At Thursday’s hearing of Marta Kos, candidate for the new European Commissioner from Slovenia, tensions came to a boiling point. When the subject of Kos’s collaboration with the so-called UDBA – the Directorate for State Security of the former Yugoslavia, i.e. the political police – came up, some left-wing MPs were extremely unhappy. But none more so than Miroslav Gregorič, an MP of the Freedom Movement party (Gibanje Svoboda), whose incredible reaction leads to the logical question: why does talk of the UDBA bother him so much? Archival documents reveal that Gregorič was a collaborator of the Counter-Intelligence Service of the Yugoslav People’s Army, also known as KOS.
When SDS MP Žan Mahnič spoke about the UDBA files, MP Miroslav Gregorič began speaking nervously, raising his hands, taking the floor without the permission of the Committee Chairman, demanding a procedural ruling and asking if we were in court. Chairman Breznik explained to him that he would respect his procedural motion by allowing each Member of Parliament to ask questions and raise doubts about the candidate (Kos), thus allowing a democratic debate.
Mahnič told him that, given his reaction, after the meeting, he would go “check” if he (Gregorič) might not also be on the list of former UDBA collaborators. At that point, Gregorič almost started to threaten and insult him, saying, “Now watch what you say, you idiot …” Whereupon Gregorič walked out of the meeting in a huff. Mahnič then said that he understood that this was a painful subject because, in the past, we have seen that those who have been on these lists have also been those who have talked about human rights and how the rule of law should be respected. Because of Gregorič’s reaction to the subject of the UDBA, Mahnič felt it was relevant to also check whether or not Gregorič was an UDBA collaborator, too.
Is Gregorič also an UDBA member?
Gregorič is certainly one of those people about whom Mahnič cannot be blamed for thinking, given his behaviour and statements in the past, that he collaborated with the Yugoslav security services.
Born in Ljubljana on the 28th of December 1948, he graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Ljubljana in 1973, and then received his Master’s degree from Oregon State University in the USA in 1978. In those days, it was extremely unusual for Yugoslav students to study in the USA. It was only common for the children of proven Party cadres to go there. After his studies, Gregorič got a prestigious job almost immediately: between 1973 and 1989, he became a researcher in the Reactor Engineering Department at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana. It is clear that in 1973, such a job could not have been given to a man without any links to the Party. Then, in 1989, when Slovenia was still ruled by the Communists, he became Director of the Nuclear Safety Administration of the Republic of Slovenia. His CV also shows that he was a man with a party pedigree. Leljak’s book Spies of the UDBA (“Špiclji UDBE”) reveals that a person called Miroslav Gregor(č)ič was a collaborator of the Yugoslav People’s Army’s security organs. He is registered under the number UDBA 0020000.
Known for his wild Russophilia
Gregorič has remained practically anonymous during the current government’s disastrous mandate, along with other “random members” of the Freedom Movement party (Gibanje Svoboda), who came to the National Assembly to raise their hands and get a good salary. But he did raise quite a few eyebrows with his wild pro-Russian rhetoric. Among other things, he was a co-signatory of Milan Kučan‘s public letter, filled with pro-Russian rhetoric. Namely, the letter, among other things, warned of Russian nuclear weapons and a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia (intimidation as a means of manipulation…). It also indirectly called for the disarmament of the victims of Putin’s aggression. We already know a similar story from the time of the creation of the Slovenian state, when, unfortunately, for some, independence was not the “preferred option”… But Gregorič went even further. He even shared the opinion that the Bucha massacre was staged, that it did not even exist!
He also shared fake news that Ukrainian extremists are burning down Russian Orthodox churches. As proof, he posted a video of a burning church, allegedly from the village of Novaya Poltava. However, Radio-Television Slovenia dismissed his claim, saying it was misinformation. The video is not of a church in Ukraine, but of a church in the village of Yelinka in southern Russia. It is also a lie that the video is new, as it is actually ten years old. What is particularly worrying is the fact that the MP is a member of the Committee on Defence and the Committee on Foreign Policy, with access to confidential information from Slovenia and NATO, which is also potentially of interest to Moscow. His sympathies with the Kremlin regime are also hinted at in a number of (re)posts on X. In particular, the use of the phrase “special operation” instead of war and the scaremongering (in full Kremlin style!) that Ukraine’s use of Himars and Shadow Storm will mean the full involvement of the USA and the UK in the conflict is striking.
Gregorič also voted against the declaration on the commemoration of the mass starvation genocide in Ukraine, proposed by the government Social Democrats (Socialni demokrati – SD) and Freedom Movement MPs Jani Prednik, Predrag Baković and Borut Sajovic. In addition to Luka Mesec’s Left party (Levica) MPs, who were all against the declaration, three Freedom Movement MPs also voted against it – they were Martin Premik, Monika Pekoša, and, of course, Gregorič. This begs the question: why does Gregorič have such an immense enthusiasm for a de facto fascist Russia? In Slovenia, it is a tradition that the biggest Russophiles are also followers of “Mother Russia”, which is a kind of base for all Slovenian apparatchiks and collaborators of the former Yugoslav regime.
I. K.
