Hungary Dismantling Iron Curtain at Austrian Border
Hungary today began dismantling a symbolic Iron Curtain that has divided Europe for four decades as it started to remove a barbed-wire fence on its border with Austria.
“With the dismantling of this barrier, an era with our relations with Western Europe and particularly Austria is closed,” Interior Ministry official Andras Kovari told a news conference.
The 20-year-old barbed-wire barrier replaced a mine field laid after the Communist takeover of Hungary in the late 1940s.
The phrase “Iron Curtain” was coined by the late Winston Churchill, former British prime minister, in a 1946 speech discussing the dangers of Soviet expansionism.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill told an audience in Fulton, Mo., “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”
Reformist Minister of State Imre Pozsgay said in October that the fence had become outdated historically, politically and technically.
Dismantling began in the no-man’s-land near this small town on the main road between Budapest and Vienna and at three other points, Koszeg, Sopron and Szentgotthard.
Journalists watched as soldiers with sledgehammers disconnected the alarm system, lifted six-foot posts and rolled up wires.
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