Citizens of a Non-existent State

A draft law that casts doubts on the status of several hundred thousand people in Yugoslavia has been under consideration in police and legal circles for years in expectation of the end of the Yugoslav crisis.

The Dayton agreement is seen as the end of the crisis but it was clear before and after it that the greatest uncertainty hangs over some 700,000 refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and people who have been living in today’s Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for years but never had republican citizenship in the former Yugoslavia.

To make things clearer, recall the fact that in the former Yugoslavia, starting in 1974, everyone had dual citizenship - federal and one of the six republics. But all former Yugoslav citizens had the same legal status across the country. It was easy to get republican citizenship and change it and every person who was of age could get the citizenship of a certain republic if they lived there or married there regardless of how long or their nationality. The only consequence was the loss of the previous republican citizenship but the status of federal citizenship did not change.

The real consequences came with the breakup of the country. Many former Yugoslavia citizens found themselves citizens of the breakaway republics and discovered that that fact became the most important thing in setting their state citizenship.

The previous ease in getting republican citizenship has now brought a huge number of former Yugoslavia citizens into an impossible legal situation. There are some who found themselves living in a state (former republic) whose citizenship they didn’t have or on the territory of a state whose citizenship they had but their families didn’t. To complicate things even more, remember that there were about two million mixed marriages in the former Yugoslavia and the citizenship children got were often accidental (now we have siblings with different citizenships).

Those problems are being solved through the new FRY citizenship law which separates citizens into three basic categories. The first will have to write requests, or will get citizenship automatically (the people who said Serbian and Montenegrin citizenship prior to April 27, 1992 when the FRY was proclaimed) and their children.

The second category are people who did not have Serbian and Montenegrin citizenship but were residents of the FRY when it was proclaimed. They will get citizenship under a shortened procedure if they don’t have citizenship in some other state. The FRY has a large number of inhabitants who have lived there for years but with the citizenship of one of the other republics including a number who have relatives in Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia and who tried to get citizenship of those republics so they could stay in touch with their relatives. The draft law says none of them can get FRY citizenship before they renounce their dual citizenship.

This category of people has a huge problem. Take the example of a woman who has spent 25 years in Belgrade and is originally from Banja Luka. She kept her Bosnian republican citizenship and never got Serbian citizenship. When she needed documents she wrote to Banja Luka and got them without any problems. Now she has to file a request for FRY citizenship and in principle she should get it under a shortened procedure just because she resides in Belgrade. But there’s a condition - she can’t have dual citizenship. When she recently asked for documents from Banja Luka she got a paper saying she was a citizen of the Bosnian Serb Republic (RS) and was born there. The question the new law does not answer is whether the FRY police will consider that as being dual citizenship. The problem isn’t limited only to the RS. Croatia’s citizenship law says everyone who had Socialist Republic of Croatia's citizenship automatically gets Croatian citizenship. That means the FRY police can decide whether Croatian citizenship (the obstruction to getting FRY citizenship) includes people who got it automatically or only people who asked for it. All the Krajina Serb refugees who fled the Croatian Army’s Storm offensive might not get FRY citizenship, but that’s another story. So if the FRY police disregards the automatic citizenship category and takes the real position of people into account, those people will probably only have to state that they have no other citizenship. It’s not impossible that the FRY and Croatian police will cooperate closely on this issue.

The third category covered under the draft law are refugees which are not called that in the law but defined as citizens of the former Yugoslavia who sought refuge in the FRY because of their national or religious affiliation and urging of human rights and liberties. Goran Svilanovic of the Belgrade university school of law says that definition has certain advantages because it gives real refugees a chance at citizenship even if they never asked for it before. So refugees and displaced persons have to submit a request for citizenship and they will get it if they can prove that they were persecuted because of their nationality, religious beliefs or for advocating human rights and liberties and have no other citizenship. The law specifies that the request has to include a statement that they have no other citizenship. Special requests have to be submitted for children under age and all requests have to be submitted within one year of the law taking effect with a deadline of three years being given for special cases. The deadline for the police to resolve the requests is not specified.

The law also requires refugee to submit proof of how they earn a living. Some people believe the police has enough proof of that since refugees get humanitarian aid. Federal home affairs minister Vukasin Jokanovic told a press conference that this does not mean the refugees will automatically get FRY citizenship but that interested parties will submit requests to the federal police who will look into the requests taking into consideration the FRY’s security, defense and international interests. During debate on the law, the federal government faced the dilemma of whether refugees should be given citizenship. The federal home affairs ministry thinks they shouldn’t.

The articles of the law on security conditions (article 47) opens suspicions that the requests will be resolved in accord with the current political situation. There are some assessments that in practice the law will be interpreted so that RS refugees won’t get citizenship since security interests require as many Serbs as possible along the border with Bosnia. Add to that the fact that the RS simply does not have enough people in it and who better than refugees to fill the gaps. After World War II there was discrete pressure on the Serbs in Bosnia who fled to Serbia for similar reasons. It could turn out that the article is also aimed at Krajina Serb refugees. Yugoslavia hasn’t shown the least will to accept them as its own citizens, Croatia also doesn’t want them and they would be welcomed in the RS.

An explanation of the draft law in circulation last summer said specifically that citizenship won’t be given to Krajina and RS refugees but only to people from the parts of Bosnia and Croatia not in Serb hands. The new draft does not mention the RS and the Krajina but that does not mean the spirit of the law has been changed.

There are some other disputable issue in the draft. It says people who got FRY citizenship since April 27, 1992 have to submit new requests. Why does it question citizenship issued by the current authorities? The answer could lie in the differences in resolving the issue in Serbia and Montenegro. Serbia gave refugees citizenship only in 1991 and early 1992 when the refugees were seen as heroes. The situation in Montenegro was different. A republican police official said recently that 70,000 refugees had been given Montenegrin citizenship. In any case, both republics let their police handle the issue.

Finally, the draft law envisages two ways of citizenship ending - by removing it or renouncing it. Both ways are voluntary. The draft invokes the FRY constitution and only formally abolishes the institution of losing citizenship but keeps it there in provisions on investigating how citizenship was acquired.

Continuity and Consequences

The obsession with continuity with the former Yugoslavia is evident in the draft citizenship law as well. The law mentions that continuity in several places but when its articles are analyzed you see that the continuity has actually been turned into its opposite, i.e. the law envisages discontinuity. Gaso Knezevic, Belgrade law professor, told VREME earlier that all former Yugoslavian citizens should automatically be given FRY citizenship if the continuity principle is implemented. The new law awards citizenship in ways similar to the secessionist republics, i.e. according to origin, birth or under international treaties.

As soon as the legal consequences of the breakup of the country became evident, experts and non-governmental agencies proposed ways to resolve the citizenship issue in the former Yugoslav republics. There were suggestions that citizenship should be given only according to place of residence giving everyone, regardless of nationality, equal treatment. None of the new states adopted that suggestion and the FRY faced the dilemma of allowing dual citizenship . The federal government debated the issue but the prevailing opinion was that dual citizenship would allow one state to meddle in the affairs of another creating security, status and civic problems and holders of dual citizenship could be drafted into other armies.

The fact that dual citizenship was not allowed created huge problems . The draft law mentions inter-state treaties to regulate dual citizenship but only on the basis of reciprocity. The question is how many people in today’s Croatia are interested in dual citizenship with the FRY and it’s clear that Yugoslavia, if it really cared for its citizens, would allow unconditional dual citizenship. As things stand now we’ll have to wait a while for the treaties and a large number of people will have trouble getting their right to citizenship and accompanying rights let alone normal communication with relatives. The most important right of citizens is the right to vote. Bearing that in mind, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will get citizenship before the coming elections since the authorities have no reason to believe refugees will vote for them. Some jobs can’t be done without citizenship - in the judiciary, army, diplomatic service. People without citizenship have limited property rights, they can’t get passports and students pay higher tuition fees.