08 January 2006
A Catholic archbishop in Slovakia has come under strong criticism for calling the wartime rule of a pro-Nazi priest a "time of well-being". Archbishop Jan Sokol was referring to the regime of Jozef Tiso, who ruled Slovakia from 1939-1945, a country formally independent but in fact a puppet state of Nazi Germany. It severely discriminated against Jews and Roma and sent thousands of them to their deaths in the concentration camps of Nazi-occupied Poland. When recalling his early years in a television interview, Sokol said that he had respect for Tiso. "I remember him from my childhood. We used to be very poor but, under his rule, the situation greatly improved," he said. His fond recollections drew a scathing response from minorities in Slovakia that are both wary and critical of current prime minister Robert Fico and his decision to bring an ultra-nationalist party into his ruling coalition - a move that has also been denounced by the Hungarian community in Slovakia and the government in Hungary.
Archbishop Sokol "failed to mention the fate of over 70,000 Slovak Jews who were deported by the Slovak government" to Nazi concentration camps, where most of them were murdered, the association of Slovakia's Jewish organizations declared, adding: "For us, the Holocaust survivors, such a misleading statement about the totalitarian Slovakia is unacceptable. We feel offended by Sokol's open admiration of that racist state." Ladislav Richter, the head of Slovakia's Council of Roma Communities, also took issue with Archbishop Sokol's remarks, recalling that under Tiso's rule, gypsies were banned from public transport and buildings and entire Roma settlements were relocated by force. Historian Dusan Kovac said so-called wartime prosperity was "a legend, a myth" and denounced Tiso's Slovakia as "a state of the will of Hitler". A spokesman for the archbishop said he had only expressed a personal opinion, but the church in mostly Catholic Slovakia has been criticized for not formally condemning Tiso and for maintaining an ambivalent attitude towards his pro-Nazi regime.
