Janez Janša (born
September 17 1958 as Ivan Janša in
Ljubljana) is a
Slovenian politician and head of the
Slovenian Democratic Party since
1995. He has been the
Prime Minister of Slovenia since he was elected by Parliament on
November 9,
2004.Janša graduated from the
University of Ljubljana with a degree in defence studies in
1982, and became a trainee in the Defence Secretariat. In his younger years, Janša was a member of the
League of Communists and one of the leaders of its youth wing. He became president of the Committee for Basic People's Defence and Social Self-Protection of the Alliance of Socialist Youth of Slovenia (ZSMS). In
1983, however, he wrote the first of his
dissident articles about the nature of the
Yugoslav People's Army (JNA). In the late 1980s, as
Slovenia was introducing democratic reforms and gradually lifting restrictions on the
freedom of speech, Janša wrote several articles criticizing the
Yugoslav People's Army in the independent magazine
Mladina. As a result, his re-election as president of the Committee was blocked in
1984, and in
1985 his passport was withdrawn. He claims to have made over 250 job applications in the following year without success, and was unable to secure publication of any articles. In this period he earned his living writing computer programs and acting as a mountaineering guide. Liberalisation in the succeeding years allowed him to get work as secretary of the Journal for the Criticism of Science (
1986) and later to begin publishing again in
Mladina. On
30 May 1988 he was arrested together with other Mladina journalists and a staff sergeant in the JNA, Ivan Borštner. They were tried in a military court on charges of betraying military secrets, in the so-called
JBTZ-trial and given prison sentences. The trial was conducted
in camera, with no legal representation for the accused, and in
Serbo-Croat (the official language in yugoslav army) rather than
Slovene. Janša was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, initially in the maximum security prison at
Dob, but following a public outcry, in the open prison of
Ig. He was released after serving about six months of sentence, and became editor in chief of the Slovene political weekly magazine Demokracija (Democracy), which he remained until the elections of May
1990.
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