Speech by Prime Minister Janez Janša at the Sovereignty Day ceremony
SLOVENIA, October 25 - (Check against delivery)
Today Is a New Day
A few minutes after midnight on 26 October 1991, the ship carrying the last group of the defeated Yugoslav army left Slovenian territorial waters. When the first rays of autumn sunshine appeared that morning and illuminated the old town centre of Koper, Slovenia was free and sovereign. The song of the seagulls woke the town as it had every day before, but this time the waves were breaking against a free Slovenian coast. On that crisp, late-autumn day, the air itself smelled of freedom.
Our military victory over what was formally one of the strongest armies in Europe at the time opened the door to international recognition and secured our right to decide our own future. Slovenia became safe. And security is a prerequisite for stability and economic prosperity.
We dreamed of becoming another Switzerland. We began to make great strides. A new confidence, the experience of our people, technical expertise, hard work, resourcefulness and the entrepreneurial spirit of Slovenians became the foundations of a new era of development. Step by step, we stabilised the economy, established market institutions, opened our doors to foreign competition, outperformed it and turned towards European markets. Independent Slovenia became a member of the UN, the OSCE, the European Union, the European Monetary Union, NATO, the OECD and the Union for the Mediterranean. It was the first of the new EU member states to take the helm of the Union.
There were some mistakes along the way. But the country born of the nation’s courageous decision to choose freedom and independence had proven that it was not only standing but would withstand. As Primož Trubar said, it is important to stand and withstand.
At times, we seem insufficiently aware of what we achieved in the first half of the period since independence. In those 17 years, we transformed ourselves from a former socialist Yugoslav republic into a country that, by 2008, was close to the European average for development and, through its presidency of the Council of the EU, stood at the epicentre of decision-making about the future of the free world. This was no gift from history, but the result of the courage of a generation that secured the country’s independence and believed Slovenia was capable of more.
At the end of 2008, Slovenia’s gross domestic product per capita, measured in terms of purchasing power, had reached 91 per cent of the European Union average. In 1992, it stood at 59 per cent. Had we continued at the same pace, we would now be among the EU’s five most developed countries and genuinely close to Switzerland’s standard. But we did not. What followed were years of missed opportunities, years spent making and correcting major mistakes, and today we are where we were in 2008: just under 91 per cent of the EU average.
The global financial crisis affected the whole of Europe, but Slovenia endured the longest recession. Instead of continuing to build a society in which merit determines success, we slid back towards a system of privilege, networks of vested interests, selective justice, the abuse of the judiciary for political battles and open violations of the constitutional order. Added to this was a politics of exclusion, which reached its culmination in 2022 with public calls to purge those who thought differently. Instead of bringing together the best people of different political convictions around common goals after independence and major development successes, one political camp treated half of society as something to be excluded rather than as part of the nation whose knowledge and creativity we need.
And so, despite our people’s exceptional abilities and all the advantages offered by an open European economy, other post-communist countries that had been far behind us just a decade earlier caught up with and overtook us in the second half. Only the shock of these comparisons recently enabled most people to begin to understand, at least partly, where a politics of exclusion and the running of a country in defiance of the values on which it was founded can lead.
There can be no doubt that Slovenia’s independence – and its concrete outcome, the Slovenian state – is founded on the values of Slovenian independence. It is also the culmination of the Slovenian nation’s long, epochal struggle for its language, identity and survival. Our long history includes profoundly tragic periods that devastated, divided and diminished us. But it also contains magnificent achievements that shaped us, preserved us and helped us grow. Until 1991, however, none of them culminated in the final act of establishing an independent state. We succeeded only during the new democratic spring of those European nations that had spent the years after the Second World War imprisoned under one-party dictatorships. In that final struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms, freedom of thought and speech, and the nation’s right to self-determination, the core values of the sovereign Slovenian nation also took shape. They were succinctly set out in the May Declaration of 1989: the Slovenians’ right to a free life and dignity, government by elected representatives, and economic development in a sovereign state of the Slovenian nation.
This core set of values received full democratic legitimacy in the plebiscite of December 1990. All of us for whom an independent Slovenia was a deeply held choice voted for it. And for its core values. Ever since, we have celebrated its birthday each year and commemorated important anniversaries such as today’s.
Most of us who gathered here in Koper in October 1991 to celebrate sincerely the withdrawal of the last member of the aggressor’s army and our final liberation believed that we were witnessing a lasting change. One that would remain firm and irreversible for as far into the foreseeable future as we could see. We believed that it would no longer be threatened, at least from within, and that the sentences written in the constitutional documents when Slovenia declared independence, condemning the former undemocratic regime and its violations of human rights, would be self-evident and clear to everyone. That the old Yugoslav and communist symbols and flags we had taken down from their poles would no longer haunt Slovenian public life, but would end up in museums of totalitarianism.
We were very wrong. We forgot that an independent Slovenia had never been the deeply held choice of some people. We did not know, and it only emerged in later years, what some had actually done to prevent an independent Slovenia from ever coming into being.
We could never have imagined that we would live to see the government of a state, the Slovenian state, abolish the Museum of Slovenian Independence. Nothing of the kind had ever happened anywhere before. We could not have imagined that some members of the National Assembly would mourn the former totalitarian state. Nor could we have imagined that a monument to some of those who had sailed out of Koper harbour 35 years ago as part of the defeated, unruly Yugoslav army would be erected in the Slovenian capital sooner than a fitting monument to Slovenian independence. We could not have imagined that the state would pay compensation even to people who had not wanted Slovenian citizenship and later declared themselves erased. We could not have imagined that someone would be able to prevent and obstruct, for 35 years and by every means available, the issuing of death certificates for 70,000 of our compatriots of all convictions, killed during and after the Second World War. 70,000 compatriots who were actually erased. Nor could we have imagined that we would have to spend more money each month on an illegal migrant who is not a refugee fleeing a country at war than most pensioners receive in payment for their years of work. We could not have imagined that, even after 35 years of an independent Slovenia – not the veterans themselves –but the descendants of veterans of a war fought in the middle of the last century would receive a larger allowance than the veterans of the Slovenian War of Independence, who are genuinely responsible for our standing on free Slovenian soil today. We could never have imagined it, yet all this has happened, and much work remains to be done.
Those for whom an independent Slovenia was not a deeply held choice already knew back then that are were two ways to subjugate a nation. The first is physical subjugation. One-party dictatorship, repression and violence. After 45 years, the Slovenian Spring wrested this option from their grasp.
The second is spiritual and cultural subjugation. The precondition for this is the erosion of the values that lie at the heart of a nation or community. It is the erosion of the core values that, in our case, are embodied in Slovenian independence. These are the individual’s right to life and dignity, government by elected representatives, and life in a sovereign state of the Slovenian nation. Ninety per cent of us voted for this core set of values. Yet those for whom an independent and democratic Slovenia was never a deeply held choice did not give up. They set about eroding these values. By every means at their disposal. Through monopolies in education, the media and cultural institutions. By funding nostalgia for Yugoslavia. By ridiculing the values of Slovenian independence. By belittling the achievements of the generation that secured it. This went as far as a remark by the country’s president, who would never have held that office without independence. He is better known for saying that Huda Jama was a second-rate issue. But a decade and a half ago, the same president also called for direct repression against those involved in securing independence, saying that all that independence rubbish had to be dealt with once and for all. For him, independence was rubbish. To call the greatest achievement in a nation’s history rubbish is to strike directly at that nation’s self-confidence. It is an extremely arrogant attempt to persuade people that they should be ashamed of their greatest achievements. The same category today includes claims that, for supposed historical reasons, the symbols of the former totalitarian state are more valuable than those of independent Slovenia.
The victorious units of the Slovenian Territorial Defence and Slovenian police wore Slovenian cockades and insignia of the independent Slovenian state on their caps and uniforms. Units of the defeated Yugoslav People’s Army and the federal police wore the red star and the insignia of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on their caps and uniforms. There is no room for doubt about the facts of 1991 and Slovenian independence, or about their interpretation.
Nor, after the discovery of hundreds of mass killing sites on Slovenian soil dating from the period after the Second World War, can there be any historical doubt about whether certain symbols of that era are appropriate or about the values they actually represent. Yet, despite the facts, opinions in Slovenia remain deeply divided not only over the symbols of that time but also over the facts themselves. All those who sincerely and voluntarily fought the occupiers on Slovenian soil during the Second World War, particularly in the Primorska region, deserve respect and recognition – as does anyone in our history who has resisted the suppression of human rights and the rights of the Slovenian nation. Yet we all know that they did so not because of the red star, but out of love for their homeland. The red star was an ideological symbol of communism, imported from Stalin’s Soviet Union. It has no connection with anything Slovenian, past or present. It was imposed on them. It was then imposed, as something natural and progressive, on all of us who lived under the totalitarian regime in the SFRY and wore it on our caps while doing military service in the Yugoslav People's Army or taking part in exercises with the old Territorial Defence. We did so without thinking that we were wearing the same symbol of international socialism as the armies and police forces of the Soviet bloc. We officially broke with this in June 1991, when we replaced the old symbols with Slovenian ones and, in Republic Square, raised the Slovenian tricolour bearing the national coat of arms in place of the Yugoslav flag with its star. Since then, everything has been clear.
Those who now try to confuse facts and historical periods, even at ceremonies marking Slovenian independence, do so precisely because an independent Slovenia was not – and still is not – a deeply held choice for them. They persistently demonstrate this by attending events and protests carrying mainly Yugoslav, communist and Palestinian flags rather than Slovenian ones.
For a week now, we have watched violent protests, looting and arson in numerous cities across Western Europe. The flags flying at these protests are predominantly anarchist, communist and Palestinian. On the walls of looted and burnt-out shops in Paris, antisemitic slogans, the hammer and sickle, red stars and slogans of terrorist organisations have all been painted side by side.
These scenes warn us not to be naïve. Never again. This requires not only preventive measures and a different immigration policy, but also a clear understanding of which symbols and slogans lead to violence of the kind we believed, in 1991, we would never again see on the streets of our own cities or those of other European cities. Sadly, the age-old lesson of history has been confirmed: evil that goes uncondemned and unpunished always returns. Because the evil responsible for killings throughout the former state after the Second World War was never condemned, Srebrenica happened. It was carried out by the top students of the military academy of the Yugoslav People’s Army, whose doctrine taught that the fundamental aim of armed struggle was to kill the enemy. No man, no problem. Because, in contrast to the denazification of the German Reich, the evil of communism was never clearly condemned and punished after the break-up of the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, we are now witnessing aggression and a large-scale war in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin and Ratko Mladić are products of the same murderous doctrine of evil, which in our time has found its twin in the terrorist expansion of radical Islam. Its destructive consequences can be seen, among other places, on the streets of numerous European cities.
And yet, despite everything, today is a new day, and we are no longer naïve. Europe as a whole is also rapidly coming to its senses. Before last week’s European Council meeting in Brussels, 21 EU national leaders – 21 out of 27 – gathered for a working consultation on tightening Europe’s immigration policy. In less than a year, after elections in some of the EU's larger countries, our coalition will be joined by several more member states, and there will be a further major shift in European migration policy. Legal entry into the Union will be consistently distinguished from illegal entry; entry from safe countries will be automatically refused; if groups force their way across the Union’s borders, entry will be refused immediately, without individual assessment; and any violence or rule-breaking behaviour by foreign nationals will result in expulsion from the Union.
Secure external borders, with the free movement of goods, services, people and ideas within them; the rule of law, meritocracy and prosperity – that is the EU we voted for and will fight for. A strong North Atlantic Alliance with a robust European pillar, capable of meeting the challenges in its neighbourhood – that is the NATO we joined and will continue to strive for. Today, all four of our neighbours belong to the same economic and defence alliances, and it goes without saying that we enjoy good relations with them all. Two are landlocked; the other two, Italy and Croatia, are represented at today’s ceremony by their warships. A United States Navy destroyer is also visiting our port. To the crews of all three ships: thank you for your visit, and I wish you a pleasant stay on the Slovenian coast.
Today, Slovenians face the challenge of correcting the mistakes of the second half and gathering momentum anew. And that is what we will do. We will do so even though the international environment is considerably more demanding today than it was in the first half. In some respects, it increasingly resembles 1989, when dangers and opportunities were deeply intertwined.
In September, John F. W. Rogers, Chairman of the Atlantic Council's Board of Directors, said: "What we are experiencing is not simply another period of geopolitical upheaval. A deeper change is taking place: the international system that shaped much of our lives has been transformed."
The world is very different today. The old world order, shaped after the Second World War and further developed after the end of the Cold War, no longer holds in many respects. For the most part, a new one has yet to emerge. Today, more than ever, the future is not predetermined, and progress towards a better future cannot be taken for granted. Time and again, people who are willing to accept responsibility and make difficult decisions choose such progress. It is our duty to leave future generations more freedom, joy of living, security, opportunities and peace than we ourselves inherited.
Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: "Those who have long enjoyed freedom eventually forget that people died to win it."
We are gathered here today, in part, to make sure that we do not forget. Thirty-five years ago, we Slovenians showed the world that we were prepared to do whatever it took for our homeland. At decisive moments in our history, brave lads and men stood up to defend freedom and the Slovenian nation’s right to its own state. Some paid the highest price for its birth: mothers lost sons, wives lost husbands and children lost fathers. It is right that we remember them all with gratitude, especially those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Their sacrifice commits us to protecting Slovenia and keeping it free. We must ensure that the crisp autumn morning when we first drew breath in complete freedom is never taken for granted. Every day, we have a duty to ensure that our children wake up in a free Slovenia, run carefree along its open paths, learn, love, create and dream big dreams – knowing that the sky above them is free and that the future belongs to them.
So that one day they, too, may stand beneath that same sky, on that same soil, and say to their children: “This is our homeland. Our ancestors dreamed of it. Our fathers fought and died for it. And they entrusted it to us to preserve for you."
Heartfelt congratulations on Sovereignty Day. God bless free and sovereign Slovenia.
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