Hungary fears a flood of refugees if Serbian forces were to attack ethnic Hungarians living in northern Yugoslavia.
"We are different from all other NATO member states," the Hungarian Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Orban, said yesterday. "We are a neighbouring country to Yugoslavia and we cannot put a quota on how many refugees we accept. If there is a wave of refugees to the north then we must accept everyone who comes from a war region."
Hungarian border authorities say that since the NATO offensive began two weeks ago, only a few hundred Kosovan Albanians have crossed into Hungary, apparently because anyone fleeing Kosovo has to cross Serbia to reach the distant northern border.
"We know that from Vojvodina [province] numbers of Croatian families have gone to Croatia and it cannot be excluded that [ethnic] Hungarian families may want to come to Hungary," Mr Orban told a news conference. "This might be the second phase of the conflict."
Mr Orban said he was concerned about Serbian forces stranded near Hungary by NATO's bombing of bridges across the Danube at Novi Sad, in northern Serbia. Novi Sad, Yugoslavia's second city, is the capital of Vojvodina, home to over 300,000 ethnic Hungarians.
"Considerable troops of the Serbian army came northwards and it was not by chance that some of the bridges were bombed by NATO to cut off retreat possibilities," he said. "This means some of the Serbian troops are not far from the Hungarian border."
Mr Orban said the interests of the Vojvodina Hungarians, the only ethnic community in Serbia not to come into serious conflict with the authorities, were safeguarded by Hungary's membership of NATO.
"The logic of the last eight years in that region is that sooner or later every minority has come into sharp conflict with the Serbs," he said. "But when I voted for Hungarian NATO membership I did so driven by the conviction that Hungary is a more secure supporter of Hungarians living beyond its borders if it is a member of a strong alliance."
Hungary became a NATO member last month, along with Poland and the Czech republic, in the alliance's first expansion to include former communist states.
Red Cross organisations launched a joint appeal in Geneva yesterday for $100 million to help Kosovan refugees and to fund bigger operations in the Balkans.
The appeal was issued by the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.