A new country is to be created on September 9, 1999 - Cyber Yugoslavia. The country, which exists only on the Internet, will issue citizenship and passports and eventually hopes to join the United Nations.
It has been created by a group of people nostalgic for the former Yugoslavia, which broke up in bloodshed in 1991. "We lost our country in 1991," says the site at http://www.juga.com.

"Starting September 1999 this will be our home. We don't have a physical land, but we do have nationality and we are giving CY citizenship and CY passports." The site invites anyone who "feels Yugoslav, regardless of your current nationality" to apply for citizenship. Only those on a secret list of "undesirables" will be refused, it says, without giving details.

Once the CY has more than five million citizens it plans to apply for UN membership. "When this happens, we will ask for 20 square meters of land anywhere on Earth to be our country. On this land, we will keep our server," the site says. The idea was first mooted by Zoran B., said to be a former author forced into exile in western Europe who now works as a computer programmer. More than 300 people have been granted citizenship in the first four days of the site appearing. The site warns that due to "the unbelievably high volume of applications" processing takes more than 48 hours.