Slovenia's sad independence celebrations

Slovenia celebrates its 20th anniversary as an independent state on June 25. The conservative daily Večer takes stock: "Twenty years ago extremely free-thinking magazines and publications that did not fear censorship or lawsuits were published in Slovenia. The Human Rights Committee was founded, civil society enforced Christmas celebrations, gays organised a world congress in Ljubljana. Twenty years ago Slovenia still had character but there's not much of it left nowadays. ... What went wrong? There are several possible answers. ... It wasn't important what form democracy took. The main thing was that we had our own state. The consequences were the so-called 'erased', when the bureaucrats struck the Yugoslavian citizens from the population register, the still unsolved weapons smuggling affair, the fact that the compensation for assets nationalised after World War II mostly went to the Church, and finally the state property lost as a result of privatisation. The crisis, too, is putting a damper on our celebrations of Slovenia's 20th anniversary. What a shame."    

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