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Hungary Security Police
In the late 1980s, Hungary's 15,000 member Security
Police
was controlled by the Ministry of Interior. However,
unique among
Warsaw Pact countries, Hungary lacked a uniformed security
police
force. Such a force--the AVO--had existed but was
disbanded in
October 1956
(see
Historical Background and Traditions
, this ch.).
Given the
vehemence with which the public hated the AVO and
associated it
with the Stalinist terror, the Kadar regime saw fit not to
revive
it, even under a different name. Nevertheless, until the
late
1980s the Security Police continued to harass and arrest
those
persons deemed to be political enemies.
The reform of the political system during the second
half of
the 1980s appeared to have also affected the Security
Police. In
an interview on Hungarian television in July 1989,
Minister of
Interior Horvath claimed that the Security Police no
longer
viewed the domestic opposition as political enemies, an
image
that had become "obsolete" in a multiparty system. He
condemned
previous Security Police actions, such as harassing and
detaining
known dissidents before national holidays as "a bad reflex
action
of a different type of power structure." Horvath stressed
that
the Security Police did have a legitimate intelligence and
counterintelligence function but was not an organization
"placed
above the citizens."
Data as of September 1989
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