June 9, 2001
Man Fights For Slovenian Identity
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:45 a.m. ET
ON THE CROATIA-SLOVENIA BORDER (AP) - Slovenia's flag used to flutter
atop Josko Joras' home, along with a sign proclaiming: "Slovenia is here,
too.'' Nonsense, says Croatia, which insists he's living on Croatian soil.
But Joras, a Slovene citizen, won't back down - even though his insistence
that he lives in Slovenia has meant being hauled before a judge and enduring
daily hassles from the Croatian police, who took down the flag last month.
Good fences make good neighbors, they say, and Joras' unusual case has
inflamed a long-simmering dispute over the border between the two otherwise
friendly countries.
"I don't want to be an interstate problem,'' said Joras, who is in
his 50s. "But as a Slovene citizen, I have a duty to protect Slovenia's
borders.''
He's not alone. Thousands of people across the former Yugoslavia found
their homes and fields suddenly belonging to another country after the
six-republic federation disintegrated in the 1990s in a series of bloody
wars.
The republics' borders within the Yugoslav federation were not always
meticulously drawn to begin with, and today, most of the new countries
claim at least a small slice of a neighboring nation.
Croatia and Slovenia proclaimed independence simultaneously in June
1991. Ten years later, they still cannot agree on the border even after
years of negotiations, and international arbitration eventually may be
sought.
While both countries are equally stubborn, they'd prefer to avoid that
kind of showdown: Both seek membership in the European Union, which favors
unproblematic countries who settle their quarrels wthout outside intervention.
The Joras case centers on a small, 200-yard-long strip of land dividing
the two countries in a village that Croatia calls Plovanija and Slovenia
knows as Secovje. Joras, who runs a restaurant in Slovenia, bought his
house there in 1987.
Croatia claims that Slovenia in 1991 accepted the borders as they were
before independence, meaning the land is in Croatia. Slovenia argued that
the issue should be negotiated. And as Joras hardened his position, so
did Slovenia.
After Joras was arrested, detained and brought before a judge in December
for refusing to pay customs on a dishwashing machine, the Slovene Foreign
Ministry in Ljubljana, the Slovene capital, accused Croatia of a provocation
and insisted it never accepted the border as it is now.
But Croatia won't budge.
"Mr. Joras is obviously not alone'' in his claims that his house is
in Slovenia, said Goran Rotim, Croatia's Foreign Ministry spokesman.
"Ljubljana
shrewdly uses Mr. Joras's excesses to test Croatia's reactions.''
Joras pulls out maps showing that the land below his house is inscribed
in Slovenia's land registry. It's in the Croatian registry, too, but he
insists that paper is fake.
Slovenia has issued him a home address: Secovje 1. Croatia sends him
mail and court subpoenas to a Croatian address: Mlini 73a.
The Croatian Foreign Ministry claims he sought, and got, a building
permit from Croatia and that he only launched his campaign in 1998 after
he accepted a local political post in the neighboring Slovene city of Piran.
Joras earns his money in Slovenia and pays taxes there. He doesn't use
a regular phone, which would be connected to Croatian Telecom, relying
instead on a Slovene mobile phone, although he does pay a Croatian electric
bill.
Dial a Croatian mobile phone from the terrace overlooking the border,
and the signal locks onto the Slovene network. Some might say that proves
his claims; others would argue that it's simply the result of a stronger
Slovene infrastructure.
Joras' neighbors cross the border each day without troubles. His car,
he says, is stopped and checked every day.
When he tried to bring home a package of Slovene-made milk, guards at
the checkpoint banned it. He said they were "harassing me.'' They said
they were enforcing a Croatian law which bans the duty-free import of more
than one liter of milk.
When Joras refused their demand that he pay customs on the dishwasher,
and he later failed to appear in court to pay a fine, he was stopped at
the border and arrested on the spot.
But he won't give up.
"I will persevere in the fight,'' he said, "whatever it takes.'' |