Hungary Rejects Visit By Munro

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29070, 5 December 1959, Page 13

Hungary Rejects Visit By Munro

(Rec. 10 p.m.) BUDAPEST, December 3. Hungary today renewed its refusal to admit United Nations fact-finders to its territory.

A member of Hungary’s Politburo, Mr Karoly Kiss, reiterated Hungary’s refusal to allow United Nations officials to enter Hungary when he spoke at the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ (Communist) Party congress today.

Hungary has denied an entry visa to Sir Leslie Munro, of New Zealand, who was appointed last year by the United Nations General Assembly as its “watchdog” on Hungarian affairs. Mr Kiss added that it was impossible to allow the entry of “a committee and a delegate of the United Nations illegally devised to interfere in our internal affairs.”

He said Sir Leslie Munro's entry visa had been denied on principle.

But Mr Kiss said: “Hungary will readily welcome politicians, businessmen, journalists and even simple tourists who do not attempt to meddle in our internal affairs.” United Press International reported that the Minister of the Interior, Mr Bela Biszku, told the fourth day of the party congress today that the Government had evidence that “armed espionage groups” were operating on Hungarian soil. He said several members of these groups “recently” had been arrested inside Hungary in the vicinity of the Austrian border.

Such things were evidence, he said, that the United States, West Germany and Austria have not stopped “interfering in Hungary’s internaL affairs” and showed that the Hungarian Communists “will have to continue our policy of caution.”

He denied Western newspaper reports that youths involved in the 1956 Hungarian uprising were being held in prison until their eighteenth birthdays, when they would be executed. “Let me state with full responsibility that there has not been a single juvenile person in our prisons, either among those who were convicted formerly or those who have been remanded in custody,” he added. However, the measures taken

against participants in the revolt and all “counter-revolutionaries” were an “internal affair,” he said.

Radio Budapest reported that Mr Khrushchev, who is in Hungary for the first party congress since the rising, talked today with Soviet troops. The text of Mr. Khrushchev’s talks to the army units was not revealed.