Heavenly Passport

Six months later, the competent body ("apartment owner") informs him that the contract on the purchase is invalid or, to say the least, suspect. The reason: the pensioner is --a foreigner. That is, he has Croatian citizenship, transferred from paper to paper, from document to document, from office to office, from memory to memory, from counter to counter - from the beginning. To the end. A foreigner in the state into which - regardless of whether it is a historical irony, a cosmic joke or the revenge of an ungracious god - he has invested his entire, now already past life.

An illegal immigrant, 40, in the United States (with the help of an outdated business, pre-war visa) does not kno who to turn to extend his passport (red, of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). His state does not exist. The "case" wonders whether he exists in any way other than as a case to be "settled" in the United Nations Security Council or, on an equally high level, in the office of the UN. High Commissioner for Refugees --which he cannot turn to because he is in the US. illegally.

An owner of an apartment in Istria who, not of her own will, was born, resides and works in Belgrade (26 years), a non-Serb, cannot travel to the republic of Croatia because her passport was issued in Belgrade (Serbia, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). Among the documents to be submitted when making bus reservations, the agency which earns from organizing the roundabout transfer of human beings from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to the republic of Croatia also asks for proof that the passenger is not of Serbian Orthodox faith. It is not clear if the travel agency is in this way protecting its passengers (and itself) from the risks of any unpleasantness on the part of the new Croatian authorities, or if what is involved is perhaps a request for the religious (and racial, why not?) purity of those entering the country whose 1,000-year dream of independence and sovereignty has come true.

In the same way, that is, without any right to wonder about the sense of the mistreatment to which they are exposed, victims of national and historical goals are forced to stand patiently at the counters of municipal services to submit applications for citizenship of the so-called Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Everything in this regard has to be done personally, that is, for oneself alone, and between six and eight o'clock in the morning because this is the only time that the competent authorities issue the bits of paper with numbers guaranteeing a place on the waiting list in the mass of those who hope to be the privileged ones to be entered into the citizenship of the "third" Yugoslavia.

"In this context, all 'citizenship'-related matters in the new states on the territory of former Yugoslavia are the same: contrary to the European trend of a continual, gradual expansion of the body of the so-called natural rights of citizens," says Jasminka Hasanbegovic, a Belgrader and member of the Civil Resistance Movement. "In other words, all the newly created states have with their attitudes towards the question of citizenship asserted, or rather denounced themselves as democratic communities," she adds.

The only reasons the Croatian parliament has not yet verified the law on confiscating the property of the "aggressor" was that it was much too busy with the new "elections," i.e., the need to establish/renew President Franjo Tudjman's democratic appearance. The new parliament - with the recently re-affirmed authority of the will of the people, based on the constitution and law, as well as on the fundamental principles of all charters on the freedoms and rights of man, citizens, etc. - was in a gentlemanly manner left to take over all that the poor fellows born in the "other" Yugoslavia have inherited, earned or used on the territory of the former (and new) Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Macedonia or some other newer state, still to be created in these parts.

Realistic estimates count with at least two million citizens of the former Yugoslavia who have in these past weeks, months and years been wrestling with the state's guardian angels resolved to make them happy at all cost. "Besides those who live in or were born into mixed marriages, those who ethnically commit themselves in regional. terms (as Istrians, Herzegovinians...) despite all efforts by the respective states to bring them under national 'sovereignty', besides 'ethnic' Yugoslavs and all others, any kind of reckoning must take into consideration also those who by any criteria have the right to protection from fear: the nationally uncommitted, the 'old' and the newly-formed minorities , as well as the sophisticated nationalists of the 'French' type, those who take into account, respect and cherish all the national values, but do not look upon them as a special reason for demanding any special status whatsoever." What all these people have in common - and the word people is taken here as a synonym for differences - is the fact that their freedoms and rights are being restricted by state force, Hasanbegovic adds.

Its arbitrariness has condemned all subjects to choose between two possibilities: either kneeling at the counter for citizenship applications, or the status of hostile foreigner, regardless where. Here, because you are Croats who voted there for them and sent sons to the National Guard, and there because you lived in a Byzantine barbarity and the Orthodox-Coptic so-called state...

To be blessed with national and state citizenship implies an administrative purgatory. Unless we are prevented, through some miracle, benevolence and good will of the "quality" Serbs, "better" Croats and "improved" Slovenes, from becoming what nearly three million former Yugoslavs have already (through joint efforts) been turned into. Namely, refugees. The homeless. Nobodies.