East Germany to Hungary: Curb Exodus : Angry Protest Sent to Budapest as Flood of Refugees Continues

Moving to abate a growing political crisis, the Communist regime of East Germany on Tuesday demanded that Hungary curb the tide of East Germans crossing the border to the West as refugees continued to arrive at camps here and elsewhere.

“East Germany expects Hungary immediately to take back its unilateral decision to suspend parts of the agreement on visa-free travel,” said an official protest to the Hungarian government whose text was reported by the state-run ADN news agency.

“Hungary’s behavior is a clear violation of legal treaties and thus constitutes a violation of the basic interests of East Germany.”

East Germany’s vitriolic note to Hungary reflects the worsening of relations between the two Communist states, diplomatic analysts said, and was almost as sharp as East Berlin’s accusations against West Germany. The Budapest government announced Sunday that it would open its border to allow thousands of East Germans to flee to West Germany rather than return to their homeland.

Also Tuesday, Yegor K. Ligachev, a key conservative in the Soviet Politburo, joined East Germany in condemning West Germany’s alleged “slander, enticement and recruitment of East Germans,” according to a separate report by ADN. Ligachev arrived Tuesday in East Berlin to discuss agriculture with East German officials.

In Moscow, the Kremlin appeared to back off from the political fray, although President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s push for reforms seemingly encouraged Hungary to break its 1969 agreement with East Germany not to allow the latter’s citizens out into third countries.

‘An Unusual Step’

“Hungary has taken an unusual step,” chief Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady A. Gerasimov declared at a news conference Tuesday. “Naturally, this situation is of some concern to us. But it does not affect us directly.”

Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn rejected as “unacceptable and insulting” the East German charges that Budapest was being paid by the West German government to allow the refugees to leave.

In an interview with the Washington Post, the No. 2 official in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry said Hungary’s borders will remain open indefinitely for the free passage of any East Bloc residents who want to leave for the West.

State Secretary Ferenc Somogyi told the Post that Hungary has no intention of changing its new policy on open borders, a policy that the government on Sunday had described as temporary.

In Austria, officials said Tuesday that about 10,600 East Germans had crossed from Hungary into their country on their way to West Germany since Budapest opened the frontier at midnight Sunday.

Most of the exodus was funneled through the Bavarian city of Passau, on the Austrian border, and into temporary camps in southern Bavaria, from which the refugees were moving to more permanent quarters elsewhere in West Germany.

The Austrian government estimated that about 4,000 East German tourists vacationing in Hungary joined the 6,500 would-be emigrants who had settled in refugee camps in Hungary waiting to flee to the West.

But the actual flow of refugees into Austria from Hungary subsided Tuesday, according to officials on the frontier.

In another development, about 250 East Germans who had camped out in the West German Embassy in Prague, Czechoslovakia, left the mission grounds, declaring they had been promised help in East Germany in obtaining legal emigration papers. West Germany has said it will not forcibly expel East Germans from its missions abroad. Butthe Communist government in Prague said it would not allow East Germans to leave the country without proper documents issued by the East Berlin regime.

Most of the successful East German emigrants had travel papers issued by their government that allowed them to travel through Czeechosiovakia to Hungary, Romania or Bulgaria on vacation.

The Bonn government declared that the East German newcomers, although now full West Germancitizens, will be exempt from compulsory military service for their first two years in thecountry.