HUNGARY 2001-2

 

The racist and xenophobic MIEP, which had hoped to become a decisive factor in the survival of the center-right coalition government in the May 2002 general elections, did not pass the electoral threshold. It continued its virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel attacks in its mouthpiece Magyar Forum. Antisemitic manifestations were reported at soccer matches and at far right demonstrations. Much extremist effort was focused on condemnation of any type of memorial activity related to the Holocaust in which Hungarian participation was recalled.

 

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

The 80,000 Jews living in Hungary, out of a total population of 10.55 million, constitute the largest Jewish community in Eastern Europe outside the borders of the former Soviet Union. The great majority live in Budapest, with smaller communities in large urban centers such as Miskolc and Debrecen, as well as in smaller cities.

The Federation of Jewish Communities is the main body of Hungarian Jewry (Mazsihisz). Several major organizations are active in Hungary, especially the Lauder Foundation, whose summer camps attract youth from across central and eastern Europe. The Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association publishes a monthly, Szombat (Saturday), and conducts a wide variety of cultural and educational activities. The quarterly Mult es Jovo (Past and Present) publishes original and translated essays on a variety of topics. The bi-weekly Uj Elet (New Life) is the official publication of the Jewish community, and its content reflects a religious revival among some segments of the Jewish population.

The formal agreement signed in December 2000 between the Hungarian government and the Jewish community pledges commemoration of the Holocaust and the introduction of Holocaust education into the school curriculum.

 

POLITICAL PARTIES AND EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY GROUPS

Political Parties

The May 2002 election led to the replacement of the center-right coalition government by a center-left one consisting of the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP) and the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz). The Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIEP), which had hoped to become a decisive factor in the survival of the center-right coalition, did not pass the electoral threshold, and hence lost its parliamentary representation. On the eve of the elections analysts believed that the silence of the governing FIDESZ party regarding the extremist, sometimes antisemitic, rhetoric of MIEP leader Istvan Csurka was motivated by electoral calculations. However, the FIDESZ rejected media suggestions that it was “courting” the extreme right.

 

Extra-Parliamentary Groups

The number of neo-Nazis is small, but they are visible in public demonstrations on national days or anniversaries linked to World War II. The most notorious neo-Nazi group is the Hungarian Welfare Association, which has appeared under various names and in different forms and adheres openly to the legacy of the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross movement, led during the war by Ferenc Szalasi.

Skinhead numbers have not increased in the last few years and their activities might have diminished. Nevertheless, this violent sub-culture with its neo-Nazi symbols continues to be a visible threat to public order. In February 2001 and 2002, Hungarian police confronted groups of local neo-Nazis who were celebrating the anniversary of the attempt in 1945 of Hungarian and Nazi troops to break out of Soviet-besieged Budapest. Following these displays of neo-Nazi power, the authorities promised to clamp down on such demonstrations. The yearly marches in 2000, 2001and 2002 were much smaller in scale than in 1999, but have become an annual display of neo-Nazism and Holocaust revisionism.

A principal defender of the skinheads is former parliament member Izabella B. Kiraly, president of the small Hungarian Interest Party, whose organ is Kottot Keve (Tied Sheaf). This insignificant group continued its pro-Iraq, anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda (see also ASW 2000/1).

 

ANTISEMITIC AND RACIST ACTIVITIES

The Hungarian media reported antisemitic slogans and symbols at soccer matches and public events. Despite the ADL’s appeal in June 2000 to the Hungarian prime minister to take legal measures against soccer fans who displayed antisemitic and racist behavior, “soccer antisemitism” continued with slogans such as “The train is leaving for Auschwitz.”

Antisemitic manifestations were also evident during MIEP demonstrations in Budapest in March 2001 and 2002 commemorating the 1849–49 revolution, as well as at a noisy demonstration of skinheads that attempted to break up a Chanuka celebration in the center of Budapest in December 2002.

 

Propaganda

The electoral struggle in 2002 was the bitterest in Hungary’s post communist history. During the campaign many HSP electoral posters were defaced by slogans, such as “Israeli interests are behind the Socialists.” Following the formation of the new government in May 2002, Csurka, who has long accused the SzDSz of having a “Jewish” élite, claimed in the MIEP weekly mouthpiece Magyar Forum, that Hungary was now being ruled by the “soczionists” (szocionista, in Hungarian). This expression figures in almost every statement and political analysis of MIEP, which uses old conspiracy theories to explain that Jewish-Zionist interests are behind the victory of the liberal-left in Hungary.

Csurka’s party, which until the 2002 elections, had representatives on the board of directors of the public broadcasting commission and the media, was active in “unmasking” the “socialist-liberal [read “Jewish”]” spirit in the media. Pannon Radio station identifies with the MIEP line, and “Sunday Journal,” a popular Sunday radio show on Hungarian state radio, has become a major forum for airing nationalist and extremist views, as well as criticism of Jewish issues. Csurka defended Pannon Radio, blaming attempts by “anti-national” forces to silence the “true” voices of the nation.

Extreme right motifs of “Hungarian superiority” and the nation’s “mission” in the Carpathian Basin often echo the interwar East European nationalist and extremist language of exclusiveness and élitism. The “Judeo-Bolshevik” theme is still frequently raised, so as to portray the Jews as the source of all Hungary’s misfortunes, and is evident in various publications in addition to those of the extreme right. Thus, in its issue of 23 June 2001 the periodical Our Justice 56, “the independent journal of the 1956 freedom fighters and the victims of communist persecutions,” mentions repeatedly the Jewish origin of communist leaders such as Bela Kun and Matyas Rakosi. The same issue contains several antisemitic articles, such as one describing Herzl as a “bank manager,” whose Zionist movement dealt and cheated in land speculation.

The September 11 attacks on the US and the war against terror became the main foci of Csurka’s propaganda. His immediate reaction after the attacks, that the “US had received its due punishment” was condemned by the vast majority of Hungarians. Within a month of the attacks Csurka had clarified the MIEP line, combining US, Israeli and Jewish interests, but emphasizing that in fact Israel and world Jewish interests were leading the US and not vice versa, and that Israel and the US were to blame for the attacks. In the wake of the anti-racism conference in Durban and the September 11 events, Csurka stated that “the downtrodden of the world are clearly saying that Zionism is a racist ideology and the US is a power carrying out genocide.”

Both the weekly and the monthly Magyar Forum regularly publish lengthy exposées of the dangers facing Hungary from globalization, which is presented as an international Jewish attempt to keep world power in its hands. The war against terror and globalization were perceived as a combined onslaught against all forces resisting US-Zionist interests.

The weekly Magyar Demokrata has become a regular forum for the publication of antisemitic, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist articles. Articles dealing with the size and impact of Israeli-Jewish financial interests in Hungary are published in almost every issue of Magyar Demokrata, as well as in Magyar Forum. Such themes are combined with a negative approach toward the European Union. Another frequent topic is the continual growth of the Jewish “mafia” from the former Soviet Union, which import a violent sub-culture into Hungary. Following 11 September, Demokrata quoted from dubious sources of alleged Israeli knowledge of, if not direct involvement in, the terrorist acts, because they would serve world Jewish and US interests. In its reportage of the second intifada Demokrata has frequently accused Israel of war crimes, and publishes pseudo-historical articles describing “Zionist crimes” against the Palestinians since the late 19th century.

Introducing a new motif, Demokrata, which claims a readership extending beyond the extreme right, alleged in its issue of 3 January 2002 that the slave trade was “an exclusively Jewish monopoly” to which non-Jews were rarely accepted.” Describing the “excellent profits” the Jews had made out of the slave trade, the paper asserted that the Jews were continuing such practices today. As proof it quoted from one of the works of Israeli humorist Ephraim Kishon, who wrote that in the human trafficking between the Third World and Europe, the Jews had pocketed billions.

 

ATTITUDES TOWARD THE HOLOCAUST and the nazi era

As in previous years, much extremist activity was focused on condemnation of any type of memorial activity related to the Holocaust in which Hungarian participation was recalled, and on Jewish demands for compensation from Hungary. Frequent mention was made of the “communist holocaust” in which Jewish communist leaders were allegedly involved. The incorporation of activities in the school curriculum commemorating and educating about the Holocaust was vehemently rejected by extremists (see ASW 2000/1).

A troubling trend in the past few years has been the gradual expansion of a discourse minimizing and relativizing the Holocaust. In a penetrating study, Randolph L. Braham, leading historian of the Holocaust in Hungary, analyzed this process which characterized the period between the elections of 1998 and 2002 (Randolph L. Braham, Hungary and the Holocaust: The Nationalist Drive to Whitewash the Past, Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies of the Graduate Center of CUNY, New York, Oct. 2001). According to Braham, “Whitewashing” the past, which is part of historical revisionism, will in the long run endanger the stability of the new Hungarian democracy. The penetration of a relativist attitude toward the suffering of the Jews caused by the Hungarian regime, along with attempts at rehabilitating Hungarian leaders guilty of war crimes, became one of the major issues during this period.

The “House of Terror” caused great controversy when it was opened in 2001. Supported by the then center-right government, and directed by Maria Schmidt, an adviser to Prime Minister Viktor Orban (see ASW 1999/2000), the museum documents the Arrow Cross terror of late 1944 and the Stalinist terror of the late 1940s–early 1950s, allegedly led by people whose Jewish origins are clearly evident, but it ignores the antisemitic policies and legislation of the Horthy period.

 

RESPONSES TO RACISM AND ANTISEMITISM

Relations between the Hungarian population and the authorities and the Roma minority remained problematic, despite government pledges to ease tensions by promoting cultural and educational activities and the election of four Roma members of parliament. The right-wing media continued to stress the anti-social and criminal record of the Roma, while human rights organizations sought to monitor and combat racism in Hungary.

Hungarian educators continued their participation in the now annual seminars at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in order to carry out the government’s pledge to include Holocaust studies in the school curriculum.

In 2001 the B’nai B'rith Budapest Lodge issued its Anti-Semitic Discourse in Hungary in 2000 (in Hungarian and English), documenting antisemitism in Hungary. The book contains a selection from the antisemitic media in Hungary along with analysis and reactions from Hungarian and Jewish organizations and public figures. The publication is to be issued yearly.

Leading figures of the Hungarian Jewish community have voiced their concern over the impact of antisemitism in present-day Hungary. Several months before the 2002 general elections, Peter Tordai, president of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, spoke of “frightening antisemitic tendencies in Hungary” (Uj Kelet, 30 Nov. 2001). Tordai criticized the silence of former Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his tacit courting of the extremist MIEP. Tordai also urged the Hungarian government and lawmakers to hasten legislation on racism, Holocaust denial and specifically antisemitism, a topic also raised with the Hungarian minister of justice by a delegation from the World Jewish Congress in November 2002.