‘Some Balkan ‘Citizens’ Count for Less Than Zero’

Q&A with Igor Stiks, writer and academic currently researching the Balkans, citizenship and EU membership at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

This year’s Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence programme topic is justice - how does citizenship determine access to justice?

I understand citizenship generally as being a major cohesive tool of any political entity. It binds together citizens and defines not only their relationship with the state, involving rights and duties, but also their identity and well-being. Due to profound changes over the last two decades in the Balkans, citizenship as such, its forms and content, changed significantly, radically re-defining the role of citizens, their rights and their treatment by the new states and new regimes. Having citizenship is a prerequisite for all sorts of rights, involving a wide range of political and social rights such as, to name just few, (un)employment benefits, health care and property rights. If having citizenship puts you on an equal footing with other citizens at the ‘ground zero’ of every community, not having one means being literally ‘less then zero’ on every account, including justice and access to it.

Given recent conflicts in the Balkans, there were large refugee populations who are unable to return to their original home state.  What does this mean in practice for refugees and their families?

During the conflicts in the 1990s and in their aftermath, refugees were often treated as hostages of the nationalistic policies of Franjo Tudjman’s and Slobodan Milosevic’s regimes, regardless of having (Croat refugees in Croatia) or not having (Serb refugees in Serbia in the 1990s) access to citizenship in these countries. Serbian refugees from Croatia faced obstacles in acquiring certificates of Croatian citizenship up until 2000. Very often refugees were redirected into regions where they were supposed to change the ethnic make-up, such as in the former Serb-majority Krajina region in Croatia or Kosovo and Vojvodina. In the 1990s, much of the refugee population was effectively stateless.

While this began to change after 2000, the return of refugees was only partially successful. Many either stayed in other countries in the region or left for the US, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands or Norway. The major question when it comes to justice for this population is what rights they had or have in their host country and what rights can they enjoy in their old, home country?

Besides refugees fleeing war and ethnic cleansing, what other groups of people may be denied or are without citizenship of Balkan states?

The situation is especially difficult for the Roma population, in particular with Roma refugees from Kosovo. For instance, with Montenegro becoming independent, this group of former citizens of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and of Serbia, suddenly found themselves to be essentially stateless. With their old FRY documents invalidated, without resources to get either new Kosovan or Serbian documents and, as refugees, with no prospect of acquiring Montenegrin citizenship they are left in a limbo. The situation of many Roma who went to the West is also complex; often having no documents and giving birth to children abroad, they face deportation threats in Italy and Germany.

When it comes to stripping people of citizenship, the most well-known case comes not from the states engaged in the 1990s conflict but from successful EU-member Slovenia. It is the famous, or infamous, case of the ‘erased’ (izbrisani). In 1992, some 25,000 people were ‘erased’ from civic registries for failing to fulfil the conditions to acquire new Slovenian citizenship. They literally went from being citizens to being made illegal aliens overnight. Many left, many lost jobs and some died without access to health care. The European Court of Human Rights condemned Slovenia recently, but there are still a couple of thousand of the “erased” whose status is yet to be settled 20 years after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

How was the transition of ownership from former communist Yugoslavia to current, capitalist states handled?

Citizenship, obviously, is not only about having the status but also about the rights that come with it. Social rights, as noted in 1949 by T. H. Marshall, are, besides civic and political rights, an extremely important part of the citizenship package. While the attention has been primarily on human rights abuses, the deprivation of basic social rights of many citizens of post-Yugoslav states remained in the shadow of the so-called ‘transition’ to ‘democracy and the free market’. In the former Yugoslavia this journey was realised as a brutal transition, facilitated by conflict, from social ownership to, basically, savage and predatory capitalism.

Yugoslavia’s particular brand of social ownership was, more or less, a functioning, self-managing system that was far from perfect but did, however, secure a huge range of social rights. The predators were new elites, legitimised through minimal democratic procedures that were linked, in many cases, to business interests and even criminal networks. If you add this element to societies devastated by wars, the question of justice becomes obviously highly complex. Basically, someone was getting rich while the others were making wars. One is tempted to think that people were sent to make wars in order to facilitate the huge robbery of social wealth that happened and, with the remnants of it, is still happening across the former Yugoslavia. It is only recently that we hear voices asking for social justice as well.

Given the economic reforms and the impact of regional conflicts – are citizens also suffering in terms of access to education, welfare, pensions, employment and housing?

If you are engaged in a huge robbery, you’ll do everything to prevent justice functioning properly. In spite of all the reforms, we can still see problems in establishing a fully independent judiciary across the region. There are some encouraging signs, however, when it comes to dealing with war crimes and corruption. On the terrain of social justice, things do not improve considerably. If you add to this the fact that the whole region, as impoverished as it is, is part of global capitalist economy, you can expect that the crisis at the centre will hit hard in the periphery. What happens then with justice? Could we expect justice to really function without social justice? This is a question that is, obviously, not exclusively reserved for the Balkans but for Western societies as well.

How has prospective EU membership affected the rights of citizens and stateless people? Good and bad consequences?

It is not so easy to determine the EU’s role univocally here. In come cases, such as Croatia, we saw citizenship becoming more inclusive during the process of EU accession. In Slovenia, an EU member since 2004, the case of the ‘erased’ is not yet fully resolved. The visa liberalisation process brought many unwanted consequences as well. I mentioned earlier the case of the stateless Roma in Montenegro, whose situation deteriorated due to strict conditions of visa liberalisation. Kosovo residents with Serbian passports were left out of the visa liberalisation terms and there is no clear prospect in a near future for Kosovan citizens to be able to travel without visas. This makes the sense of isolation and despair even stronger. It also encourages people to search for alternative routes, not always legitimate or legal, to acquire visa-free passports.

What is the current state of legislation and societal attitudes to gender, disability and sexual orientation equality in Balkan states – giving note to the recent anti-gay riots in Belgrade?  What impact on human rights overall, if these minorities denied freedom and access to justice?

We are still reconciling the consequences of discrimination against ethnic minorities, and doing so with much difficulty. You can imagine that in the atmosphere of conservative nationalism that’s dominated the region since 1990, societal attitudes towards gender or sexual orientation do not change all that easily. When it comes to gender equality we saw a huge deterioration in comparison to the socialist regime. Not that the picture was ideal then, but the social position of women when it came to employment, equality or maternity rights was much better.

When it comes to gay rights, we have witnessed the breaking of a taboo and a much-improved situation, but that doesn’t mean that the violent, homophobic reaction to the Gay Pride march seen in Belgrade won’t happen again. The attitude towards gender or sexual minorities is very telling about the general atmosphere in the society under scrutiny. Again, without progress in these areas, you can’t expect that these societies will move forward and grant their citizens equal access to justice for all.

In your opinion, what elements related to human rights and justice in the Balkans are under-reported in the regional and international media?

Doubtless, issues related to social justice. You have an impoverished and indebted population whose prospects in terms of education, employment and social care become more remote and slimmer by the day. But you rarely hear about these people, about the strikes, about their everyday lives, the struggles to make ends meet and the horrible working conditions. Social issues, not only identity politics, sparked the current changes in the Middle East and social issues, or the attitudes towards them, will, in my opinion, be crucial for the future of this region as well.

Igor Stiks is the author of two highly-acclaimed novels: Dvorac u Romagni, (A Castle in Romagna) and Elijahova stolica (Elijah's Chair). He is also a post-doctoral research fellow with the CITSEE (Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the Former Yugoslavia) faculty at the University of Edinburgh.

Q&A compiled by Anita Rice, editor of the 2011 Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence programme, established by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.