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Slovenia Bracing for Nationhood : Independence: For the first time, Slovenes have the chance to be masters of their own destiny. They voted to secede from Yugoslav federation.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

A flicker of candlelight in the recess of a pale yellow chapel illuminates an alabaster likeness of the Virgin Mary. The 18th-Century shrine is one of hundreds of architectural footprints left on Slovenia by half a millennium of Austrian rule.

The red-tiled roofs and arched bell towers of the churches and monasteries that crown the surrounding foothills show the Italian hand that governed by turns with the Hapsburg Empire until World War II.

What has been built here in more recent years bears the unmistakable imprint of socialist Yugoslavia. A majestic mountain backdrop is marred by drab high-rise apartments and a hilltop memorial where whitewashed rocks spell out a tribute to the late Communist strongman, “Our Tito.”

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Slovenia is a patchwork of foreign influences, with little physically to define the 2 million people who have made this Alpine highland their home since the Dark Ages and are now, for the first time, standing up to be counted.

The Slovenes arrived in the 6th Century from the Slav lands north of the Carpathian Mountains to settle the Julian Alps and the fertile Sava River region then known as Illyria. They were absorbed by the Roman Empire, then by the Hapsburgs until World War I. During the period between the wars, Slovenia was a political battleground between the new Yugoslav state and fascist Italy.

Yet Slovenes nurtured their language and culture through the succession of foreign dominations and their tightknit communities stubbornly resisted attempts at assimilation.

Never masters of their own destiny in the 1,500 years since they arrived, Slovenes are now embarked on an irreversible quest for nationhood.

Slovenia has already annulled Yugoslav law on its territory and officials are endeavoring to introduce a separate currency to sever all financial ties to the federal government in Belgrade.

Europe’s newest country, sovereign Slovenia, is expected to debut by the end of June, yet much of the Continent has only recently been awakened to its existence.

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European neighbors are no more enthusiastic about the emergence of another small country in their midst than Slovenia’s partners in the Yugoslav federation are about losing the most developed and productive republic.

But Slovenes argue that having been denied the right to national self-determination for centuries is poor justification for regarding the deprivation as permanent.

“We’ve never been on our own. We’ve always been the handmaids of some other nation, either Italy or Austria or Yugoslavia,” complained Neva Predan, a 43-year-old linguist from the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. “Independence would give us the right to determine our own lives. Now we are helpless. We can’t do anything to improve our situation because our money washes down south, like the Sava River.”

Since its creation in 1918, the Yugoslav federation has failed to weld a durable union from the unlike regions that were dominated by the great empires of the preceding centuries.

Slovenia and Croatia, earlier governed by Hapsburg Austria, are predominantly Catholic and write in Latin letters. Both republics voted out communism last year in favor of nationalist democrats promising a market economy. Serbia, the largest republic, was occupied by Ottoman Turkey for 500 years, adheres to the Orthodox religion, expresses its language with the Cyrillic alphabet and has endorsed central planning and Communist rule.

Since the free elections held throughout Yugoslavia last year inflicted a new ideological divide, the economy and inter-ethnic tolerance have decomposed to a dangerous level, raising the specters of national bankruptcy and civil war.

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Slovenes like Katjusa Cufer, a 19-year-old nurse from Podbrdo, say the only recourse for Slovenia is to get out of Yugoslavia as soon as it can.

“We are too different to live together with the southern people,” Cufer said in explaining why she joined nearly 90% of her Slovenian countrymen in endorsing a December referendum proposing secession. “If we had our own country, we wouldn’t have to pay so much money to the south and not know what was happening to it.”

A conviction has spread among Slovenes that they have been taken advantage of by fellow Yugoslavs in “the south,” a label they disparagingly attach to the republics of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia, which they see as backward and incapable of integrating with Western Europe.

Their sense of superiority is bolstered by living standards more akin to affluent Austria than the poorer Balkan states and per capita income twice as high as in Serbia. Some of those advantages, however, were acquired with the help of generous foreign credits assumed by the federal government the republic now wants to spurn.

Slovenian factories are overstaffed and inefficiently operated, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and shops are full of goods bought with more hard currency than the republic earns.

Foreign loans of at least $1 billion will be needed to back a new currency for Slovenia, and the republic will likely have to shoulder at least 15% of Yugoslavia’s $16-billion foreign debt when its expected secession takes place.

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The loss of buying power in transition to independence could be as sharp as 30% to 40%, foreign analysts caution. The Slovenian Chamber of Economy has forecast unemployment will affect at least 10% of the work force within the next few months.

Despite the deflating predictions, Slovenes seem unshakeably committed to going it alone. The overwhelming endorsement of the independence referendum surprised even the ardent secessionists who proposed it.

Western economists, such as capitalist guru Jeffrey Sachs, who visited Slovenia in late February, have warned Ljubljana’s leaders that they may be courting financial disaster by venturing out too soon.

But Slovenes say the time for second thoughts is long past, and they insist that they are equal to the traumatic transition that awaits them.

“We are already enduring these hardships,” observed Srecko Svetina, a 35-year-old delivery service manager taking lunch at a Nova Gorica pizzeria. “There will be some economic difficulties--much worse than we’ve seen so far. But at the moment, we feel it is worth it.”

Older Slovenes argue that their national identity has been suppressed by each of the governments that have ruled from a distance.

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Emilia Zimec, 67, was born near Nova Gorica, when the region was part of Italy and Benito Mussolini’s fascists sought to eradicate everything Slovenian.

“When I was young, the Italians demanded that we speak their language, even in our own homes. My parents didn’t know Italian, because we had been under Austria (rule) before World War I,” Zimec recalled. “At that time, we were very enthusiastic about joining Yugoslavia. But the situation has never been as we wanted. In the federation, we were always expected to be like Serbia.”

Zimec was thrilled by the December referendum because, she said, it was the first time in Slovenian history that the people had been given a say in how they were to be governed.

The tidal wave of pro-sovereignty sentiment worries the ethnic minorities that form about 10% of Slovenia’s population.

Serbs and Muslims who live in Slovenia tend to shy away from comment on the move toward independence, apparently uncomfortable with speaking against what has become a national cause.

Even rarer is the Slovene who expresses doubt about the impending break.

“No one knows what the economy will be like when we are independent. People like to forget that we depend on raw materials from Serbia for a lot of our production,” said Barbara Kramzar, a Ljubljana journalist who deliberately invalidated her referendum vote by marking both yes and no. “But we Slovenes are very proud people and we’ll never admit we made a mistake if times get very bad. We will proudly eat Slovenian grass.”

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