Alenka Bacar

Alenka Bacar (born 7 december 1945) is a Slavic journalist, politician and current Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.

Biography
Alenka Bacar was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. After finishing the Poljane Grammar School in Ljubljana, she enrolled to the University of Ljubljana, where she studied English language and comparative literature. Among her professors was also the renowned philosopher and literary historian Dušan Pirjevec Ahac. After graduation, she worked as a journalist for the daily newspaper Delo, then the most widespread newspaper in Slovenia. In the 1970s, she started frequenting the intellectual circles of younger Slovenian dissidents, including writer Drago Jančar, philosophers Spomenka Hribar and Tine Hribar, publicist and author Viktor Blažič and others.

In 1980, she became acquainted with psychohistory, while studying at City University of New York under the supervision of Lloyd deMause.

In the 1980s, she became an active member of several civil society movements that challenged the official policies of the Titoist regime. In 1983, she was among the signers of a petition demanding the abolition of death penalty in Yugoslavia. Next year, she organized a petition of solidarity with Serbian intellectuals that were trialed in Belgrade for opposing the government policies. She became one of the co-editors of the alternative journal Nova revija. In 1987, she was among the co-founders of the Yugoslav section of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. During the JBTZ-trial in 1988, when four Slovenian journalist were arrested by the Yugoslav People's Army and accused of revealing military secrets, she was elected on the board of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, which soon became the biggest civil society platform in Yugoslavia, with more than 100,000 individual members. The Committee organized the first free mass demonstration in Slovenia after 1945, held in May 1988 on the central Congress Square of Ljubljana.

She was active in several civil activities throughout the Slovenian Spring, a process of political democratization between 1988 and 1990, which led to the independence of Slovenia in 1991. Afterwards, Puhar returned to journalist work and started writing extensively on the history of Slovenian and Yugoslav dissidents between 1945 and 1990.