-Caveat Lector- <<Um, who's putting up the jack for all this? >> >From BudapestSun www.budapestsun.com Army bases could house war refugees By Géda Szamosi May. 20, 1999 - Vol. VII, Is. 20 Six-party negotiations took place at the Foreign Ministry last week regarding the problem of caring for the increasing number of Yugoslav refugees arriving in Hungary. The Migration Office has been lobbying to open three military bases in southern Hungary to accommodate them. Foreign Minister János Martonyi said after the meeting that it is crucial not to lump the Kosovo crisis with the issue of ethnic Hungarians living in Vojvodina. Since news of the imminent arrival of 20 air tankers at Ferihegy and 27 jet fighters to the Taszár Nato base in southern Hungary, the border traffic from Yugoslavia has been slowly increasing. Customs officials last week reported 1,800 Yugoslavian refugees from the Nato airstrikes, including 700 ethnic Hungarians, 600 Albanians, 350 Serbs and the rest from other ethnic backgrounds. István Dobó, head of the Migration Office (MMH), said the influx has not yet reached "flood" proportions. However, he said many who had arrived on holiday or business could run out of money and apply for refugee status. The number of war refugees not yet officially registered who are living in border camps or homeless shelters could be as high as 20,000 he said. Most of them are Hungarians and Serbs. The number of registered refugees at the three refugee camps operated by MMH last week reached 2,500, approximately 1,300 of whom were Yugoslavian citizens, Dobó said. Their daily keep costs Ft800-1000 per day, he said. Another 300 refugees are staying at temporary shelters operated by border guard stations; the remaining war refugees were staying at private places. Dobó said talks were underway to let the refugees stay at three military bases in southern Hungary, one in Szeged, one in Baja and one in Orosháza. He added that substantial financial aid would be needed to furnish the bases, as neither the Interior Ministry or the Prime Minister’s Office has funds for such needs. To open a shelter for 1,000 people, some Ft40 million ($17.5) would be needed. Utilities and food would cost about Ft30 million ($13.5) per month, Dobó said. Hungary was also facing the problem of helping those trying to move on to Western countries. Dobó said MMH was in direct contact with embassies in Budapest and was doing everything possible to inform refugees about official requirements to travel to the West. The Hungarian Red Cross is helping to unite families, and finding many missing refugees waiting for visas in the embassies of Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Holland and the US. << & >> <<Begin excerpt>> > MP wants Vojvodina statehood > > May. 20, 1999 - Vol. VII, Is. 20 <Picture> > > The Government has distanced itself from a statement made by a > coalition leader that Yugoslavia’s province of Vojvodina should seek > statehood. > > Zsolt Lányi, deputy head of the junior coalition partner Independent > Smallholder Party (FKgP) and Chairman of Parliament’s Defense > Committee, made the statement in reference to Yugoslavia’s > northernmost province where some 300,000 ethnic Hungarians constitute > 16% of the population. <<End excerpt>> <Picture>Copyright 1999 * The Budapest Sun * All rights reserved >From Int'l Herald Tribune Paris, Tuesday, May 25, 1999 Living 'Like Cavemen' in Belgrade: No Water, No Electricity ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By Steven Erlanger New York Times Service ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BELGRADE - In the Belgrade suburb of Zemun on Monday, people were complaining that even McDonald's did not have coffee, because there was no water and no electricity. In Kovin, a small town in the northern province of Vojvodina, there was no power for the air-raid sirens. So the populace was relying for warnings on the church bells, which ring and pause in an imitation of the broken so und of an air alert. Branislav Grbic described with fury how he had to make a fireplace out of broken bricks in his Belgrade courtyard to heat milk for his baby son and grill the chicken in his freezer, before it spoiled. ''This is nearly the 21st century, and they force us to live like cavemen,'' he said. ''Slobo,'' he said, referring to President Slobodan Milosevic, ''has plenty of power and water, and so does the army.'' After two months of bombing, which began March 24, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has now gone after Serbia's electricity and water supplies in a serious way, using high-explosive bombs that are doing permanent da mage to both systems, essential to modern civilian life. People are buying up batteries and bottled water and are boiling eggs, when they have electricity to do it, so they have something to eat in the long, dark, powerless night, when the planes come again and anti-aircraft fi re is the only light in the sky. Electricity supply is intermittent for the luckiest, while workers struggle to provide emergency power to hospitals, bakeries and the water company. But the hospitals are having the most trouble finding enough water to ba the patients and sterilize equipment; the city is attempting to supply them with water trucks. Without power to run the pumps, many urban dwellers have no running water, and if they have water, little hot water, because most dwellings have electric water heaters. According to city officials, Belgrade is down to les s than 10 percent of its water reserves, because it cannot filter new supplies, and only 30 percent of residents, mostly in low-lying areas, have running water. The electricity cuts, which have been temporary in the past, intensified with new NATO attacks on Saturday morning. As the national electricity grid, EPS, has begun to restore power, NATO has attacked it again and again. The company urged consumers to be patient because, it said, NATO had now hit Serbia's five major transmitting plants. The largest democratic opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement led by Vuk Draskovic, issued a scathing attack Monday on NATO's targeting of power and water, calling this ''collective retaliation'' and ''crimes agai nst the civilian population.'' The party called for quick action by the UN Security Council, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. ''The situation requires an urgent reaction by major international institutions, rather than a slow diplomatic process, since a flagrant violation of all international norms and customs of war is happening before the eyes of the entire world,'' the party said in a statement. The opposition Democratic Party, whose leader, Zoran Djindjic, has been attacked as a traitor by the regime, said that cutting electricity would produce needless deaths of the innocent, the very young and the very old, sa ying: ''Such attacks are particularly unreasonable at a time when diplomatic activity is being stepped up and there is a chance to find a solution.'' Some analysts here said they assumed that NATO was intensifying both its attacks and its rhetoric as a way to press Mr. Milosevic into signing a less favorable deal to end the war. But Jadranka Djordjevic is caustic about such an assumption. ''If NATO wants to overturn the government, this is not the way to do it,'' she said. ''Bombing has never had that result anywhere in the world. I am absolutely certain this will not make people revolt against their government - they will revolt against whoever is doing this to them. ''NATO is terrorizing 6 million civilians in large cities in Yugoslavia. Making people's lives miserable is not solving any problem.'' Miss Djordjevic, 64, was 6 years old in 1941, when the Nazis bombed Belgrade, and she remembers the Allied bombing of the occupied city in 1944. ''Our generation is well-trained in war,'' she said. ''My mother always had salt, flour and dried yeast in the house at all times. I have 100 liters of water in my apartment now. Of course, then we had wood stoves. My mot her always implored me not to get rid of our wood stove. And I still have it in the pantry.'' She has no stock of wood just now, Miss Djordjevic said. ''But as a last resort I can use my parquet floor. In fact, I think it could come to that this winter.'' She lives in downtown Belgrade, on the second floor, and a relative who lives in an 8th-floor apartment in New Belgrade has moved in with her. ''Of course, we all worry about our freezers and how long the food will stay s afe to eat,'' she said. ''The problem is that for most of us, that food is now worth a fortune. We can't replace it if we have to throw it out.'' Miss Djordjevic worked much of her life for the U.S. Embassy here, and she is extremely bitter about this war. ''I worked for 30 years to elevate relations between our two countries and they were destroyed in two days of bombing,'' she said. Will the new difficulties affect the way Serbs think about Kosovo? ''People now think of survival, of keeping old ones warm and the little ones safe,'' she said. ''It's exhausting. When you have to fear for your survival, you don't think politics. You just get angry at people who want to make you live like cavemen.'' Miss Djordjevic also had some choice words for President Bill Clinton and wife, Hillary: ''People who learn history from Spielberg movies should not tell us how to live our lives.'' As for the British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, ''I've heard he's said that this might make people rise against the regime. If he really said that, it means he's a terrorist and should be put on trial by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. You cannot terrorize civilians in this way. We are talking about millions of people here who are deprived of basic necessities.'' 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