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Former Slovenian president Drnovsek dies

People write in the book of condolences in Ljubljana on Saturday after former Slovenian president Janez Drnovsek passed away in the morning after a long battle against cancer. PHOTO: EPA

Former president Janez Drnovsek, who helped lead Slovenia to independence from Yugoslavia and later enthralled many of his countrymen by adopting a New Age lifestyle, died on Saturday, his office said. He was 57.

Mild-mannered but resolute, Drnovsek had been a political icon for years, in part for working to keep violence at a minimum when Slovenia declared independence in 1991. He later led the country to EU and NATO membership. The country of 2 million currently holds the six-month rotating EU presidency.

In Brussels, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said Drnovsek played a "crucial role in preparing Slovenia for entering the European Union [in 2004], where Slovenians gained their rightful place in the family of European nations."

In recent years, as he battled cancer, Drnovsek won the hearts of many of his countrymen again for his radical shift to a holistic lifestyle and his authorship of New Age-influenced books.

Drnovsek served as prime minister from 1992 to 2002, after which he became president. He did not run for a second term in elections late last year and was replaced by Danilo Turk in December. Drnovsek had not been seen in public since then.

His office gave no specific cause of death, but said he died at his home.

Drnovsek had a cancerous kidney removed in 1999. In 2005, he acknowledged that doctors had diagnosed what he described as "formations" -- apparently cancer -- on his lungs and liver in 2001, a year before he was elected president.

Nevertheless, he generally carried out his duties without disruptions.

He said he realized in 2005 that doctors could not cure him. Instead, he insisted that he had cured himself simply by changing his diet, his lifestyle and his way of thinking.

After many years as a straight-laced politician, Drnovsek turned into a New Age guru.

"It is hard for me to say if the change was only caused by the illness," Drnovsek said in an interview last year. "It is true that the illness acts as a shock -- it awakens one."

He moved from Ljubljana, the capital, to the remote village of Zaplana, where he lived with his dog. He baked his own bread and ate only organic fruit and vegetables. He had no TV.

He considered some of the daily political give and take a waste of time and focused instead on the fight for the poor and weak, from Darfur to Kosovo.

Once an important Slovenian supporter of the EU, he grew critical of it, complaining at one point, regarding the union's agricultural subsidies, that the EU "subsidizes a cow each day with US$2 -- that's more than half the human population gets."

He wrote about the perils of technology and urged humans to rely instead on each other.
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