 |
Gyula Horn A onetime Secretary of State and Foreign Affairs Minister of Hungary, Horn is now the Prime Minister The dismantling of the Iron Curtain was started [in early 1989] as part of Hungary's development toward an independent foreign policy. But we came in for very tough criticism from Moscow and its allies. So it was decided to have a sort of fence-cutting ceremony, together with Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock, to demonstrate to the world that we were not going to stop, that we were going to dismantle the Iron Curtain and that we were creating an irreversible situation. Actually, they couldn't do anything against it. Later, when we began letting out East German refugees, we followed the same principle. Only two other people knew about that besides me-Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth and Minister of the Interior Istvan Horvath-and there was coordination with the West Germans and the Austrians.
Moscow would have had two means of preventing it. One was military intervention, and in fact, the Romanian and the Czechoslovak leadership demanded it. The second was the threat of economic retaliation. But neither of these things happened. Under Brezhnev things would have been very different. Having a Gorbachev in Moscow was very important for all of this.
PHOTO CREDIT: PHILIP HORVAT-SABA |
