The Little Boxes

The 225-mile boundary between Austria and Hungary has long been marked by a 1,000-yd.-wide no-man's land, fronted by two six-ft. fences of barbed wire, patrolled by armed Hungarian border police and Hungarian dogs, and secured by the Hungarians -- since the early days of the cold war -- by some 7,000,000 little brown boxes containing lethal charges of TNT. As the Iron Curtain wears thin, the mines are be coming as much of an embarrassment as a hindrance to trespassers. Stray cats or even a speedy thaw sets them off in the night, and in last year's torrential floods a great many mines sown on hillsides along the boundary-marking Pinka and Raab rivers worked loose and washed over to the Austrian bank. On April 1, a 60-year-old Austrian farmer digging for sand on the banks of the Pinka hit a mine, which blasted off both his hands. Three weeks ago, Claudia Kracher, 2 1/2, was playing in a pile of sand that had been trucked up from the Raab by a neighbor for mixing concrete. She stepped on a mine, which severed her left foot from her leg, and died the next day.

Claudia's death alarmed the Austrian countryside, sent village drummers and police loudspeaker cars through the vineyard-studded hills of southern Burgenland to alert the peasants to the danger. More to the point, a new eight-man Austro-Hungarian border commission called at the house of Claudia's parents to inspect fragments of the exploded mine, and the Hungarians officially admitted their guilt. The Foreign Ministry in Budapest promised to try to improve the situation, possibly (as the Austrians recommended) by damming the rivers temporarily and retrieving some of the lost mines from the mud.

At the northern end of the border, the Hungarians have already dug up the mines and replaced them with a highly sophisticated--and far less conspicuous --electronic surveillance system.

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