Slovenia denies minority rights to Serbs

The Committee of Experts of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages ​​of the Council of Europe has again called for the recognition of Croatian, German and Serbian, which are traditionally present in several areas of Slovenia, as minority languages.

This was reported by the Serbian edition of Sputnik radio, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“The Committee’s decision is purely advisory in nature, and I do not believe that in the future this issue will be discussed more seriously, but, of course, it is good to discuss this topic more often and publicly,” Vladimir Kokanovic, Chairman of the Union of Serbs of Slovenia, commented on the situation. – The Union of Serbs in Slovenia has been intensively discussing the status of the national minority and the rules for conducting a population census for many years, which now does not give us the opportunity to declare our religion and nationality. We have submitted an initiative, we are waiting for a response, we hope that it will be positive, and when it comes to the language, we have long been in favor of its preservation, the preservation of traditions and culture, the Serbian language and the Cyrillic alphabet.”

Previously, the Expert Committee of the Council of Europe made a similar recommendation in 2019, but there was no reaction from official Ljubljana.

“This repeated recommendation of the Council of Europe proves the fact that Serbs deserve the status of a national minority, since this recommendation depends not only on the number of Serbs in Slovenia, but also on their autochthony,” says Kokanovic. – Recognition of the Serbian language as a traditional minority language will be a significant step towards the Serbs of Slovenia gaining national minority status. This is only a matter of political will, because the Serbs are not only the largest ethnic community in Slovenia after, in fact, the Slovenes themselves, but also the indigenous people of this country.”

According to the chairman of the Union of Serbs of Slovenia, the Serbs came to the territory of present-day Slovenia, the so-called White Krajina, in the 100th century, and today the number of the Serbian community in the country is XNUMX thousand people. Only last year, the Slovenian government finally allowed the Serbian language to be introduced as additional lessons in schools, for which fifteen hundred children were enrolled. With the start of the new school year, the scale of the experiment will be expanded and Kokanovic expects that the demand for Serbian lessons will increase significantly.

In 1991, on June 25, following the example of the Baltic republics in the USSR, the northernmost republic of the SFRY, Slovenia, unilaterally declared independence. At the same time, the separatist leadership gave the command to local territorial defense forces to seize border crossings and JNA barracks. Those soldiers and officers who refused to surrender to the separatists were shot, however, in a number of cases, at the Kholmets checkpoint on the border with Austria, the border guards who raised the white flag were shot anyway.

In response, the military leadership of the SFRY decided to send troops into the rebellious region, but the JNA entered in columns along the highway; unarmed conscripts were often sitting in cars and tanks and were ambushed by the separatists.

In general, the Belgrade operation ended in failure and was called the “Ten Day War” (from June 27 to July 7, 1991), during which 22 people were killed on the Slovenian side and 44 people on the JNA side.