BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, July 6 (UPI) -- Slovakia's new president, Ivan Gasparovic, has issued a strong condemnation of Slovakia's wartime fascist state, the SME newspaper reported Tuesday.
Gasparovic said he wholeheartedly condemned the state, headed by the clerical fascist leader Father Josef Tiso, especially for its complicity in the deportation of tens of thousands of Slovak Jews to Nazi death camps.
The Slovak president was speaking at the unveiling of a memorial to victims of the Holocaust in the central Slovak city of Zilina.
Gasparovic, once a senior member of former Slovak Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar's populist-nationalist Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, has made great efforts since becoming president to prove his pro-Western credentials.
In the 1990s, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia at times showed an ambiguous attitude to the Tiso regime.
After World War II, Tiso was executed in what was then Czechoslovakia for treason against the state and collaboration with the Nazi regime.
