In 1991 to 1995, 70.000 people fled to Slovenia due to the war and genocide in Croatia and Bosnia and Hercegovina. However, they were not granted refugee status under the Geneva Convention, but only temporarly protection status, which provides very reduced rights. The state showed its position on the arrival of refugees with the closure of the border in August 1992 arguing that the set quota of refugees that the state could accept had already been exceeded. Territory, space and border were the means of maintaining the rule of exlusion. An additional mechanism for exclusion was citizenship, the conditions of which were difficult for people to access. In Slovenia, citizenship had a special significance in the formation of a new, Slovenian citizenship. Certificates of citizenship were the first condition for exercising rights and at the same time conferred moral superiority on citizens as opposed to people without documents - people without rights. Fairly soon after the country's independence, the political and media discourse managed to form the image of refugees as law-breakers, imperfect and uncivilized persons, such as job-stealers, etc. The political-media discourse dehumanized refugees, deprived them of their individuality and defined them as »others«, i.e. as a »problem«, especially in terms of endangering the public. It was with these arguments that people detained in refugee centres were deprived of their freedom and their exits were restricted with permits. Life in the refugee centre is thus reduced to »naked life«, the Agamben's concept which describes camps and similar spaces (including refugee centres) as a biopolitical environment where the possibility of distinguishing between a biological body and a political body is eliminated. Thus, human rights are limited to the right of survival. Consequently, all demands for rights that go beyond the right to "be human" are interpreted by the receiving state as "ingratitude" of refugees. In return for security and minimum freedoms, refugees must be »obedient and grateful«. In the empirical part of the thesis, I analysed eight narrative interviews that testify to the refugee experience in Slovenia after the war in Yugoslavia and the establishment of a life in a new country. The interlocutors talk about the difficult refugee path, feelings of uncertainty, losses, effort and victories. The deprivation of the right to work and education had consequences for the refugees of that time which are visible to this day - undeclared work, shorter length of service and coping with hard and low-paid work. Obtaining statuses and waiting for visas was a great financial burden for people and, above all, a tremendous stress. They were waiting for citizenship for more than ten years, some despite having already met the conditions. Living in a refugee centre meant living in crowded rooms, eating leftover food, and asking permission to leave. Refugees at the time remember the people, individuals and NGOs from whom they received help and felt accepted, and describe the attitude of the Offices for Foreigners, the Refugee Centres and administrative units as very humiliating. Despite everything that refugees have experienced, after thirty years of coming to Slovenia, they see their stories as stories of struggle and victory. They want peace, a world without hatred and respect for fellow human beings.
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