Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 25, 1991 TAG: 9102250338
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: B-5 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BUDAPEST, HUNGARY LENGTH: Medium
The officials from the six alliance nations - the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania - were meeting in Budapest at a hotel on the banks of the river Danube.
Czechoslovak Defense Minister Lubos Dobrovsky, before entering the one-day meeting, told reporters, "a new era is beginning."
Several hours later, the state radio reported the agreement had been signed.
The agreement formalized the end of 35 years of military cooperation, sealing Eastern Europe's break with Soviet domination.
Besides signing the documents, the ministers could reveal some of history's best-kept secrets: the unpublished accords that kept their countries bound in a powerful pact.
For decades, the Warsaw Pact and NATO faced off in Europe with their mighty arsenals.
Warsaw Pact troops never attacked their Cold War enemies in NATO. But they intervened in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 to crush Hungarian and Czechoslovak anti-communist uprisings.
But revolutions throughout Eastern Europe in late 1989 overturned communist rule there and essentially ended any chance those nations would act in concert with the Soviets.
"The Warsaw Pact is now a piece of fiction," Hungary's Andras Hegedues, the last surviving premier to have signed the Pact, said late last year. "The military command no longer has an army at its disposal. . . . It's a group of generals without soldiers."
Experts meeting Sunday agreed to end any military cooperation by March 31, as Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had suggested to East European leaders earlier this month.
Their only point of disagreement was whether or not to make public Pact agreements sealed since the alliance was founded in 1955, Hungarian delegate Istvan Kormendi had told the state news agency MTI.
By agreeing to scrap the Pact's military structures, the Soviets bowed to increasing pressure from Eastern Europeans, who feared their still fragile democracies were threatened by a conservative backlash in the Kremlin.
The Soviets had stalled on dissolving any Pact structures last November, postponing a summit scheduled then in Budapest and refusing to set a new date for any meeting.
by CNB