President of the Slovak Republic at the NATO Summit in Riga

In Latvian metropolis Riga, the NATO Summit was held. It was attended also by Slovak President Ivan Gašparovič.

After the end of the talks, he said that the Alliance is capable to meet the tasks and mission on which the Alliance establishment was based. The Summit mainly dealt with questions of the future extension of the North Atlantic Alliance by new members as well as issues of cooperation with other organizations and international institutions and problems of building technical capacities of particular armies of the NATO member states.

President Ivan Gašparovič also said that the topics of the Summit included also issues related to the trans-Atlantic cooperation of Europe, USA and Canada. „The Slovak Republic is a fully-fledged member of NATO, and each member states has to fulfil the conditions to which it has committed.” Referring to the Afghan issue, President Ivan Gašparovič said that the Slovak Republic meets its tasks in line with agreements, and the transfer of our troops from Kabul to Kandahar was not a direct subject of the Summit talks.

According to what the Slovak President said, however, the Slovak Republic is ready to meet its tasks also in Afghanistan. By March next year, the Slovak Government should definitely decide about transferring the Slovak engineer unit from the North to the South of Afghanistan. In connection with this issue, Defence Minister of the Slovak Republic František Kašický underlined the need of preparedness for such a transfer and a guarantee of general safety of the operation taking into account results of the inspection team work of the Defence Ministry of the Slovak Republic.

At the same time, it is needed to solve the question of mandate of our engineer unit in the context of the positive standpoint of the National Council of the Slovak Republic.

Regarding this, President Ivan Gašparovič said that there are commitments that need to be fulfilled provided that certain conditions are met so that the transfer of our engineer unit to the South of Afghanistan could take place.

As for the death of some Slovak soldiers working in foreign missions and operations, he noted that “it was a tax on solidarity, a tax on freedom and peace we have today.“