7

Today, Slovenia is not facing a challenge from outside, as the was the case in the early 1990s, but challenges within the country, the prime minister said.

"We have become our own biggest challenge because we were unable to curb the massive greed and manipulation of influential individuals and groups in Slovenia," Cerar said.

President Borut Pahor, Defence Minister Janko Veber, Interior Minister Vesna Györkös Žnidar and former President Danilo Türk also attended the event organised by the Independence War Veterans' Association and the Sever Police Veterans' Association.

The withdrawal of Yugoslav troops is often considered one of the final steps in Slovenia's independence movement that started in the 1980s and brough the first democratic election in April 1990.

The negotiations on the Yugoslav troops' exiting Slovenia were closed on 18 October and the withdrawal was completed a week later, when the last of the troops left on two boats departing from the port of Koper.

The war started four months earlier, a day after the Slovenian parliament passed the Basic Constitutional Charter on the Sovereignty and Independence and the Declaration of Independence on 25 June 1991.

The Yugoslav federal government retorted, ordering the military and the federal police to "protect" federal regulations at border crossing between Slovenia and Croatia, setting the groundwork for the attack on Slovenia that began in the night of 26 June.

In the ensuing ten-day war, 18 Slovenian fighters were killed and 182 were wounded, while the Yugoslav army counted 44 dead and 146 wounded.

A ceasefire was signed on 2 July and on 7 July the two sides adopted a declaration on the Brijuni archipelago in Croatia ending all hostilities and mandating a three-month moratorium on independence activities.

, nearly four months after the end of Slovenia's ten-day independence war