today’s ” AR-online” again AR-Online recent issues: May 1999 April 1999 March 1999 February 1999 January 1999 December 1998 November 1998 October 1998 September 1998 London, Hungary’s rebels strike back By Michael Leidig and Karl Peter Kirk in Budapest VETERANS of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against communism are suing the country’s Socialist Party for compensation for the suffering they endured after their revolution was crushed by
Soviet tanks. The Association of ’56 Rebels is claiming 120 billion forints (about £320 million) and has asked a court in Budapest to freeze the party’s assets and properties as part of a civil prosecution. It says it wants the Socialist Party, which was founded by reformed Communists, to pay 300,000 forints (£800) for every year one of its members spent in prison for taking part in the failed revolt – plus compensation for the families of those executed.
Tibor Hornyak , a former revolutionary and the association’s president, said: “Why should we ask the state for compensation when these sentences were carried out on the orders of the Communist Party?” The pro-democracy uprising in Hungary in 1956 started when secret police fired into a student protest – turning a peaceful demonstration into a revolution. The Hungarian army joined the revolutionaries, with military depots and munitions factories handing out arms.
Prisons were broken into, and dissidents, such as Cardinal Joszef Mindszenty , were released and took control of the uprising, along with Imre Nagy , the reformist prime minister. Soviet troops in the country pulled back, but when Nagy announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and asked the United Nations to recognise his nation as a neutral state, the Red Army massed tanks on the border and then invaded.
On November 4, they entered Budapest, and after two weeks of fighting that claimed 3,000 lives, a new Soviet-backed “revolutionary peasant-worker government”, consisting entirely of Communists, was established. About 200,000 revolutionaries fled the country, but many others remained and were either imprisoned or were among the 3,000 executed under the new regime.
Nagy was hanged in 1958, while Cardinal Mindszenty sought refuge in the United States embassy in Budapest where he remained for many years. Mr Hornyak, who was jailed for 12 years for his role in the rebellion, said his group was not prepared to let the politicians simply forget the past. He said: “In 1990, there was a cosy deal among the political elite that the Communists would not be brought to account. We are putting an end to that – even if we have to do it through a civil case.”
Mr Hornyak, 73, was imprisoned in the infamous Szeged prison, where the current national president, Arpad Goncz , was also held. Mr Hornyak said: “No one can tell me this is in the past. I still hear the cries of the condemned as they were dragged off to be executed. “We know of 16,700 people who had sentences ranging from 10 years to death. What we are asking for is not much – given what they did to us. When they put me inside they also took everything I owned.
I had nothing when I was released in an amnesty in 1963. Now it is our turn.” If his association wins its case, the plan is to distribute the money among its members. The organisation says that many have to get by on pensions of £100 a month, which, Mr Hornyak says, is not even enough to pay for medicines to treat the injuries they suffered after 1956.
The association now believes that it has enough evidence to prove that it was the Communist Party – and not the courts – that decided who should live or die, and that the Socialists, as legal successors to the Communists, should pay compensation. For its part, the Socialist Party says it has completely broken with the past and has managed to win the trust of many Hungarians. After a poor showing at elections in 1990, it came