HUNGARY-L Archives

From: "Laszlo & Monika APATHY, III" <>
Subject: [HUNGARY-L] Re: News
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 1999 20:37:17 -0400

Dezso,

Koszonom, Danke Schon, Thank YOU...... This is a GRRRREAT article. I
appreciate you forwarding it to us. Monika's sister & brother-in-law
are here from Germany & with pride will also show it to them.........
not that I had anything to do with it, of course. I think I will also
send it to several others too.

Hope everyone is A-OK. I talked with Agi Apathy-Bely yesterday. I am
anxious to finally get a good, inexpensive meeting
hall/parish-center/place and several hotel/motel/pensions addresses &
telephone #'s in Budapest for the Apati & Apathy reunion 16-20 August
2000. I started on the invitation announcement and I have to include
the above details too. I would appreciate it if you could possibly help
Agi & Miki with this task.

Thanks in advance,
Laci

*************************************************************************
David Apathy wrote:
>
> WORLD VIEW
> Remembering The Wire Cutters
>
> Hungary's gutsy border opening 10 years ago was crucial to
> bringing down the
> Iron Curtain
>
> By Andrew Nagorski
>
> Quick, rerun the images of Central Europe in 1989 in your mind and what do you see? Certainly the charismatic shipyard electrician Lech Walesa, the workers' hero who exploded the myth of the workers' state, leading the Solidarity delegation to the round-table negotiations with the embattled Polish communist leadership and then to a stunning victory at the polls. Or perhaps the joyous crowds on Prague's Wenceslas
> Square greeting Alexander Dubcek, back from his long political exile, and
> dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, soon to become Czechoslovakia's philosopher king. And, of course — from those pictures seared in everyone's memory — Germans celebrating atop the Berlin wall on the night of Nov. 9, when this ultimate symbol of a divided
> continent broke wide open.
> But there's usually a glaring omission: Hungary's dismantling of the barbed-wire fences on its border with Austria that year. On June 27, Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock took up wire cutters themselves, providing the world with an image that should rank right up there with the others. For Hungarians who had been free to travel to Austria since the 1980s, this was largely a
> symbolic event. But for East Germans — who could travel to Hungary but, until then, no further — this was a screaming signal to start a stampede for the exits. Suddenly, the Hungarians had to decide whether to keep arresting at least some of the East Germans trying to cross the border illegally or whether to throw the gates open. On Sept. 10 exactly a decade ago, the government announced it would open the border and let the East Germans escape. If the collapse of the Berlin wall was the final act for the Iron Curtain and East German communism, Hungary's decision was the turning point that made it possible. German reunification inevitably followed.
> Even for the Hungarian communists who ran the most liberal regime in the region, this wasn't an easy call. A 20-year-old treaty between Hungary and East Germany obligated the two countries to prevent the other's citizens from fleeing west. But this legacy of "socialist fraternalism" was directly at odds with Hungary's more recent commitments to uphold international human rights. The 65,000 East Germans who had gathered in Hungary to make their way to Austria left the authorities with no way to fudge the issue as they had in the past. The Hungarians jettisoned their treaty with East Germany because they were determined to prove they could win the acceptance of the West. As an aide to communist Party General Secretary Karoly Grosz told me at the time: "We thought that, if we wanted to meet the requirements of joining Europe, this was the test."
> That it was, and the Hungarians passed with flying — if not flashy — colors. This was no accident of history. Since the bloody Hungarian uprising of 1956, the country had carefully avoided the kind of dramatic confrontations that kept convulsing its neighbors. Once known as "the butcher of Budapest," party leader Janos Kadar reversed the old Stalinist axiom and proclaimed in 1961:
> "Whoever is not against us is for us."
>
> When the "democratic opposition" emerged in the 1980s, its
> members
> were still sometimes harassed, denied jobs or travel abroad,
> but didn't
> face anything like the repression other dissidents faced
> elsewhere. Taking
> advantage of their leeway, they began demanding a multiparty
> system and
> a "post-Yalta" Europe when most Polish and Czech dissidents
> were still
> camouflaging their true intentions. Instead of striking back,
> the Hungarian
> communists kept retreating in the face of this pressure. And
> then they
> decided to try to outrun their opponents in the race to grab
> the leadership
> of a new democratic Hungary.
>
> The communists were trying to save their own skins, of course.
> Mikhail
> Gorbachev had left no doubt he wasn't about to roll in the
> tanks anywhere to
> preserve the old empire, and Poland was the first to show that
> free elections
> were inevitable. The Hungarian communists agreed to
> hold elections, too. They hoped that some of the palpable
> pride their
> countrymen felt about their new open borders would help shore
> up their
> sinking popularity. It didn't. They were voted out of office
> on the first
> go-round, but they would come back to win in 1994, this time as
> Social
> Democrats. (They lost again in 1998, but they remain the
> largest
> opposition party.) And they fared a lot better than the East
> German
> leaders, not to mention Romania's hated First Couple Nicolae
> and Eleni
> Ceausescu, who ended up as bullet-riddled corpses.
>
> The Germans, in particular, haven't forgotten the role Hungary
> played.
> Former chancellor Helmut Kohl thanked Hungary repeatedly, as
> will his
> successor Gerhard Schroder and Austrian Chancellor Viktor Klima
> when
> they travel to Budapest next week to attend the commemoration
> of the
> 10th anniversary of the opening of the border. But this should
> be a bigger
> Hungary's gutsy action, Europe would have remained divided much
> longer than it did and 1989 would never have ended so
> decisively. It's
> time for Hungary to preen a bit and take a long-overdue bow.
> Cue for
> the audience: very loud applause.
>
> Newsweek International, September 6, 1999

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• [HUNGARY-L] Re: News by "Laszlo & Monika APATHY, III" <>