William Penn Life, 2010 (45. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

2010-06-01 / 6. szám

They also reported that almost all would-be escapees they caught were foreigners.

Hungarians, for their part, had already been permitted to travel wherever they wished since the beginning of 1988. Because of these new freedoms, many in Budapest resented the fact that the government was spending money to maintain the run-down border facilities. Although the annual maintenance cost of close to $1 million was relatively low compared with the country's foreign debt of $17 billion, it was enough to serve as an argument in favor of dismantling the border facilities.

Then-Prime Minister Miklós Németh had hardly assumed office when, in late 1988, he eliminated the budget for maintaining the signaling system. The first barbed wire fences at the border were dismantled on May 2, 1989. When Foreign Minister Horn arrived, bolt cutters in hand, for his photo opportunity eight weeks later, the Hungarian army was already boosting its revenue with the sale of rusty sections of barbed wire fencing.

"To be honest, I don't see a problem with it." According to official records, those were the words with which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev commented on the Hungarians' plans to open the Iron Curtain, during Németh's visit to Moscow in March 1989. Did the Kremlin ruler, as Németh assumes today, underestimate the consequences of this step?

By that point, Németh and a small group of reformers were already at work in Hungary. They differed from rulers in the rest of the socialist world as much as a pioneer battalion differs from a combat tank unit. The leader and patron saint of all Hungarian forward thinkers and contrarians was the politburo member Imre Pozsgay.

Pozsgay had always been ahead of his time. In 1968, he wrote a dissertation titled "Some Questions of the Further Development of Socialist Democracy and of Our Political System." In 1981, by then a member of the Hungarian Communist Party Central Committee, he was the first to warn against Hungary embarking on a "road to the debt trap." In 1988, he described the border facilities as "technically, morally and historically" outdated, and he participated in the removal of long-term Hungarian leader János Kádár as general secretary. In May 1989, Pozsgay traveled to West Berlin, where he referred to the Berlin Wall, which the East Germans claimed was an "anti-fascist protective rampart," as a "disgrace" that had to come down.

Thanks in part to Pozsgay's efforts, Hungary joined the Geneva Refugee Convention on June 12. This meant that Hungary could now cite internationally binding agreements as justification for its refusal to return "border violators" to their native countries. In the ensuing weeks, campsites along Lake Balaton, as well as parks and the grounds of the West German embassy in Budapest began filling up with tens of thousands of East Germans.

Many of them had already gotten wind of an opportunity that no one was mentioning officially at that time: The door to the West had opened a crack in Hungary.

East Germans flee over the border from Hungary to Austria on Aug. 19, / 989, when a border crossing was opened during the Pan-European Picnic. (Photo (c) VOTAVA)