Troops leave Hungary

Press, 27 April 1989, Page 8

Troops leave Hungary

NZPA-Reuter Kiskunhalas Thirty-one Soviet tanks rolled out of Hungary aboard trains yesterday in the first phase of a partial withdrawal of Soviet forces from East Europe. The T-64 tanks, their caterpillar tracks clamped to flat railway waggons and their gun barrels plugged and tethered with steel rope, were the first of 5000 tanks due to leave Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia by 1991 under plans announced by the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in New York in December. “It is the historic moment in our politics,” Colonel Boris Adamenko,

deputy chief of staff of the Soviet Union’s Southern Army Group, told more than 100 journalists brought 160 km from Budapest to witness the departure. The tanks belong to the 13th tank division which arrived in Kiskunhalas after the 1956 Hungarian uprising that was put down by Soviet forces. The 10 drivers and eight guards accompanying the tanks were the first of 10,000 troops due to leave Hungary, Moscow’s smallest Warsaw Pact ally. Some 40,000 more will begin leaving Czechoslovakia and East Germany next month. A Hungarian-born Italian Radical member of Parliament, Ilona

Staller, better known as the porn star Cicciolina (little cuddly one), also observed the departure, releasing a white dove as a sign of peace. “This is a very important moment for the peace cause,” said Ms Staller, whose Radical Party is currently holding a meeting in Budapest. Moments later, the dove was crushed to death in the tracks of the second tank as it was loaded on to the train. “It was doomed to happen,” Ms Staller said. “Tanks are a symbol of death.” She nevertheless climbed on to the first train waggon and embraced a Soviet tank driver.