Arabic version: محو سلوفينيا عام 1992 يحذّر أوروبا من «الهجرة العكسية»

According to The Guardian, the Slovenian government deleted 25,000 citizens in February 1992, turning them into illegal immigrants overnight in an action writer Miha Mazzini describes as a blueprint for bureaucratic state terror.

On 26 February 1992, Slovenia quietly removed 1.3% of its citizenry from official records. Those affected were permanent residents born elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, regardless of whether they regarded themselves as naturalised. They lost citizenship, residency rights, healthcare and pensions without prior notice or a right of appeal.

Mazzini wrote that the policy sought to remove a Balkan “fifth column” as Slovenia moved closer to Europe. His research for the book Erased recorded accounts of people whose legal existence abruptly vanished, including a mother told that her son did not exist after a border change left his birthplace across the new Croatian border.

For six years, many of those erased hid or worked illegally for subsistence wages, dependent on employers, landlords and private help. One man was taken to an asylum centre after police could not find him in the registry, then deported to Croatia despite having been born in Serbia. Croatia was at war with Serbia at the time.

Slovenia’s constitutional court ruled the erasure unconstitutional in 1998, easing the immediate threat. Mazzini said restoration of rights and compensation has remained difficult for some victims. A monument and park for the erased now stand in Ljubljana, while he argues that “remigration” rhetoric is spreading across Europe and beyond.