The six-foot-high tidal wave of caustic sludge that buried several Hungarian villages last week and swept away houses, cars and bridges claimed nine lives. Scores more are suffering chemical burns as a result of the reservoir failure in Ajka. An area covering 40 square kilometres has been contaminated and streams and rivers polluted, destroying plant and animal life...
According to Hungarian Aluminium (MAL), which owns the reservoir, only two percent of the sludge escaped in the spill—leaving the vast bulk of the toxin still at risk of pouring out. The disaster has been called various things—a “natural catastrophe,” according to the self-serving statement of MAL, a result of “human error,” in the words of Fidesz Party Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Others have called it the legacy of Hungary’s pre-1990 Stalinist regime—overlooking the passage of two decades since then.
By the time the aluminium industry was up for grabs in 1995, some 536 large enterprises had been liquidated, 620 privatised and 924 partially privatised. Unemployment rose rapidly alongside a huge transfer of social wealth to a numerically small elite... One of these figures was the former prime minister and leader of the newly established social democratic MSZP party, Ferenc Gyurcsány... Gyurcsány acquired much of his huge personal fortune from the privatisation of the aluminium industry. Today he is one of the richest men in Hungary...
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/oct2010/pers-o16.shtml
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