Janez Janša

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Janez (Ivan) Janša

Prime Minister of Slovenia
In office 3 December 2004 – in office
Preceded by	Anton Rop (2002 - 2004)

Born	September 17, 1958 (age 48) Ljubljana, Slovenia
Political party	SDS

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), and in 1983 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 relaxing restrictions on the freedom of speech, Janša was the author of 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 As a result, his re-election as president of the Committee was blocked in 1984, and in 1985 his passport was withdrawn.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 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 his sentence, and became editor in chief of the Slovene political weekly magazine Demokracija (Democracy), which he remained until the elections of May 1990.

In 1989, Janša was involved in the founding of the opposition party in Slovenia, the Slovenian Democratic Union (SDZ) and became first vice-president, then president of the Party Council. Following the first free elections in May 1990 he became defense minister, a position he held during the Slovenian war for independence in 1991. After the breakup of the SDZ in 1991 he became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Slovenia (now called Slovenian Democratic Party) and stayed defense minister until March 1994, when he was dismissed by Prime Minister Janez Drnovšek following allegations that he allowed the military to interfere in civilian justice. He was subsequently cleared following an inquiry. In May 1993, he became president of the Social Democratic Party of Slovenia and was re-elected in 1995, 1999 and 2001.

He was again defense minister from June 2000 to November 2000 in the short-lived government of Andrej Bajuk. During this time he introduced chaplains to the armed forces.

Following the general election of 2004 Janša was elected Prime Minister of Slovenia on 9 November 2004, polling the votes of 57 of the 90 deputies. He assumed office on 3 December 2004.

Janez Janša has published several books of which the two best-known are Premiki (Manoeuvres, published in 1992 and subsequently translated into English under the title The Making of the Slovenian State) and Okopi (Barricades, 1994), which deals with the transition to a parliamentary democracy.