RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
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RFE/RL NEWSLINE  29 March 1999

GOVERNMENT DISTANCES ITSELF FROM RIGHT-DEMOCRATS' PEACE
EFFORT. Former acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, former
First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, and former State
Tax Service head Boris Fedorov, all of whom are members of
the Right Cause party, launched their own private Balkan
peace initiative, meeting in Budapest with U.S.
presidential envoy Richard Holbrooke and Hungarian Foreign
Minister Janos Martonyi on 28 March. Foreign Minister
Ivanov told reporters the next day that "neither the
president nor the government authorized them to hold talks
and to put forward initiatives on behalf of Russia." He
added that it looked "strange that Holbrooke arrived in
Budapest all of a sudden, allegedly as a private individual
at exactly the same time as when the Russian politicians
arrived." Meanwhile, Moscow Mayor Yurii Luzhkov said after
his meeting with French President Jacques Chirac in Paris
on 26 March that he will take back to Moscow new peace
proposals. JAC

SERBIAN JEWS FLEE TO BUDAPEST. Some 80 Jews from
Yugoslavia, mainly women, elderly people, and children,
have fled to Budapest to escape the wave of NATO
bombings, Hungarian media reported, noting that the
Serbian authorities are not allowing anyone over 15 to
leave. Hungarian Workers' Party chairman Gyula Thurmer
told some 150 people demonstrating in the front of the
U.S. Embassy on 28 March that "we do not want a world
war or yet another Vietnam war, but peace, security, and
an independent Hungary free from NATO." MSZ

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