Politicians from across the political spectrum have roundly condemned the crime. Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány called the vandalism a crime of the “most abominable and inhuman kind”.
In a statement released last Wednesday evening, he also sought to dismiss any political symbolism the act might have for some, and said that the perpetrators will be judged for desecrating Kádár’s grave, independently of any relationship between the Kádár régime and the Third (today’s) Hungarian Republic.
Gyurcsány: set politics aside
Gyurcsány, a one-time Communist youth leader turned millionaire businessman, is seen by many as inheritor of the Communist grip on power, and one of many opportunists in post-Communist countries who managed to convert their power and connections into huge wealth during the changeover to a market economy in the early ’90s. He said that in the wake of the desecration of Kádár’s grave, the onus is on all politicians to see that justice is done. “To my eyes, there is no point of view, political or otherwise, that can be used to excuse or explain such a monstrous, inhuman and cowardly act,” he said. Otherwise, he said, the case is a matter for the police.
Police closed off the area around the grave while trying to establish whether Kádár’s bones were left behind or discarded somewhere near the scene.
They announced last Thursday morning that investigators are trying to establish whether the grave robbers were also responsible for a piece of nationalist graffiti spotted nearby. A line from a song by irredentist heavy rock band Kárpátia that translates as “Murderer and traitor, you cannot rest in holy ground”, was daubed on the wall of the Workers’ Movement pantheon, which honours heroes of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party.
The Kárpátia song, “I want to hear names”, which contains the lyric scrawled on the columbarium, runs “I want to hear the names/of the butchers of 1956/who passed judgement/on a pure revolution”. Police would not allow the graffiti to be removed until it had been analysed by handwriting experts.
Goulash Communism
Kádár was placed in power by the Soviet Union after the 1956 Uprising had been crushed. Although he was Moscow’s man, he won the population over to some extent in the ensuing decades with his “anyone who is not against us is with us” approach, and by loosening the grip of the secret police on the nation and introducing a limited free market system that became known outside Hungary as “Goulash Communism”. As he slackened the reins in the 1960s and ‘70s, Hungarians - as long as they kept their heads down - enjoyed a greater degree of freedom than their Warsaw Pact comrades in Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany, earning Hungary the title of “happiest barracks in the camp.”
Despite this, many never forgave Kádár for presiding over the trials, imprisonment and execution of many who fought for independence from the USSR in 1956 - including reformist Communist Imre Nagy, who became the popular head of the 1956 Uprising and was tried and hanged behind closed doors in 1958.
Motive
The Hungarian media has been wringing its hands since the event, asking “experts”, from sociologists to philosophers, why someone would commit such a crime. No convincing answers have been offered other than that it is merely a symptom of the wave of dissatisfaction across the region with the way things have gone since Communism was tossed aside in 1989. Who a person chooses to blame depends on which party he supports. If leans to the right - and support for right wing groupings such as the Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP) and Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik) has, if not increased, then at least become more apparent since the events of last autumn - then blaming the Communists (with whom many would lump the ruling Socialist party, the MSZP) for one’s problems is almost a reflex action.
Right-leaning daily Magyar Nemzet, which supports the opposition party Fidesz, ran a piece asserting that Kádár having been a “murderer and a traitor” is a historical fact that has not changed. It condemned the desecration as an act of cowardice, while saying that the change in political system 17 years ago was not accompanied by a necessary moral catharsis.
Fidesz deputy spokesman, András Cser-Palkovics, stated his party’s reaction to the crime: “Fidesz does not consider this case a political question, rather a question of respect for the dead,” he said. “Everyone is entitled to rest in peace.”
The vandals who dug up the grave of the man born Giovanni Csermanek almost a century ago in Rijeka while it was still Hungarian territory stand to get up to three years in prison for their stunt (five years if the former Communist leader’s remains are not recovered). However, the directors of the cemetery admitted last Thursday that privacy laws prevented the operation of closed circuit television cameras, so there is no footage of the criminals to work with.
The deputy mayor of Budapest, Miklós Hagyó, held a meeting last Wednesday with the director of the Budapest Cemetery Institute (Budapesti Temetkezési Intézet Zrt.), responsible for the upkeep of the city’s burial grounds. He then announced that the number of security personnel working between 8pm and 7am will be “significantly increased”. In addition, the company has been given until 30 June to come up with a professional and financial plan for increased vigilance over parts of cemetery that are of exceptional importance, such as Plot 301 (where Imre Nagy is buried) and memorials to soldiers.
As Mária Schmidt - director of the museum dedicated to the victims of fascist and Communist brutality, the House of Terror, and one of the many pundits and commentators on all things pre-1989 in Hungary who was asked to comment by Hungarian television - said: “I fear we will never find out who did it.”
http://www.budapesttimes.hu/?do=article&id=2335&issue=139