PRAGUE — The world’s latest contender for statehood, Liberland, is a tiny new, self-proclaimed country sandwiched between Croatia and Serbia that lives up to its “live and let live” motto by offering optional taxes, its president said Tuesday. “The key idea is voluntary taxes, creating a state so small that there’s almost no state,” Vit Jedlicka, a 31-year-old Czech politician from the liberal right-wing Free Citizens Party, said. To make his dream come true, Jedlicka used seven square kilometers of no-man’s land by the Danube river between Serbia and Croatia to create Liberland on April 13. All Jedlicka had to do to claim possession of the land was make a declaration. Interest in the novel project is huge with its website (http://liberland.org/en/main/) registering 1.3 million visits in the past three days. “This goes hand in hand with a huge interest in citizenship. We’ve received about 250,000 applications for citizenship in the past four days,” Jedlicka said. — AFP