RFE/RL Daily Report
No. 217, 15 November 1994
Note: The Daily Report will not appear Wednesday, 16 November
NEW HUNGARIAN COALITION AGREEMENT ON MEDIA LAW. Following last
week's six-party talks, media experts from the ruling Hungarian
Socialist Party and Alliance of Free Democrats have reached
agreement on the principles of a draft media law, MTI reported on
14 November. A subcommittee on which Hungarians abroad will also
be represented is to supervise the programs for Hungarians in
foreign countries. Hungarian Television, Hungarian Radio, and
Danube Television are to become joint-stock companies, and their
current chairmen are to remain in office for four years. The
government coalition parties hope to put the draft media law on
the parliament's agenda this year. The plenary debate and the
passage of the law are to take place in January and February 1995,
respectively. -- Alfred Reisch, RFE/RL, Inc.
[As of 1200 CET]
(Compiled by Jan Cleave and Penny Morvant)
Copyright 1994, RFE/RL, Inc. All rights reserved.
*****************************************************************
A tovabbterjesztest a New York-i szekhelyu Magyar Emberi Jogok
Alapitvany tamogatja.
[*] [*] [*] [*] [*][*] [*][*][*]
[*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*]
[*][*][*] [*][*][*] [*][*] [*][*]
[*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*]
[*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*]
Reposting is supported by Hungarian Human Rights Foundation News
and Information Service.
*****************************************************************
|
NATO: A Sweet, but Misleading, Song
JIM HOAGLAND
(C) 1994 THE WASHINGTON POST (LEGI-SLATE ARTICLE NO. 216797)
Bosnia burns, while NATO plays a sweet but unrealistic song of expansion
and new unity on its fiddle.
The war in the Balkans is again lurching toward violent escalation. But
the European and American governments allied in NATO seem powerless to halt
today's tragedy. Instead the politicians, diplomats and generals who head the
world's most powerful military bureaucracy talk and posture about events far
over the horizon.
Their talk is about the future of NATO and how it will take in new
members, expanding to provide the best of all futures for Eastern Europe,
Ukraine and even Russia. Designing utopia in time for high-level diplomatic
conferences in December is the priority task in NATO's foreign affairs
ministries.
Urgent action by NATO to stop Europe's bloodiest and cruelest conflict
since World War II is blocked by political differences within the
organization. And the Clinton administration's symbolic decision to stop
enforcing the arms embargo against Bosnia will significantly aggravate those
differences and create new strains in the alliance.
The Nov. 11 announcement of a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from an
already leaky embargo will add no protection to the Bosnian Muslim government
in Sarajevo as that regime faces the final offensive proclaimed the same day
by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
To be fair, Clinton's embargo action is not designed to change the
battlefield situation. It is part of a complex campaign of pressure and
incentives Washington is applying to the Serbs in Bosnia and Belgrade - and
to America's NATO partners and Russia as well - to get a negotiated
settlement to the war. If the campaign works, the administration will score a
major diplomatic triumph.
Hope that it works. The cost of renewed failure in Bosnia now would be
devastating in human and political terms.
The visible gap between the alliance's rhetoric about unity and purpose,
and its ability to act in a real crisis outside its original purpose of
territorial self-defense, is growing. That disparity undermines public
confidence in NATO as it renews talk of taking in new members by expanding
eastward to include former Soviet satellite nations.
I can recall no time when the gap between talk and the ability to act
was greater in NATO affairs, or when public perceptions were more at variance
with the ideas on the minds of NATO's key figures. The alliance's leadership
is deeply involved in behind-closed-doors discussions about NATO's future
that would shock their countries' citizens if they were tape-recorded and
played on the air.
The discussions center on questions such as these: Is it enough to extend
NATO's guarantee (and thus America's nuclear umbrella) to the Czech republic,
Poland and Hungary by making them NATO members? Or must the guarantee and
umbrella also cover Ukraine? And Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors, Estonia
and Latvia? Would pushing the front line of NATO defense to the eastern
frontier of Poland and stopping there send a signal that the Baltic countries
are outside NATO's defensive perimeter and that Russian reform is lost?
This debate proceeds at a time when every NATO government is cutting back
on defense spending, reducing the size of its armed forces and emphasizing
economic and physical security for its citizens at home.
The sense of a spreading inconsistency in policy is amplified by the
public support these same governments extend to Russia, the presumed threat
to Eastern Europe. Washington and its allies assure the world publicly that
Boris Yeltsin's government and democracy are more entrenched every day, while
making plans that have coherence only if they suspect Russian democracy will
soon collapse.
The new NATO debate about membership is being driven in part by the
artificial need of NATO members to come up with a work program for the North
Atlantic Council meeting of foreign and defense ministers in mid-December.
The NATO debate is also central to the December summit of the Conference on
Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Budapest, which President
Clinton may attend.
But serious discussion of extending full NATO nuclear protection to
former Soviet satellites - especially to nations on the Russian doorstep - is
still premature. The new Republican majorities in the House and Senate should
think twice before whooping through tough-sounding language about expanding
NATO to face down the Russian bear, as Jesse Helms may be tempted to seek.
That would require a lot of money, and a lot of public support for new
military forces in Europe. The smoke rising from Bosnia shows how little
stomach there is among allied governments to provide either commodity now.
*****************************************************************
A tovabbterjesztest a New York-i szekhelyu Magyar Emberi Jogok
Alapitvany tamogatja.
[*] [*] [*] [*] [*][*] [*][*][*]
[*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*]
[*][*][*] [*][*][*] [*][*] [*][*]
[*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*]
[*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*]
Reposting is supported by Hungarian Human Rights Foundation News
and Information Service.
*****************************************************************
|
