Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-10-24-Speech-2-013"
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"en.20061024.4.2-013"2
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"Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to make a statement, and I shall do so standing, on the ‘Hungarian Revolution’ of October 1956.
Camus said: ‘Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any other European people for twenty years […]. In Europe’s isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves, or anywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for and never to condone, even indirectly, what killed them. It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices. We can, however, try to be so, in uniting Europe at last, in forgetting our quarrels, in correcting our own errors, in increasing our efforts and our solidarity’.
A reunified Europe today is prepared to make further progress and to disseminate the European spirit even further, thereby helping to create a world in which our actions are guided by the principles of freedom, solidarity and progress.
We owe that to those who died for their belief in a free Europe.
Half a century ago, the Hungarian people rose up against the Communist dictatorship and against the occupation by a foreign power.
On 23 October 1956, Hungarian university students took to the streets of Budapest to protest against the Communist government and they were soon joined by citizens from all professions and sectors of society.
I must tell you that that is my earliest childhood memory of politics. At that time, the news in my country was full of the resistance by the Hungarian people. I can remember our school teacher showing us where the events were taking place on a map, the voices on the radio and photographs in the newspapers of burnt-out T-34 tanks in the centre of Budapest. It brought alive in me for the first time the notion of fighting for freedom.
For two weeks there was hope; then the radios stopped and a complete silence fell, and behind that silence thousands were killed and hundreds exiled. For some time those who rose up in Budapest hoped that the free West would come to their aid. It did not. For some time, they were led to believe that it would.
We looked on as powerless spectators as thousands of Hungarian men, women and children fled their country and sought refuge in the West. It was an indescribable tragedy for the Hungarian people, but it was also the first chink in the armour of the Soviet system – a chink that would grow and would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall – and it was undoubtedly a great moment in the history of that country.
Around that time, at the end of June, the Poznan uprising in Poland, with the workers from the Cigielski factory demanding ‘bread and freedom’, was another significant moment in that upheaval. Those events were undoubtedly related. In fact, during the ceremony organised this year to commemorate the events in Poznan in 1956, the Hungarian President, Laszlo Sólyom, said that ‘Poznan and Hungary rose up together against the Soviet occupation. On 24 October 1956 the Hungarians took to the streets carrying placards reading “Poznan - Warsaw – Budapest”’.
That was a source of inspiration for what happened later, although it took a long time. It took a long time, until the spring came in Prague in 1968. It took a long time, until the strikes in Poland in 1970, which led to the recognition of Solidarnosc, ten years later, which was the pickaxe that brought the wall down.
History repeated itself in 1989. Hungary and Poland laid the first stone of the reunification of the continent, and I believe that this is a good point to quote from Albert Camus in 1957, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution."@en1
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