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Hungary Border Guard
In 1989 Hungary's Border Guard numbered 16,000,
operating in
eleven districts. Conscripts totaled 11,000, or nearly 70
percent
of the total. Although nominally controlled by the HPA,
the
Border Guard Headquarters of the Ministry of Interior took
orders
from both the party Basic Organization in the ministry and
the
Government Administration and Administrative Department of
the
HSWP's Secretariat
(see Party Structure
, ch. 4). The
Border Guard
Command was established in 1946 and reorganized in 1950.
Its
tasks were governed by Decree Number 40/1974, which
brought
border regulations into conformity with those of other
Warsaw
Pact countries. The exact level of party and Communist
Young
League membership among the Border Guard was unknown, but
it was
certainly higher than that of the army. For this reason,
Volgyes
argued that the regime may have considered this
organization to
be more reliable than the army as a whole, although the
high
percentage of conscripts left this contention open to
question.
Border Guard work in Hungary required a high level of
education, political training, good health, "good
appearance,"
and even a knowledge of the foreign languages necessary
for work
at border crossing stations. Statistics from 1987 showed
that 40
percent of guards at border crossing points had finished
secondary school or university. In 1986 border guards
checked the
documents of 50 million people visiting or transiting
Hungary
through sixty-six highway, rail, river, and air border
crossing
points.
In the late 1980s, a permit was nominally required to
enter a
narrow zone along the western and southern borders, but
according
to Major General Janos Szekely, chief of the Border Guard
Headquarters, "anyone who applies to the proper agency for
a
permit usually gets it." An estimated 900 voluntary Border
Guard
auxiliary groups aided in the arrest of about 20 percent
of
border violators.
During the late 1980s, Hungary's borders with two
countries
received international attention. On May 3, 1989,
Hungarian
soldiers began removing the barbed wire fence on the
border with
Austria. Calling the fence "outdated" and superfluous,
given the
existence of Hungary's new (1988) liberal passport law,
the
Hungarian government publicly stated that all sections of
the
fence would be removed by the end of 1990. Although the
Austrian
government publicly welcomed this development, it
privately
feared that other East Europeans, especially Romanians,
would
travel to Hungary in order to escape into Austria.
It was not Romanians but East Germans touring Hungary
in the
summer of 1989 who took advantage of the newly opened
border to
flee to Austria. The Hungarian Border Guard interfered
only
sporadically with this flight, and eventually the
Hungarian
government allowed the East Germans to leave through
Hungarian
border checkpoints. In September 1989, the government
announced
that it would allow all the East Germans in the country
wishing
to emigrate to the West to leave Hungary. By the beginning
of
October, more than 35,000 had left the country to go to
West
Germany. The East German government protested that Hungary
had
reneged on its border agreements with the other members of
the
Warsaw Pact, but the Hungarian government claimed that it
was
merely following the spirit of the Helsinki Accords that
were
signed as part of the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in
Europe in 1975 and the border remained open.
Data as of September 1989
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