Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (3940)	4/15/1999 8:48:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 17770

Lot of money are to be made by ethnic hungarians... :) For Hungary, new NATO membership is mixed blessing 11:09 a.m. Apr 15, 1999 Eastern By Michael Roddy MOHACS, Hungary, April 15 (Reuters) - In this small Hungarian port on the Danube River, residents have a daily reminder of NATO's air war against neighbouring Yugoslavia. ''The bombs are falling just 130 km (80 miles) away,'' said Attila Hejjas, finance director of the MOFA fibreboard factory, Mohacs's biggest employer, with some 480 workers. ''Very often at night we can hear the airplanes overhead,'' he told Reuters during a visit this week to Mohacs, last stop on the Danube before it flows into Croatia and, further on, Serbia. Hungary, along with Poland and the Czech Republic, joined NATO on March 12, just 12 days before NATO began its bombing campaign to end Serb repression of ethnic Albanians in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. Some officials in the new NATO countries see the bombing as confirmation they made the right choice, providing security on their road to eventual membership of the European Union. ''Poland can feel safe,'' Polish Defence Minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz said. ''If NATO intervened there (Kosovo) it will have a hundred times more reasons to intervene if Poland's security is threatened.'' But among Hungarians there is a growing fear that Hungary, with its flat terrain and long border with Serbia, could play a key role if NATO decides to send in ground troops. NATO says it has no plans to fight the Yugoslav army on the ground and the suggestion is almost angrily dismissed by some top Hungarian officials. ''People are getting worried partly because of the reports of some experts giving ideas of what kinds of actions should be taken -- but this is an academic exercise,'' Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi told Reuters. But reports of planning for ground troop deployment have appeared in U.S. newspapers and Istvan Szent-Ivanyi, head of the Hungarian parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, said on Thursday he was aware that Hungary figured in them. ''We understand that there are plans,'' he told a press breakfast in Budapest. ''But I'm sure that...only in the ultimate case is it conceivable at all.'' Hungarians generally support the bombing campaign but are distinctly worried about a ground war. A recent Gallup poll showed that 61 percent of 500 people polled supported the NATO bombing, virtually unchanged from a poll taken just after the bombing started. But it also showed that only 35 percent of Hungarians would support a ground war against the Yugoslavs -- compared to polls in the United States showing a majority of Americans now in favour of a ground war if it is deemed necessary. Hungarians also are concerned about how any ground war might affect the 300,000 ethnic Hungarians living across the border in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina. Istvan Erdelyi, head of the Interior Ministry's office of refugees and immigration, said just under 300 Yugoslav ethnic Hungarians, most of them men, had entered Hungary and applied for refugee status since the bombing began. So far there is no sign of a mass exodus, but he said he was worried it could change. ''At the moment there is no sign of discrimination against the Hungarians in Vojvodina,'' he said. ''But I have this fear that if the Serbs in Vojvodina start to attack their Hungarian neighbours because Hungary is a member of NATO, we could get refugees in much larger numbers.'' Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited.