its border with Austria, which came to symbolize the ‘Iron Curtain’.
Speaking at the 75th birthday party of former Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Horn in Budapest, Gorbachev made clear he would not have stopped Horn’s plans to cut the dreaded barbed wire in 1989, BosNewsLife learned Saturday, July 7.
Horn, serving as foreign minister in Hungary’s last Communist government, literally cut the barbed wire in 1989 with his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock on an abandoned stretch of land that marked the Austrian-Hungarian border, allowing 700 East Germans to reach the West without being shot.
That breach was followed by negotiations between Hungary, then a Soviet sattelite state, and West Germany that eventually enabled tens of thousands of East Germans to leave Hungary and precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.
NO PERMISSION
"He didn’t need our permission, he knew that the time was ripe," Gorbachev said about Horn’s
action in remarks late Friday, July 6, which were later distributed by Hungarian News Agency MTI.
Former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who also attended the birthday celebrations, reportedly described Horn as a great European statesman who opened the Iron Curtain, "and has a place in European history."
Yet the birth day party was not without controversy.
Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom refused this week to award a high state honor to Horn, citing Horn’s role in paramilitary forces which helped to crush Hungary’s 1956 anti-Soviet Revolution.
Many Hungarians were killed and dissidents, religious groups and many devoted Christians suffered persecution under the decades of Soviet-domination and Communism.
ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES
President Solyom, who needed to approve the award, said he did not dispute Horn’s merits gained during Hungary’s transition to democracy starting in the mid 1980s, but cautioned that his anti-revolutionary activities in 1956 and recent comments seeking to justify those actions were contrary to the values of Hungary’s Constitution.
"Gyula Horn was a paramilitary in 1956," Solyom said in a letter to Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany. "His past acts and today’s position are in such basic contrast with the constitutional order of the Republic of Hungary, that I cannot comply with the prime minister’s proposal, even taking into account Gyula Horn’s merits mentioned in the nomination."
However Gyurcsany disagreed. "The road one travels is much more important than the road’s starting point," Gyurcsany told reporters about Horn’s 1956-controversy.
Gyurcsany on Friday, July 6, presented a clock to Horn, to remind him and his family of "his everlasting achievements that have gone been registered in the history of Hungary, Europe and the Hungarian left wing."
The prime minister also suggested that his Communist-turned-Hungarian Socialist Party could thank Horn for ensuring that the party remained a "European force committed to modernization" after Hungary’s transition to democracy. Gyurcsany claimed that the Hungarian Socialist Party was now the most influential left-wing party in Central and Eastern Europe.
Karsten Voigt, a senior foreign policy expert of the German Social Democrats, reportedly noted that Horn "had great merits in Hungary’s integration into NATO and the European Union", which it joined May 1, 2004.
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