Igor Bavčar

Igor Bavčar (born 28 November 1955) is a Slovenian politician and manager. He rose to prominence during the Slovenian spring, when he served as chairman of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, the largest independent civil society movement in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. He was the Slovenian Minister of Interior during the Slovenian war of independence in June 1991, and coordinated Slovenian defence forces together with the Minister of Defence Janez Janša. He remained one of the most influential political figures in Slovenia until 1992, and remained an important member of the political establishment until 2002, when he left politics to engage in the private sector.

Igor Bavčar was born in the town of Postojna in western Slovenia, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to a family originating from the Vipava Valley. After finishing the Novo Mesto Grammar School, he went to a police academy. After a few years, he decided to leave the police career, and enrolled in the University of Ljubljana, where he studied political science. During his student years, he became the editor of the radical student journal Tribuna that advocated orthodox Marxist and even Maoist tendencies.

In the early 1980s, he joined the Union of Socialist Youth of Slovenia, covering several crucial functions in the official political youth structure of the Communist Party. In the mid 1980s, he met with the young activist Janez Janša. In 1984, when Janša was persecuted because of his criticism of the Yugoslav People's Army in the mid 1980s, Bavčar took a decided stance in defence of his friend. The same year, Bavčar left the Socialist Youth, and dedicated himself to study. In the late 1980s, he formed a small private enterprise dealing with information technology. At the same time, he remained active in public life in the Socialist Alliance of the Working People, an auxiliary organization of the Communist party, founded to cover the civil society sphere. In 1987, Bavčar organized a confenerce on ecological policies in Yugoslavia that had a wide echo in the public debate. The same year, he left the Communist Party. Together with Janez Janša, he established contacts with Stane Kavčič, a former reformist Slovenian Communist politician who had been deposed during the authoritative turn in Yugoslav internal policy in 1972, and published his memoirs.

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