A painful break or agony without end? The stateness problem and its influence on democratization in Croatia and Serbia

That matters of the state must always be resolved before democratization seems to be a fairly common position in the scholarly literature. There are, however, also scholars that stress the importance of an alternative perspective: ‘no democracy, no state’. This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of this very important issue, advocating the need for a more nuanced argument about the relationship between the state and democracy. To do so, Croatia and Serbia serve as empirical examples as their different outcomes regarding the consolidation of democracy are explained as due to their (un)resolved stateness problem. The article uses process tracing to explain these outcomes and attempts to craft a minimally sufficient explanation of the outcomes by developing causal mechanisms.