Tirgu-Jiu - Some 15,000 striking Romanian miners continued to advance on Bucharest yesterday after breaking through police barricades, as the government warned it may call in the army to stop them.
The militants, who have been on strike for over two weeks, reached the town of Tirgu-Jiu, 250 km west of Bucharest, after spending the night in the Jiu Valley, where police had tried unsuccessfully to block them. "We did not give up in the Jiu valley and we are certainly not going to give up now," a union leader, Mr Miron Cozma, told the miners in front of the police headquarters in the town.
The strike, over wages and threats of pit closures, has raised fears of a repeat of miners' protests in 1990-1991 in Bucharest that turned violent. President Emil Constantinescu called an emergency meeting of the country's political leaders yesterday to discuss the march, saying afterwards that he was determined to avoid a repetition of the 1990-1991 scenes.