19/04/2010 (Agence Europe) - The Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, has severely criticised the fact that the permanent president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, and the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, did not travel to Warsaw on Sunday 18 April for the funeral of President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria. On Czech television, Klaus said that the fact that nobody had come from Brussels was inexcusable and showed that all the big sentences about European unity are nothing but clichés. Klaus was very close to Kaczynski and the two men shared great scepticism of the EU. The president of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, travelled to Poland at the weekend to attend the funeral, but Van Rompuy and Barroso remained in Brussels because of the shutdown of European airspace. People at the Commission say that Barroso was in Strasbourg on Saturday 17 April to attend the “États Généraux de l'Europe” and had only returned to Brussels in the evening. The two presidents had hoped until the last moment that they would be able to fly to Warsaw, explain people in Van Rompuy's circle, but had been forced to cancel the trip on Saturday night, unable to find other means of transport. (H.B./transl.fl)