Hard road to West for refugees

Press, 6 September 1989, Page 10

Hard road to West for refugees

NZPA-Reuter Bonn Prospects of thousands of East German refugees leaving Hungary for West Germany this week appeared in doubt after a senior Budapest official warned that East Germany’s prior agreement was vital.

Austria said last week it was suspending visa rules for East Germans in neighbouring Hungary, raising expectations that the refugees would soon be allowed to leave en masse for the West.

But the Hungarian Interior Minister, Istvan Horvath, was quoted yesterday as saying Budapest could not permit a refugee exodus unless the East and West German Governments resolved their differences on emigration rights. Referring to 5000 East Germans waiting in camps for permission to leave this week, Mr Horvath told the West German magazine Stern: “First East Germany and West Germany have to agree about this. We cannot and will not allow them to leave secretly in the night.”

He said a solution to the refugee crisis could take another four to six

The East German Government later reiterated that refugees must go home to seek exit visas for the West. It again accused Bonn of breaking international law by sheltering refugees in its embassies as if they were its own citizens. “Let it be said once

more clearly: Staying in diplomatic missions or other places outside East Germany will bring no advantages and is no way to attain emigration,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wolfgang Meyer, said in a statement. More than 6000 East Germans have fled to the West across Hungary’s newly open border with

Austria this year. Hundreds had sought refuge in Bonn’s Embassy in Budapest and others remain in its Prague legation. West Germany, which does not recognise separate East German nationality, denies seeking to undermine East German communism by encouraging emigration, as East Berlin has charged.

But it claims a right to help any “fellow compatriot” wanting to move to West Germany.

Mr Horvath said Hungary could not let the East Germans depart with West German passports issued by Bonn’s Embassy in Budapest because this would signify recognition that Bonn had sovereignty over East Germans.