Speaking at the United Nations in New York, Hungary
has apologized for the first time ever for the role the country played in the
Holocaust. News agency MTI reported today that the apology was made last Thursday
by the Hungarian Ambassador to the UN, Csaba Körösi.
“Until today at this forum, no one has ever expressed, on behalf of the Hungarian
state, its
responsibility for its role in the Holocaust,” MTI quoted Ambassador Körösi as saying.
The ambassador went on to say he would be making two separate statements of
Hungarian responsibility that Thursday.
The ambassador made the apology during an event
held at the UN on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the
Holocaust in Hungary, whose victims were Jewish and Romani people. He then
repeated it at the opening of an exhibition called “Remembrance of the
Holocaust in Hungary” which was put together by various organizations with the participation
of the Hungarian mission to the UN.
“We owe the victims an apology because the
Hungarian state was guilty of the Holocaust, on the one hand because the state
did not manage to protect its citizens from annihilation, and on the other hand
because it aided their mass murder and provided financial resources for it,” Körösi
said during a press conference at the New York headquarters of the United
Nations to launch a series of events dedicated to the Holocaust. Hungary
is commemorating the 70th anniversary this year of the transport of
more than 430 000 Hungarian Jews to the Nazi death camps, deportations that
began shortly after the German invasion of the country.
The problem of anti-Semitism is currently alive
again in Hungary due to the controversial ultra-right Jobbik movement there.
Its members reject Hungary’s responsibility for the murder of Jewish people
during WWII and are notorious for making anti-Semitic declarations.
Recently the government of Hungarian Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán generated even more bad blood with a plan to erect a large
monument in Budapest to be unveiled on the anniversary of the German occupation
of Hungary in March 1944. Representatives of Hungary’s Jewish communities protested
the move, which critics consider part of efforts to obscure the responsibility
of the former representatives of Hungary and
its local security forces at the time for the deportation of the Jews.
