Region: Former Hungarian communist to be tried

By Robert Hodgson

For the Budapest Times

Former high-ranking communist official Béla Biszku faces a potential three years in prison after being indicted last week for denying crimes committed in the name of Hungary's communist regime.

Biszku was interior minister in the four years following the doomed 1956 uprising against Soviet-backed rule, a period during which reprisals saw dozens of executions, including that of the reformed communist Prime Minister Imre Nagy.

Biszku has been charged under a new law that bans "public denial of the crimes of the national socialist and communist systems," spokeswoman for the Budapest prosecutor's office Gabriella Skoda told state news agency MTI Jan. 27.

Biszku eventually became secretary of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party until he was pushed into retirement in 1978 after taking a hard-line stand against the "goulash" communism of General Secretary János Kádár.

The former apparatchik sank into relative obscurity after the end of the one-party system in 1989 until last summer, when he unsuccessfully attempted to block the screening of a new documentary film, Crime and Impunity, which highlighted his role in the country's communist past. Biszku argues that he filmed an interview for the documentary "not as a public figure."

"The makers of the film ... did not show it to me," Biszku said in a statement in June. "I no longer give my consent for the film to be shown either partially or in its entirety."

The present charges relate to an interview he subsequently gave to state-owned Duna TV Aug. 4, in which Biszku said he had been reluctant to accept the post of interior minister in 1957, but nevertheless asserted that "public safety was restored" during his four-year watch.

He characterized the uprising as a "counter revolution" against the official Communist Party line at the time. The former minister said in the interview that he had not intervened in the judicial process that followed the crushing of the 1956 uprising by the Soviet military.

Biszku also denied that he had disapproved of the relatively low number of "physical eliminations" that were carried out in the aftermath of 1956. Experts have placed the number of judicial executions at around 200. He denied that the process that led to the 1958 execution of Nagy, who found himself the leader of the uprising, had been a "show trial."

In reference to his comment in the documentary that Nagy had "deserved his fate," Biszku said, "I have terrible regret for every person whose life was taken or shortened."

Two days after the broadcast, a member of the far-right Jobbik party lodged a criminal complaint against the 89-year-old. Last week, MP György Szilágyi said the party welcomed the decision of the public prosecutor and said he hopes that Biszku will receive a custodial, and not just a suspended, sentence. He was disappointed, however, that the retired communist was not being tried for more serious alleged crimes.

"He should not be punished for what he said but for what he did, as after 1956 he ruined many thousands of families by having hundreds tortured or killed," he said.

Budapest's chief prosecutor last November rejected a petition from a private citizen that Biszku and accomplices be tried for murder and crimes against humanity. The prosecutor cited statutes of limitation and the fact that Biszku could only be tried according to the laws in place at the time.

Biszku has become a test case for new legislation passed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's conservative government shortly after taking office. The previous socialist-backed government, which was crushed in general elections in April last year, had pushed through a law making the public denial or downplaying of the Holocaust a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.

Orbán's Fidesz party voted against the law after the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) refused to extend the scope of the legislation to cover crimes committed in the name of the dictatorship.

This amendment was made in June, the month after Orbán's government took office.

Robert Hodgson can be reached at news@praguepost.com