Hungary in Move to Drop Warsaw Pact Membership

Parliament agreed today to consider suspending Hungarian membership in the Warsaw Pact and opposition leaders urged the government to negotiate a permanent break with the Soviet-led alliance.

In an indication of widespread support, members of the recently elected Parliament applauded loudly when the suspension proposal was introduced by Mikos Vasarhelyi, a deputy of the opposition Alliance of Free Democrats. Lawmakers voted to consider the proposal at their next session.

Approval would make Hungary--whose once-dominant Communist Party has been removed from power and reformulated itself into a Socialist Party--the first East Bloc country to suspend Warsaw Pact membership since last year’s wave of anti-Communist reforms in Eastern Europe began.

Hungary withdrew from the alliance briefly during the 1956 uprising that was crushed by Soviet tanks.

Vasarhelyi was the spokesman of the Imre Nagy government that was dissolved after the failed uprising. The Nagy government’s Nov. 1, 1956, announcement that it was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact was followed three days later by the Soviet invasion.

“We wanted to express the historic continuity with this proposal and we wanted to carry on the traditions of the government in 1956,” Vasarhelyi said at a news conference after introducing the suspension legislation. “What that government was unable to carry through, we now present to Parliament.”