From a Bonn correspondent

The stream of East Germans making theit way across the border between Austria and Hungary and on to West Germany has become a flood. In just a few hours on August 19th, close to 700 surged jubilantly through a border gate at Sopron, past Hungarian guards told to look the other way. About 200 a night are now finding their way across different bits of the largely unguarded border. Some 300 more have been holed up in West German diplomatic misions in East Berlin, Budapest and Prague.

West Germany had expected some 90,000 East Germans to arrive this year with the official blessing of the East German government. If the flood of "illegals" continues, the numbers could swell by up to 20%.

Suffering an embarassment of immigrants, West Germany's chancellor, Mr Helmut Kohl, this week urged East Germany's leaders to introduce the sort of reforms that are being tried in Poland and Hungary. If life in East Germany improved, he said, more East Germans might stay at home. Mr Kohl even hinted that, unless the East German leader, Mr Erich Honecker, does his bit to sort out the problem, West Germany might cut back the amount of money it pours into East Germany each year for everything from road improvements to cleaning up the environment.

No response. That is only partly because Mr Honecker is in hospital, recovering from an operation for gallstones. Mr Honecker, 77 this week, is the chief obstacle to reform in East Germany. Ill or not, he has no intention of going vet.

That has encouraged the governments stuck with the refugee problem to conspire quietly against him. The East Germans who pushed through the Sopron border gate were taking advantage of a long-planned "Pan-European Picnic", organised under the patronage of Mr Otto von Habsburg, a Euro-MP, and Mr Imre Pozsgay, Hungary's most reforminded communist.

Part of the jollification was a symbolic "border walk" from Hungary into Austria and back. Once across, the East Germans just kept going. West German officials and Hungarian relief workers who have been looking after East German refugees in Budapest had tipped them the wink. Once across the border, Austrian gendarmes ferried them to a meeting point and fed them. Then a fleet of buses, chartered in advance by the West Germans, took them to the West German embassy in Vienna, where British and French diplomats helped issue them with the necessary papers. Now that is European co-operation.

Copyright © 1997., ISE, Sopron

~sztoth