By Tamas Krausz
BUDAPEST -- Hungary's right-wing government refuses to take serious action over the environmental destruction resulting from the cyanide contamination from the Romanian mine spill, which is being described as “Hungary's Chernobyl”. The government is afraid to criticise multinational capital.
A representative of the Western Australian company Esmeralda Exploration spoke very cynically on Hungarian television, claiming nothing serious had happened and the company would not pay any compensation. This is spectacularly untrue.
It is doubtful that the environmental equilibrium in the contaminated rivers can ever be fully restored. Many native species have disappeared.
More than 100 tonnes of dead fish have been taken from the Tisza River. Eagles, dogs, cats, ducks, gulls and other animals lie dead beside the river after they ate fish from it or drank the water.
Now the people must drink bottled water. After the cyanide pollution passed through Hungary, it entered the Danube River (the biggest river in the region) in former Yugoslavia.
Under pressure from the left, the Hungarian Socialist Party protested and attacked multinational capital, accusing it of behaving in eastern Europe as it does in Africa (paying no taxes, providing no public services or environmental support and causing destruction).
The radical Left Alternative group and other organisations are preparing to hold protests to demand action to limit the damage and prevent future destruction.
This “accident” -- Hungary's worst environmental catastrophe -- has again shown the real face of Eastern Europe's new “democratic capitalism”.
[Tamas Krausz is a leading member of Left Alternative and a founding editor of the left-wing theoretical journal Eszmelet.]
