Hungarian who cut open Iron Curtain
BUDAPEST, Hungary - Gyula Horn, a former Hungarian prime minister who helped trigger events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall when he symbolically cut the Iron Curtain in 1989, has died. He was 80.
Horn, who was the communist regime’s last foreign minister and later embraced free-market policies including the sale of state assets to foreign investors as premier from 1994 to 1998, died at a hospital in Budapest after a prolonged illness, the government said on its website Wednesday.
Horn was born July 5, 1932, into a poor, working-class family in Budapest. His journey took him from a young communist militant who aided Soviet troops in crushing Hungary’s uprising in 1956 to being a top diplomat who helped usher the country out of Moscow’s sphere of influence and on a path to membership in the European Union and NATO.
His defining moment came on June 27, 1989, when he joined Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock in cutting the fence separating the two countries, presaging the end of the Cold War.
The cutting ceremony, captured by television cameras, prompted tens of thousands of East Germans to go to Hungary in the hope of crossing over to Austria and then joining relatives in West Germany, on the other side of the Berlin Wall.
The first East German refugees crossed into Austria from Hungary on Aug. 19, 1989, during a civic gathering on the border that came to be known as the Pan-European Picnic. Tens of thousands followed after Sept. 10, 1989, when Horn announced on the evening news that Hungary would officially open its border the next day. The Berlin Wall came down two months later.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 10 on 06/21/2013