The letter of support for the “Caravan of Erased”

On 26th of February 1992 the newly established Slovenian state erased from the register of permanent residence 18305 inhabitants that until this day enjoyed full citizenship rights. The erased were internal migrants, citizens of former Yugoslavia that were after the cessation of federal State reclassified as international migrants.
The erasure was an act of administrative cleansing by which 1% of the population of Slovenia was made illegal and deprived of basic human, social and political rights. This people without being warned or noticed lost their apartments, jobs, pensions, health care and lived in constant risk of deportation. Many of them were deported or left the country because they realized that for them there is no future in newly established democratic country.
Majority of them persisted in Slovenia being subjugated to everyday humiliations and arbitrariness of the police and other state or local officials.
It took some years for this people to realize that they are a group targeted by the Slovenian state and that their exclusion from the citizenship was constitutive for the establishment of a new citizenship of the nation state that aimed from the beginning to become the member of European Union.

Eventually erased started to self organize, to gain visibility and their struggle led to important victories in Slovenia. The Constitutional Court ruled twice that the act of erasure was unconstitutional and illegal and that rights should be restored to them retroactively.
Instead of complying with the constitutional court decision Slovenian political cast and specially right wing parties that are currently in power started to mobilize Slovene population against erased using xenophobic and racist discourses.
After referendum against erased in 2004 which was boycotted by the majority of voters and after national elections the same year on which right wing parties that mobilize against erased won, the problem of erased is on the stand still.

At the same year it became clear that the question of erased is - despite its peculiarity – European question and that there are many commonalities in the struggle of erased and the European struggles in the field of transformations of citizenship and precarization of labor.
On the 31st of April 2004 on the eve of the enlargement of EU on eastern European Countries, among which Slovenia, the erased marched on the streets of the border town Nova Gorica together with precarious and migrant workers from Slovenia and Italy declaring that since that day they are European erased and demanded new expansive and inclusive European citizenship. With the entrance of Slovenia in the European Union the erased stayed erased in Slovenia, became part of many that are excluded from the citizenship in European Union and became one of many groups that struggle for new European space of freedom and equality.
Since that day Erased fight together with migrants, antiracist activists and precarious workers against detention centers in Slovenia (Postojna) and Italy (Gradisca).

This year the Erased filled the complaint on the European Court for human rights. The locomotive in this legal struggle as they say are eleven urgent cases, eleven persons that live in extreme conditions of precarity and poverty because of erasure. To give political and public support for the case on the Court they organize the Caravane of Erased to Brussels via Monfalcone in Italy and Paris in France.
In their exploration of ways to fight for stolen rights they would like to meet movements that like them fight for the freedom of movement and right to stay, against detention centers, for immediate and unconditional regularization of migrants, against precarity, against racism, for new European citizenship that will guarantee rights for everyone that lives in Europe. On the path of the caravan they will present their problem to the national and European institutions and public to give visibility and support to their struggle and common European struggle.

We, groups, movements and organizations of the civil society consider the struggle of erased as a common struggle; we will participate at the caravan of erased and will be part of this struggle from Ljubljana to Paris.