Slovak president attacks political standards in New Year speech

Slovak President Michal Kovac has said that the failure of Slovakia to be among the first candidates from Central Europe for NATO and EU membership represented a failure of government policy.

Kovac made his comments during his New Year's address broadcast on Slovak radio.

"It follows that if we want to be accepted by democratic Europe as an equal partner, the principle of mutual respect obliges us to behave like a democratic partner who respects universally recognized social and political principles and values," Kovac said.

"The fact that last year we were not included in the first group of candidates for membership of such vitally important integration groupings as NATO and the European Union should tell us that at the moment advanced European states do not perceive us as a trustworthy partner benefiting from a consolidated democratic system.

This amounts to a failure of the government policy and we should be honest enough to admit it," Kovac said.

Kovac stated he did not want outsiders in particular to judge the Slovak people by the standards shown by their politicians.

"Despite this I am convinced that Slovak society is capable of joining the European countries involved in the integration processes as an equal partner soon," Kovac continued.

"Therefore we cannot accept certain statements, made both in our country and abroad, making connections between the maturity of citizens and the standards of political representation.

I believe that our people's qualities are comparable with European standards..." The reputation of Slovaks as a cultivated European people was being damaged, Kovac said, by the example set by political circles in Bratislava.

"It is therefore a bad thing that for some time an irreconcilable political struggle has been going on our political scene.

Our society is cursed also by the fact that the example provided by the high political circles has often turned hundreds of thousands of decent citizens into irreconcilable enemies." "Equally serious is the fact that many of us kept silent and did nothing more but indifferently watched when even the most excellent people were subjected to insults - for example, outstanding artists, incorruptible church personalities and respected teachers.

In this way we have narrowed our political horizon, limited our spiritual space and quite unnecessarily allowed our reputation as citizens to be damaged in the eyes of the cultivated European nations," the Slovak president said.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.