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EMIGRE TESTAMENT’ ON HUNGARY

UN REPORT CANNOT BE VERIFIED

By J. R. CAMPBELL

LONDON

The report of the United Nations Special Committee on Hungary, issued last
Week, can best be described as an emigres’ testament. The 111 witnesses cited had
all fled from Hungary after the failure of the uprising and were interview in various

estern capitals.

Cfoss - examination. Stories

about the -same events were
Compared and the witnesses
were’ subject to a certain
amount of cross,- examination
but this could not eliminate
the witnesses’ persistent bias.
, The Hungarian government
did not recognise the commit-
tee, but a few selected extracts

__ &¥e given from the two White

apers which it issued.

So the bias against the pres-
nt Hungarian government is
‘vident throughout the report.
€ report gives the names
‘of only three witnesses, Major-

€neral Kiraly, military gov-
‘tor of Budapest, Jozef Kov-
ee Mayor of Budapest during

© years 1945-47, and Anna
Kethly, Social Democratic
leader,
Pee the other witnesses are
ey eat there are no
stories, Checking their
ie great majority of the
ES nesses were under 35 years
8ge, many were much
te the youngest being
mittee, of age,” says the com-

The main thesis is that the
bla & was not in any way
fe nned. It was purely spon-

neous and those who partici-
oe in it had no idéa how

Would develop.
fie € committee is faced with
iin argument of the Hungar-
With ernment that the speed
tks peuich various groups ob-
tegic arms and seized stra-
oat. Points in the city indi-
fore that the counter-revolu-
pated elements who partici-
é In the rising had a pre-

Tanged plan,
© committee merely

arushes this aside with the

€Nnce of it.

fing ite committee expect to
emi : 2 the testimony of the
aaa Surely the counter-
ally utionaries, faced ‘with
= te, had every ‘reason to
s <P quiet.
»© incident has been more
Written about than the strug-

gle Outside the radio building
Udapest, in which the first
Shoot

Mg occurred.

Those, Committee adds one
SS of pocllisment: “The. an-
When the crowd intensified
- ee ambulances with

Up, Toss licence plates drew

cake of first-aid teams,
Police emerged, wearin
Oat whi es ee
Sctors white coats. A part of
e Mfuriated crowd (infuri-
y AVH shootings) at-
t gs) a
pked them and in this way
fhe demonstrators ~ acquired
1t first weapons,”
of ue of previous accounts
; S incident have been;

€ment that it found no evi- °

written wihout the dramatic
incident of the AVH men in
the ambulance being men-
tioned. The legend is: being
elaborated.

Or take the shooting in Par-
liament Square on October 25.
Previous accounts, from non-
government sources, say that
the Russian tanks guarding the
building were fired upon and
returned the fire.

Here it is calmly presented
as- “Soviet tanks guarding the
Parliament Building, in which
the chairman of the council of
ministers had his offices, open-
ed fire on unarmed demon-
strators, in support of the
AVss ‘

The prior shooting at the
tanks has disappeared from
the narrative.

A new feature in this report
is the allegation that Soviet
troops stationed outside Hun-
gary, in Czechoslovakia and
Rumania, were organised. to
intervene before the uprising
actually took place at all.

Having contended that the
uprising was purely spontane-
ous, the report proceeds to
claim that Soviet forces—out-
side Hungary—were prepared
to intervene against an up-
rising which no one _ inside
Hungary had even (according
to the special committee) an.
ticipated.

Who told the committee of
these preparations? Was it the
emigre under-35’s or the un-
der-25’s?

Or was it “a considerable
number of government offi-
cials including diplomats” or
the intelligence services of the
Western powers?

The allegation about Soviet
troops is one of the new accu-
sations contained in the re-
port. Yet no convincing evi-
dence is offered as to its truth.

A central question’ is
whether the uprising was in
effect a counter-revolution.

The present Hungarian gov-
ernment alleges that the
counter - revolution had re-
duced the Nagy government to
complete impptence, -that a,
pogrom was taking place
against Communists and pro-
gressive-minded people , and
that reaction was pushing
ahead to restore capitalism.

The committee gives quota-
tions from speeches made by
Janos Kadar, present Hungar-
ian premier, from the earliest
days of the rising, warning
against the danger of counter-
revolution. Similar speeches
by Social Democratic leaders
are also given.

The danger of counter-revo-
lution was in the minds of all
working class leaders.

The Hungarian government

The method of checking ‘the witnesses’ stories was one of comparison and

claims that when the Soviet
troops withdrew from Buda-
pest for several days, White
Terror raged.

Nowhere in the report is
there a coherent account of
this period. Yet this was the
time when the European press
of all political tendencies was
carrying pictures of murdered
Communists.

Says the committee: “A
number of lynchings and beat-
ings concerned in almost all
cases members of the AVH or «
those who were believed’ to
have cooperated with them.”

The last clause is self-re-
vealing.

When it is pointed out that
there were a lot of lynchings
of people not connected with
the AVH the committee can al-
Ways argue: “Oh, but they

_ were believed (by the lynchers

presumably) to be -connected
with the AVH.”

“It is the committee’s point
of view that no putsch by re-
actionary landlords or by dis-
possessed industrialists could
have prevailed against the de-
termination of those © fully
aroused workers and peasants
to defend the reforms they
had gained and to pursue their
fulfilment,” says the report.

What a travesty of politics!
Of course, the dispossessed
landlords and capitalists would
not organise a putsch under
their own banners.

But armed groups were
pushing the government to the
right. Reactionary ministers
had a majority. The reaction-
ary movement.was growing all
the time and the Nagy govern-
ment was taking no measures
to stop it.

One of the key incidents of
the uprising wag the attack on
the headquarters of the Buda-
pest committee of the Commu-
nist party by a group of re-
actionaries on October 30.

The building was subdued
by heavy artillery fire and
most of those within it were
then massacred in cold blood.

While the events at the radio”
station on October 22 and in
Paliament Square on October
25 are mentioned in great de-
tail, the committee does not
analyse this event at all.

It knows, because it has
quoted other extracts from the
document, that the council of
ministers in the Hungarian
government has declared that
“the White Terror claimed
hundreds of victims—hundreds
of people who were not killed
fighting, but were murdered.”

The committee does not
notice the White Terror at all.

The reactionary minister
Istvan Bibo, as he left the Par-
liament Building on November

4 issued a statement which is
quoted at length in the report.
Among other things he said:
“The popular justice (a syn-
onym for lynching) which we
experienced for a few days on
the streets as well as the un-

armed appearance of the old
conservative forces could have
been stopped by the new gov-
ernment in a very short time,
and the assertion that for this
purpose a huge foreign army
had to be called, or rather re-
called, into the country is cyni-
cal and irresponsible.”

Note, on November 4 this
minister admits that the lynch-
ings — or “popular justice” as
he calls them — were still
going on, which is in direct
conflict with the statements in
other parts of the report that
the Nagy government was in
full control of the situation.

The role of Cardinal Mind-
szenty is surely germane to the
question of whether a counter-
revolution was developing in
Hungary or not.

There is no account appar-
ently of the famous broadcast
in which he called for “a
classless society on the basis of
private property,” which is
simply a hypocrite’s definition
of capitalism.

Yet this would seem to be
more important than the evi-
dence of a witness who told
the committee that Mindszenty
had told him that he did not
intend to press for return of
Church lands.

Would it not be more to the
point to deal with what Mind-
szenty said in his public broad-
cast than with what an un-

A street scene in Budapest today

named witness. said that Mind-
szenty had said in conversa-
tion? :

It is necessary to conceal
these developments, otherwise
the picture of the uprising
“aiming at democratic social-
ism” would be seen as the un-
mitigated nonsense that it is.

Having, on the basis of tor-
tuous reasoning, convinced
itself that there was no danger
of counter-revolution, the com-
mittee concludes that there
was no legal basis for the sec-
ond Soviet intervention and
throws doubt on whether there
was a legal basis for the first

It therefore declares that
the Soviet Union was guilty of
aggression and that this is a
matter of international con-
cern.

“The committee considers it
of interest that certain ‘writers
of “Communist sympathies”
have rejected the thesis of the
Kadar government concerning
Hungarian events.

The only writer it quotes is
Peter Fryer, former London
Daily Worker . correspondent
now writing for Lord Beaver-
brook’s newspapers.

The report complains that

.Fryer’s first dispatch was not

published but that in the Lon-

‘don Daily Worker next day it

was said that gangs of reac-
tionaries' were beating Com-
munists-to death in the streets
(as indeed they were). :

What filled the London
Daily Worker’s front page that
day? The same event that fill-
ed the front page of most other
British newspapers—the Brit-
ish+French-Israeli invasion of
Egypt.

757 East Hastings

TED HARRIS

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JUNE 28, 1957 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 3

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