Fleeing In, Not Out : Suddenly, Hungary Is a Haven

From the moment she saw that supermarkets in this capital overflowed with food and that people didn’t cringe automatically when police appeared, May Li began mulling the idea over in her mind.

Li, who is afraid to disclose her real name or nationality for fear of reprisal, is an exchange student from a Communist country in the Far East. Here in socialist Hungary, she is learning technical skills desperately needed by her developing nation.

But 30-year-old Li has other plans. Later this year, she will wed a Hungarian comrade she has never met. She will marry him, the Asian woman says softly in fluent Hungarian, because a marriage license means she won’t have to return to the Orwellian regime where she spent her formative years outwitting starvation and the secret police.

“On my first day here in 1985, I started to think how I can stay here. Even though things are hard, at least there is food. Students will do anything they can to stay.”

Pleasant Place

Li isn’t alone. Since 1945, when the Soviets rolled in to “liberate” this small Eastern European country from the Nazis, Hungary has been a place where people have defected from. But these days, as its leaders move toward greater political freedoms and social democracy, Hungary is grappling with a new and unexpected phenomenon: People from more repressive regimes are finding Hungary a pleasant place to defect to.

In May, it was 44 Somalis fleeing civil war in Africa.

In June, it was a Mongolian university student who wanted the freedom to read her Bible in peace.

In the last 18 months, more than 15,000 Romanians, many of them ethnic Hungarians, have poured across the border, prompting Romania’s authoritarian leader Nicolae Ceausescu to build a seven-foot fence between the two countries at a time when Hungary is dismantling its own Iron Curtain with Austria.

200 Awaiting Visas

Currently, reports say about 200 East Germans are inside the West German Embassy here awaiting resettlement visas in the West. Hungarian officials have said recently that they might grant asylum to East Germans who can prove political persecution.

“It’s a rather costly business for the Hungarian government, and we just don’t have enough money for all the refugees who are here and who want to come here,” says Laszlo Albrecht, the deputy director for a newly created state Refugee Committee.

Albrecht attributes the rising refugee tide to the political and economic reforms that have transformed Hungary into the most humane place to live in the East Bloc.

“Thirty years ago, human and social rights were completely absent from Hungarian life and now it’s completely opposite . . . human rights are really guaranteed,” Albrecht boasts.

But the gentler, kinder Hungary is waking up to a mean reality.

In addition to the burden of caring for tens of thousands of refugees, Hungarian authorities say their new policies are straining relations with more hard-line socialist countries. The leaders of East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania are vocal critics of the Hungarian reforms, and with good reason. After all, their residents have only to look at this more liberal neighbor and decide that they too, should demand more consumer goods, freedom of speech and access to the West.

Already, Hungary is earning a reputation as a sort of trapdoor into Western Europe. Since residents from socialist countries can travel fairly freely within the East Bloc, would-be defectors plan “vacations” in Budapest, then sneak across the Austro-Hungarian border to the West.

On July 10, for instance, Austrian authorities reported that eight East Germans had crossed the border near Sopron, Hungary, and immediately asked for asylum in West Germany. Although the defectors had set off an alarm, European newspapers reported that none of the Hungarian border guards tried to halt their escape.

“Hungarian border guards don’t care,” says Johann Spitzer-Zopfl, a second secretary at the Austrian embassy in Budapest. “Five years ago you had shootings. Today, the Hungarian border guards run more slowly.”

Spitzer-Zopfl predicts that more repressive East Bloc countries may soon slash the number of visas they issue for Hungary.

And while Communist officials deny it, some say the process has already begun.

“Last summer, it seemed like half their countries were here,” one Hungarian journalist says. “But this year, I’ve seen few East Germans or Czechs in Budapest.”

Hungarian authorities insist that none of those who flee to the West are Hungarian. Under a newly reformed passport law, which declares that freedom of travel is an inalienable Hungarian right and lifts all restrictions for visiting the West, there is little need to go the illegal route anymore, officials say.

Besides, with all the reforms, Hungarians have increasing difficulty persuading anyone that they are persecuted at home.

‘No Chance as Refugees’

“Hungarians have no chance of being recognized as refugees in Austria and are discouraged from applying for political asylum,” says Spitzer-Zopfl. “Even if it were a bit more repressive than now, it still wouldn’t be enough for them to qualify as refugees.”

Such statements are the best evidence of how far Hungary has come since the 1950s, when the government presided over a regime as brutal as any in the Stalinist camp.

This February, Hungary joined the Geneva Convention, the international human rights organization. The nation of 10.6 million has also applied for membership to the European Convention of Human Rights, which will bind it even more closely to maintaining humanitarian standards.

“We were surprised at how quickly the intentions to protect human rights developed in Hungary, and how strong they were,” a Western diplomat says. “If there is any message to get across, it is that Hungary is not part of the East Bloc.”

Earlier this year, the Office of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees acknowledged this shift by awarding Hungary $5 million in refugee aid. The Hungarian government is using the money to open three refugee camps in the towns of Bekescsaba, Hajduszoboszlo and Bicske, mainly to deal with the flood of Romanian immigrants. About $750,000 of the funds came from Austria, with wishful strings attached.

“We very much hope that Budapest will become a transit center for refugees to take some of the pressure off Vienna,” an Austrian diplomat says.

A Hungarian official, however, shudders at the thought.

“We do not want to become a channel out into the world for people from other socialist countries,” the official said.

But Hungary appears to be relishing its new role as a champion of freedom. Government officials organize international press excursions to the border to watch guards removing the 165 miles of electrified fencing, dog patrols, trip wiring and towers that used to mark its common ground with Austria. During last month’s visit by President Bush, Hungarian Premier Miklos Nemeth even presented his guest with a plaque bearing an actual piece of the Iron Curtain.

For the Austrians, the absence of a fence is a double-edged sword. While it stimulates border trade, it also swells the already crowded Austrian refugee camps. Many reach those camps via Hungary.

“We completely underestimated the number of refugees,” says Spitzer-Zopfl. “If you asked a manager of a refugee camp if they should rebuild the fence, he might even say yes.”

Ironically, Hungarian papers today are filled with stories about shootings and border skirmishes--at the Romanian border. In June, the state news agency MTI reported that the bodies of two children were found floating in the Maros River along the border.

“It can be supposed that the tragedy claimed the lives of two children of a family fleeing from Romania,” the chief of border police told MTI.

Hungary is growing adept at focusing world attention on its burgeoning refugees, many of whom are ethnic Hungarians from Transylvania, in western Romania. Transylvania belonged to Hungary until the Trianon Treaty ceded it to Romania after World War I.

During President Bush’s recent visit here, for instance, officials took First Lady Barbara Bush on a tour of a Transylvanian refugee camp, in hopes that it would prompt a few stories from the White House press corps.

And Hungarians joke that Ceausescu bought Hungary’s old fence with Austria to erect along his own Western borders. While international pressure has since halted its construction, another fence is said to remain at Romania’s border with Yugoslavia.

Grim Romania

The grim state of affairs inside Romania is no joke for 28-year-old Zsofia, however. She fled the city of Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania after political repression caused her to suffer a nervous breakdown and attempt suicide.

“I wanted to be treated like a human being, not a prisoner,” Zsofia said.

In Romania, “I didn’t have enough to eat, I didn’t know if my best friends were policemen, I was told to report on my colleagues and take notes on what they said.”

Like most refugees interviewed for this story, Zsofia declined to give her real name for fear of reprisals against her family, who are only 220 miles away--but separated by light years ideologically.

Zsofia is an ethnic Hungarian. But officials say one-third of the 200 people who cross the border each week are Romanians and Wallachian gypsies with no Hungarian ties.

Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, Hungary is obliged to offer asylum to those who can prove they would suffer political persecution in their home country. But Hungary, which has trouble caring for its indigenous poor, finds this a difficult burden.

“We are keeping people who don’t want to work, don’t speak Hungarian and don’t want to learn it. Yet we have to offer them the same housing, health services and education,” says Albrecht, who calls his job frustrating.

Geza Nemeth, a Presbyterian Reform pastor in Budapest who works mainly with Romanian refugees, says he is seeing more Bulgarian refugees and people fleeing Marxist-ruled Angola.

“There are a lot of hungry people coming from Africa . . . who arrive at the airport without money. The police come to me and ask me what to do,” Nemeth says.

Such was the case with the 44 Somali refugees who slept at Ferihegy Airport on their first night here last May, camped out their second night in a Budapest park and were taken by the police on their third night to a concrete high-rise apartment building about 20 kilometers outside town.

There they remain, until the government finds a permanent home for them.

Fear of Being Killed

Wrapped in tribal blankets and pathetically thin, the Somalis say they fled their homeland rather than be forcibly inducted to fight a war that would have required them to shoot their compatriots and burn down their own villages.

“They will kill us if we go back. We left to get freedom and we’ll accept any country so long as it’s not Africa,” says their spokesman Nor, who wears horn-rimmed spectacles and was studying for an MBA degree before civil war intervened.

A Vietnamese student in Hungary says her government no longer allows single students on exchange programs for fear they will defect. The woman has one more year here and fears returning home to visit.

“I’m afraid things are going to democratize so fast (in Hungary) that they (Vietnamese authorities) won’t let me return,” she says.

But at least one political refugee sounds a cautionary note about Hungary’s current reforms.

“I can eat whatever I want and I’ve got a pretty good job,” says Zsofia, the Romanian refugee who speaks six languages and now works as a teacher in Budapest. “But as long as socialism is still alive, then even here, it is not paradise.”

Hamilton wrote this story while in Eastern Europe.