Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came down, as the Communist regimes of eastern Europe fell one by one. Who was the first to shake its foundations? Was it cold warrior Ronald Reagan? Or Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev? Well, maybe they had a role. But step forward a tenacious biologist Janos Vargha, whose campaign to halt a dam on the river Danube brought Hungarian hardliners to their knees. When reformers took over in Budapest, their first act was to cancel the dam 鈥� and their second was to open the border with Austria. As thousands of Hungarians and East Germans flooded through, the game was up for communism. The wall fell and Europe was transformed.
THE story behind the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 began nine years earlier, when Janos Vargha, a biologist from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences began a new career as a writer with a small monthly nature magazine called Buvar. In an early assignment, he went to a beauty spot on the river Danube outside Budapest known as the Danube Bend, the site of an ancient Hungarian capital, to interview local officials about plans for a small park.
It was humdrum stuff 鈥� until one official mentioned in passing that this tree-lined curve in the river, a popular picnic spot for Hungarians, was to be drowned by a giant hydroelectric dam being planned in secret by a much-feared state agency known simply as the Water Management.
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Vargha investigated. He learned that the Nagymaros dam (pronounced 鈥�苍辞蝉丑-尘补谤辞蝉丑鈥�) would pond up pollution, destroy underground water reserves, dry out wetlands and wreck the unique ecosystem of central Europe鈥檚 longest river. But nobody dared object. 鈥淥f course, I wrote an article,鈥� he remembers today. 鈥淏ut there was a director of the Water Management on the magazine鈥檚 editorial board. At the last moment, he went to the printers and stopped the presses. The article never appeared. I was frustrated and angry. But I was also extremely interested in why they cared enough to ban my article.鈥�
He discovered that the Nagymaros dam was part of a joint project with neighbouring Czechoslovakia to generate hydroelectricity, irrigate farms and improve navigation. They would build two dams and re-engineer the Danube for 200 kilometres where it formed the border between them. 鈥淭he Russians were involved, too. They wanted to take their big ships from the Black Sea right up the Danube to the border with Austria.鈥�
Vargha soon had the bit between his teeth, and some of his articles got past the censors. He gathered supporters, yet for some years, he was one of only a few people who believed the dam could be stopped. Hardly surprising when the Water Management refused to debate the project in public. After one public meeting, when the bureaucrats had pulled out at the last minute, Vargha knew he had to take the next step. 鈥淲e decided it wasn鈥檛 enough to talk and write, so we set up an organisation: the Danube Circle. We announced that we didn鈥檛 accept censorship. We would act as if we were living in a democracy,鈥� he says.
The Circle was illegal and ran secret presses that turned out samizdat leaflets. In an extraordinary act of defiance, it collected 10,000 signatures for a petition opposing the dam and made links with environmentalists in the west, inviting them to Budapest to hold a press conference.
The Hungarian government imposed a news blackout on the dam, but articles about the Danube Circle began to appear in the western media, including New Scientist. In 1985, the Circle and Vargha, its only public spokesman, won the Right Livelihood award, often known as the alternative Nobel prize. Officials told Vargha he should not accept the prize. He ignored them, and the following year, when Austrian environmentalists joined a protest in Budapest, they were met with tear gas and batons. Then the Politburo had Vargha sacked from his new job as editor of the Hungarian edition of Scientific American.
The dam was becoming a focus for opposition to an increasingly hated regime. Communist attempts to hold back the waters of the Danube became synonymous with holding back the will of the people. 鈥淭o oppose the state directly was still difficult,鈥� Vargha says. 鈥淥pposing the dam was less dangerous, but it was still a defiance of the state.鈥�
鈥淭he dam became a focus for opposition to an increasingly hated regime鈥�
Under mounting pressure from the anti-dam movement, splits opened up in the Hungarian Communist party. 鈥淩eformists knew that the dam was extremely unpopular and made no economic sense. It would be cheaper to make electricity by burning coal or nuclear power,鈥� says Vargha. 鈥淏ut hardliners were in thrall to the Stalinist idea of large dams as symbols of progress.鈥�
Green issues seemed to be east European communism鈥檚 soft underbelly in its final years. Under the auspices of the Young Communist Leagues, a host of environment groups had become established during the 1970s. Party officials saw them as a harmless outlet for youthful idealism 鈥� a cross between Boy Scouts and natural history societies.
This green idealism gradually became a rallying point for political opposition. In Czechoslovakia, the human rights organisation Charter 77 took up environmentalism. Polish and Estonian greens joined Friends of the Earth International to protest against air pollution. Bulgarian greens formed an opposition group called Ecoglasnost, which held huge rallies in 1989. Big water engineering projects were especially potent symbols of the old Stalinism and when Mikhail Gorbachev began his reforms in Russia, one of his first acts was to cancel a huge project to divert Siberian rivers south to irrigate cotton fields around the Aral Sea.
Nowhere did green politics catch on more than in Hungary. Things came to a head in 1988 when the government signed a treaty with Czechoslovakia agreeing to speed up the dams project. Engineers began dredging the river bed at Nagymaros. In response, 50,000 people marched through Budapest and the protesters collected 150,000 signatures demanding a referendum on the dam.
The government faced a crisis of authority, and reformers in parliament seized on the issue. The debates over the dam and political change fused and almost the entire nation tuned in as parliamentary debates were broadcast live on TV. In May 1989, the government backed down and halted construction work. 鈥淚t was the breakthrough to wider political change,鈥� said Andras Biro, a Hungarian development consultant who worked for the UN at the time.
The anti-dam campaign was a passport to power for the reformists in Hungary, and its success spurred them to make their most momentous choice. That September the new minister for foreign affairs, Gyula Horn, who had torn up the dam treaty with Czechoslovakia, announced that he was opening the border between Hungary and Austria, and would allow East Germans through as well as Hungarians.
Within days, East Germans were booking their holidays in Hungary and convoys of Trabants were heading for Vienna. The back door to the west had been opened and the Berlin Wall was useless. Within weeks, East German border guards looked on as the crowds began to tear the wall down.
The revolution in Budapest did not entirely banish engineers from the Danube. The new state of Slovakia built its half of the planned project, charged Hungary with violating the treaty and took its case to the International Court of Justice. Democratic politicians in Budapest flirted briefly with the idea of reviving the scheme. Vargha helped organise more protests in 1998 to dissuade them. And he recalls how, some months later, as chief environmental adviser to the government of the day, he confiscated documents prepared in the prime minister鈥檚 office that could have authorised resumption of dam-building on the Danube Bend.
Did his campaigning to save the Danube speed up the dismantling of the Berlin Wall? History is full of such 鈥渨hat if?鈥� questions. But Vargha thinks it probably did. 鈥淚t would have happened anyway eventually. The Communist system was collapsing. But I think it happened maybe five years sooner because of our efforts.鈥� The dam had become a symbol of the subjugation of people as well as of water. And as the Danube ran free, so did the people. 鈥淲e opened the floodgates.鈥�
