SLOVAKIA:Rights groups in Slovakia have lambasted one of the country's Catholic archbishops for calling the wartime rule of a pro-Nazi priest a "time of wellbeing".
Archbishop Jan Sokol was referring to the regime of Fr Jozef Tiso, president from 1939-1945 of a Slovakia that called itself "independent" but was 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, Archbishop 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 populist prime minister Robert Fico and his decision to bring a notorious ultra-nationalist party into the ruling coalition - a move that has also been denounced by the Hungarian community in Slovakia and the government in Budapest.
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, an association of Slovakia's Jewish organisations said yesterday. "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," the association added.
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, [ which] during the whole time was his satellite and served his interests".
A spokesman for the archbishop said he had only expressed a personal opinion, but the church in mostly Catholic Slovakia has been criticised for not formally condemning Tiso and for maintaining an ambivalent attitude towards his pro-Nazi regime.
Hitler's Germany took direct control of Slovakia after an anti-Nazi uprising in August 1944, but the Soviet Red Army and its allies occupied the country soon afterwards. After the war, Slovakia was absorbed back into Czechoslovakia and Jozef Tiso was tried and hanged in 1947.