Pronto, Jansa Here

The monitoring commission of the Slovenian state security service recently confirmed what most journalist wrote about with suspicion over the past few months - that the Slovenian Security-Information Service tapped the telephones of foreign consular missions in Slovenia; thus, the Security-Information Service also "caught" Ciril Zlobec, member of the republican Presidency, who didn't suspect a thing, while chatting with Italian consul Cristiani. The affair got out through the literary polemic between defense minister Janez Jansa and the already mentioned Ciril Zlobec, which threatened to acquire very unpleasant international proportions. The Slovenian government started "monitoring" the foreign consular missions on its territory very early. Already after the first multi-party elections, and way before Slovenia was recognized as a state, Peterle's government discussed, at the initiative of Interior Minister Igor Bavcar, the proposal for Slovenian bodies to immediately start listening to the telephone conversations of foreign countries' representatives. In November 1990, Igor Bavcar, who was in charge of the Security-Information Service, issued an order for monitoring the telephone calls of foreign countries' representatives in Slovenia. The purpose of the tapping was primarily to collect information of importance for the process of gaining independence, since the politicians of certain countries (especially Italian diplomats) maintained good relations with the Yugoslav leadership, so that they assumed that "telephone espionage" would give them access to important information being exchanged between foreign and Yugoslav politicians. Of course, Bavcar issued the order for tapping on the basis of the old "communist" law. The parliamentary monitoring commission of the state security service interrogated the highest state officials four times so far and came to the conclusion that minister Bavcar broke the existing laws. In 1989, due to the experience with the trial to the four Slovenes charged with betraying military secrets, the Slovenian Assembly passed the 50th and 51st constitutional amendments saying that the opening of letters and bugging, is possible only with a court approval "if this is necessary for carrying out criminal proceedings or for the sake of the state's security". Strangest of all is that even certain members of the parliamentary monitoring Commission of the state security service kept quiet about this, because, on April 23rd 1991, a three-member working group for checking on tapping determined, during a routine (and unannounced) inspection of a post office in Ljubljana, that in certain cases the Security-Information Service was tapping telephone conversations without the necessary documentation. Afterwards, members of the Commission found out from the Service's director, Miha Brejc "what it was all about and why there is no documentation", which satisfied them and made them promise not to "carry further" their knowledge. These members of parliament kept quiet for almost a year and maybe everything would have been forgotten if a few sentences hadn't slipped into Jansa's book in his attempt to harm his hated political rival. When the affair got out and when the Interior Ministry built its defense on the fact that "the Commission also knew what was going on", due to fierce protests by other MPs, the parliamentary "inspectors" finally confessed that they knew about this criminal offense. At the time when Slovenia was becoming independent, it didn't have the necessary legislation that would permit the tapping of foreign states' institutions, since it did not have a national security council which, in other countries regulates this, otherwise quite usual "counter-intelligence activity". Thus it came to the violation of constitutional provisions which most of the leading Slovenian politicians knew about. However, this is a collective criminal offense for which there is no place in a legal state. Because, how is one to describe the practice according to which, due to the "historical moment", such bodies as the Council for the protection of the constitutional order, judges of the Supreme court and members of the security service's monitoring Commission tacitly permit the violation of the Constitution? For the moment, the Italian government does not want to blow up the matter but there is no doubt that, in return, it will ask the Slovenian side for a counter favour, most probably already during the next talks on the succession of the Ossimo Agreements, very important for Slovenia.