Museum of Architecture, Museum of Ethnography, National Museum, Museum of Contemporary History, Modern Gallery, National Book Agency … On the scale of small Slovenia, the list is impressive: in one year, almost all of the main cultural institutions in the capital, Ljubljana, have seen their directors ousted on the initiative of the government of Janez Jansa.
Ultraconservative Prime Minister since March 2020 of this country of former Yugoslavia of 2 million inhabitants, this admirer of Donald Trump is accused by several local intellectual figures of wanting to carry out a real purge.
“He directly interferes in the management of cultural institutions to impose his story”, affirms, for example, Kaja Sirok, president of the Slovenian committee of the International Council of Museums, herself unemployed since she lost her post as director of the National Museum of Contemporary History, particularly sensitive because it deals with the XXe century. “The right-wing media said that I was not paying enough attention to the Slovenian struggles for independence, she says, or that it was necessary to get out of the communist narrative, when I was 15 years old in 1991! “
“De facto dismissals”
She has was replaced by Joze Dezman, a historian close to M. Jansa, who had already directed the museum during his first term (2004-2008). “When he is in government, I am here, when he is not, I am not here”, admits this one by receiving The world in his offices. This 65-year-old historian is a former communist who became a specialist in the massacres carried out by Tito’s supporters at the end of the Second World War, which he assures us that they killed more in Slovenia than Nazism.
While recognizing a bubbling side to Mr. Jansa, he condemns the “Terrible amount of effort to destroy it” which would be the subject of this hero of independence from the Slovenian left. “My predecessor did nothing when she was there”, he castigates.
In November 2020, a petition signed by 150 intellectuals and academics from around the world denounced “A takeover of cultural institutions” through “De facto dismissals”. Several demonstrations have brought together thousands of Slovenes in recent months to protest.
Carried out in the name “The elimination of potentially political biases” by the Minister of Culture Vasko Simoniti, this wave of replacements has “Followed a process that respects all regulations”, replied the Ministry of Culture in several press releases, recalling that the mandates of the outgoing directorates were coming to an end and accusing them “To be aligned on the left”.
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