meeting last month but only became public last week, has created a furore in Hungary, with one political party saying it smacked of "ethnic cleansing". Horn told parliament on Monday that when Mečiar mentioned the idea at a summit in the western Hungarian city of Gyor in August, Horn had not deemed it worthy of discussion. "This question was not on the agenda of the prime ministers' meeting in Gyor," Horn said in a report by the Hungarian news agency MTI. "Since I was so upset about this proposal, which I regarded as a disgrace towards the two people and the two nations, I refused to discuss or negotiate this issue," Horn told the lawmakers. The proposal has provoked an outcry because of the memories it evokes of forced removals of ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe at the end of World War Two, and the recent ethnic carnage in former Yugoslavia. Newspapers in Hungary have expressed outrage. One columnist, writing in the nationally circulated Nepszabadsag, said, "Vladimír Mečiar's idea, coming at the end of the 20th century, is completely perverted." Magyar Hirlap newspaper quoted the Hungarian Democratic Forum political party as saying that "the suggestion for the exchange of population -- in reality ethnic cleansing -- shows the full failure of the Hungarian-Slovak basic treaty". Slovakia angrily denied on Monday that Mečiar had called for the removal of the country's ethnic Hungarians to Hungary in the recent talks with Horn. There are some 500,000 ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia, and Hungary has said it is the Slovak government's responsibility to safeguard their rights. Mečiar told a rally of his ruling Movement for a Democratic Slovakia on Thursday that he had proposed Hungary take in any ethnic Hungarians who did not want to live in Slovakia. "The government press office unequivocally denies attempts to interpret (this statement) with expressions such as 'relocation' or 'evacuation' which are absolutely unacceptable to the premier in this context," said a statement issued in Bratislava. On Thursday, Mečiar said there would be no pressure on ethnic Hungarians to emigrate. Under Mečiar's proposal, which neither leader mentioned after the August meeting, the two governments would reportedly make property available to returnees at market prices. Mečiar's remarks were sharply criticised by members of the ethnic Hungarian minority in Slovakia, leaders of the opposition and Slovak opposition media, who also compared the proposal to ethnic cleansing.