PHOTOS: Hungary marks the memorial day of the victims of communism

Csaba Latorcai, state secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office, commemorated the memorial day of the victims of communism in Kecskemét, in central Hungary, on Friday.

Addressing the ceremony, he said the memorial day observed on February 25 was an occasion not only to remember the victims but to highlight the importance of solidarity and responsibility to one another. “Unsuspecting European citizens are these days getting attacked not from the East, as it was the case under communism, but from the West,” Latorcai, the acting secretary general of the allied ruling Christian Democrats, said. Now Western liberals seek “to force down the throats” of EU member states and citizens a plan of a “European superstate” that respects neither faith nor the human individual, he said.

“Hungarians had the tough experience of how it feels to live in fear; our parents and grandparents lived through times when there had been expulsion, discrimination and persecution of religion,” Latorcai said. “And now, at the beginning of the 21st century’s third decade, we have to face the reality that we are again living in the age of fear”.

He said at stake was whether Europe remains a community of free nations with roots in Christian culture, or becomes “a united states of Europe”, “an empire” populated by ethnically and culturally mixed groups of people and “dominated by the West”. In the afternoon, Latorcai addressed a ceremony held at the Budapest Gyorskocsi street prison used by the communist police. “The communists of yesterday, the progressives of today want to defend democracy from us; they serve foreign, pro-war interests through which they jeopardise our freedom, independence and peace,” he said.

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Istvan Balvanykovi, a Budapest politician for the Christian Democrats, told the commemoration “this is the past that is still alive, because there are many alive today who lived through the horrors of communist prisons. We must pay due respect to the victims of communism, because the crimes of communism will never lapse”. Bence Rétvári, a state secretary of the interior ministry, told a wreath-laying ceremony in Budapest that whereas Hungarians were paying tribute to the victims of communism, in the West “they are doing so for the ideology”.

Rétvári said those who had served the communist regime had not been held to account during Hungary’s democratic transition. “They remain active members of public life to this day,” he said. The state secretary said communists did not value private property, freedom or even human life. “Communist ideology is a murderous ideology, because no matter where in the world it came to power, it resulted in mass murders,” Rétvári said, adding that “most of its leaders were criminals”.

Here are some photos of the commemoration:

He said Karl Marx’s views on the need to replace home education with social education were reflected in today’s sensitisation campaigns by NGOs. Constitutional Court judge and legal historian Attila Horváth said it was important to remember the victims of communism 33 years after the change of political system because although justice had been served in a legal sense, historical justice still needed to be dealt with so that future generations are made aware of what in fact had happened in that era. Under a parliamentary decree, February 25 has been observed as a memorial day of martyrs of Communism since 2000. On this day in 1947, leader of the Independent Smallholders’ Party Béla Kovács was illegally detained and deported to the Soviet Union.

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