Janez Zemljarič, a politician who held a number of prime positions in the course of the communist period, together with head of the key police, has been buried with navy honours, sparking controversy and reigniting previous political divisions.
Zemljarič served as the primary minister of Slovenia’s authorities from 1980 to 1984, when the nation was a part of Yugoslavia, after which spent 5 years as deputy prime minister of the federal Yugoslav authorities.
Earlier than that, he was the Nationwide Safety Service director from 1975 to 1976. The Safety Service is greatest recognized by its acronym UDBA and is believed to have assassinated a number of opponents of the Yugoslav regime.
After the collapse of Yugoslavia, Zemljarič was a lobbyist famend for being an influence dealer with good connections with leftist events who at all times remained within the background.
One paper describes him as “some of the influential males in Slovenia within the final fifty years”.
Zemljarič, who died on 30 December and was buried on 6 January, was given a funeral with navy honours by the federal government on the initiative of members of his cupboard – who argued he deserved the privilege, citing his efforts within the nation’s improvement and administration of some main nationwide infrastructure tasks.
Nonetheless, the opposition Democrats (SDS) expressed indignation on the determination, which they see as basically at odds with the spirit of the Slovenian structure.
“The Robert Golob authorities’s determination violates the basic proper to human dignity and makes a mockery of the struggling of the various victims of UDBA’s legal actions,” the get together mentioned.
It mentioned the previous secret police was an institutionalised antithesis of the basic constitutional values of at this time’s Slovenia, and the Slovenian Constitutional Court docket and the Supreme Court docket formally recognised UDBA actions as legal.
Zemljarič’s funeral was attended by a number of distinguished public figures, together with Slovenia’s first President Milan Kučan and Ljubljana Mayor Zoran Janković.
(Sebastijan R. Maček | sta.si)
