(MTI) – After a government office under the authority of the minister of the interior published parts of an official report on the 2006 “lies speech” of former Socialist prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, the opposition called for the whole report to be made public.
Two redacted secret-service reports into the 2006 “lies speech” were published on the website of the Constitutional Protection Office. Accordingly, they raise the possibility that a Socialist politician was behind the leak.
Gyurcsany’s poll ratings had already begun to decline after he won the 2006 election on the back of austerity measures. When a speech he made behind closed doors to the Socialist party was leaked, however, his popularity nose-dived, and the speech in which he admitted to lying about the state of the economy before the general election unleashed a wave of violent street protests.
Ferenc Gyurcsany called on Interior Minister Sandor Pinter to bring the entire documentation related to the leaking of the “lies speech” into the public domain.
In a posting on his Facebook page on Saturday, Gyurcsany accused Pinter of manipulating the evidence, and, “worse, of lying”. He insisted the reports that the minister had now made public were not equivalent to the official report finalised in December 2009.
“I determinedly reject Pinter’s current innuendos and contentions,” he wrote.
He accused Pinter of wanting to suppress the issue of publicising the recording and of disseminating it to the media had been the decision of the Fidesz leadership.
“We know, however, that Fidesz wittingly prepared the ground for the disturbances of the autumn of 2006,” he wrote, referring to running street battles with police which ensued in the autumn.
Gyurcsany also demanded Pinter’s resignation should it be shown that the official report diverges from the currently “manipulated” material.
He also called on Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the Fidesz leadership to say whether they knew beforehand that the speech would be played on Hungarian public radio. If this is the case, then they should take responsibility for the events on the streets in the autumn of 2006, Gyurcsany wrote.
Attila Mesterhazy, leader of the Socialist party, called on the government to stop using the secret services for campaign purposes, and to bring the entire report into the open instead of a “distorted” version of it.
Gordon Bajnai, who became prime minister after Gyurcsany stepped down in 2009, told MTI on Saturday that the conclusions drawn from the current partial information, which had now been released, were in contradiction to the original report.
Bajnai, who leads the opposition E-PM election alliance, said there was no reason not to publish the entire report, since doing so would not pose a danger to national security in any way. The reason the authorities had refused to release the entire report is because this would reflect poorly on them, he insisted.
The ruling Fidesz party’s head of communications, Mate Kocsis, told a news conference that Gyurcsany had “lied about his lies speech”. He hushed up the circumstances of how the recording of the speech was leaked, Kocsis said.
Now the left wing is condemning the minister of the interior for publishing a report which was prepared when Gyurcsany and Bajnai were in power, he said, insisting that the left-wing politicians were lying when they accused the government of using the Constitutional Protection Office for election campaign purposes.
The Fidesz official also rejected the contention that the partial report published on the office’s website would not help to uncover the truth of the matter. Kocsis argued that the office had had to take into account aspects such as personal rights and national security when releasing the material.
The most important issue connected with the “lies speech” has already surfaced, Fidesz spokeswoman Gabriella Selmeczi told a news conference on Saturday: namely that Gyurcsany had himself admitted in his speech to “lying morning, noon and night…”.
One of the redacted reports prepared in 2006-2009 makes reference to information provided by Eduardo Rozsa-Flores under the code name “Guevara”, who claimed that a Socialist politician leaked the speech. This was arranged after consultations with Gyurcsany and members of the then ruling Socialist party’s parliamentary group, he claimed.
The report says the Socialist politician in question was the subject of guesswork.
According to Rozsa-Flores, a Hungarian-Croatian-Bolivian citizen shot in Bolivia in April 2009 amid unclear circumstances, the Gyurcsany government had sought to divert attention from budgetary disputes and shed light on the “terrible state of the Hungarian economy.”
Photo: MTI
Source: http://hungarymatters.hu/
