Is this the worst article about Slovenia ever written (it's from the Guardian in 2004 just before Slovenia joined the EU). How many errors can you find?

Standing aloneSlovenia has not followed the usual patterns of development, but life can still be sweet in Ljubljana, reports Ben ArisBen Aris
Wednesday April 28, 2004
Guardian UnlimitedSlovenia is the odd man out amongst the ten accession countries and does not fit any of the usual categories.

Although it was a part of the communist bloc, as part of Tito's Yugoslavia it was never locked up behind the Soviet iron curtain.

It is a Balkan state, but the residents of Ljubljana are more likely to make the half-hour drive over the north-western border to Italy for a cappuccino (a favourite weekend jaunt) than cross the five borders to the south to join the ethnic fighting in Kosovo.

It is lumped in with eastern Europe, but Austria, immediately above it, has borders that extend further east than any part of the tiny republic of 1.9 million people.

And, although it boasts probably the healthiest economy of all the ten accession countries, it is also the furthest behind with privatising the socialist-era state-owned enterprises, with somewhere between a third and half of industry still under state control.

Slovenia was born after a short and relatively bloodless 10-day war in 1991. After Tito's death in 1980, Yugoslavia began to crumble, finally collapsing in 1991. Slovenia quickly declared independence, fighting a half-hearted attempt to keep it in the fold with only 100 casualties. Since then, the centre-left Liberal Democrats have dominated Slovene politics.

"The Serbs were in control and usually manned the military installations with soldiers from other republics. But there is no large Serb population in Slovenia and I guess they thought a fight was more effort than it was worth, so, after a week, the fighting stopped," says Anka Kumar, an economist at the British embassy in Ljubljana.

The Balkan region is still being ripped apart by divisions created two centuries ago. At that time Slovenia and Croatia were part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and they are predominantly Roman Catholic countries where the Latin alphabet is used. A little further down the Dalmatian coast the Ottoman empire was dominant and there religion is predominantly Muslim and the alphabet Cyrillic. The only unifying factor is that all the languages in the region belong to the Slavic family.

Tito's mild form of socialism meant Slovenia was already doing business with the west during the cold war, making the move to independence easier. Tito broke with the Soviet Union in 1948, formed the league of non-aligned nations in 1960 and never closed the borders.

"Slovenia has a population of 2 million people and Yugoslavia 22 million. Today there are a total of five countries left from what was Yugoslavia and Slovenia exports more than all of them put together, about 12bn (£8bn) in exports and imports each year," says Branko Miklavic a manager for the Austrian bank HVB in Ljubljana.

But the country has its own ethnic rivalries. Next month the residents of Ljubljana will decide by referendum if the country's first ever mosque should be built in the capital.

Arguing over plans became so heated that Osman Djogic, a leading cleric of the small Muslim population, appealed to the constitutional court to block a referendum called by the city of Ljubljana, arguing that religious freedoms gave the Muslims the right to build a place of worship. However, the constitutional court ruled this month that the referendum will go ahead.

"We have been seeking a mosque for over 35 years. It has been a terribly mismatched and unfair game between the ruling majority and the [Muslim] minority," Djogic said after the constitutional court's decision.

Even more divisive is the fate of "the erased", some 18,000 Croats, Bosnians and Serbs who found themselves living in a new country but refused to accept Slovenian passports after independence. Their names were simply erased from the national register, leaving them stateless.

A nationwide referendum held at the beginning of April overwhelmingly voted against returning residency and other rights to the lost citizens. The decision sparked a mini political crisis after the government's junior coalition partner walked out in protest.

But the streets of Ljubljana are filled with more shoppers than protesters as the country enjoys its new-found freedoms. Crowds stroll between the shops and street cafes in the medieval old town. It is a picturesque city, with white limestone bridges crisscrossing the river that flows through the centre and a castle looking down from the top of a moraine at the edge of the old town.

With a population of only 300,000 people, Ljubljana has a village's slow rhythm and a pleasant friendliness. This causes problems for the politicians, as scandal spreads by word of mouth almost as quickly as by television, but the advantage for the citizens is that getting your voice heard is easy. The president, Janez Drnovsek, likes to walk in the wooded hills that surround the capital and are only a 10-minute walk from anywhere in the centre of the city.

"That's his favourite hill, over there," says Kumar, pointing out of the window. "Everyone knows he is there at the weekend and sometimes people with a problem go out there to ask him for help."

The small republic is also something of an economic paradox. It is doing so well that the IMF officially recognised Slovenia as "emerged" in January. It will now be a net contributor to the fund, helping to pay for, among other things, the reconstruction of Iraq. And, with a GDP per capita income of 12,000 a year, Slovenians earn twice as much as the accession country average and 70% of the EU average.

Privatisation is happening, but only slowly. Foreigners invested 160m into Slovenia in 2002, by far the lowest of any of the accession countries, but this shot up to 1.7bn the following year, almost all from the sale of a single company. Swiss multinational Novartis bought Lek, Slovenia's second largest pharmaceutical company, pharmacology being one of the few things Yugoslavia was particularly good at.

Size does matter if you are a really small country. The country has never built up much of an industrial base and foreigners snap up the few really good companies, like Lek, as soon as the government puts them under the gavel. This year investment is expected to slip back to about 200m again, but, whatever the economic climate, the residents of Ljubljana can return to their street cafes and listen to the river burble under the bridges as it has always done.