Hungarians must accept role in Holocaust: deputy PM

BUDAPEST: Hungary must acknowledge its role during the Holocaust, the country's deputy prime minister said on Tuesday, in comments which won praise from the Jewish community.

Speaking at a two-day conference on anti-Semitism in Budapest, Tibor Navracsics said the Hungarian state had "turned its back against its own citizens, and indeed took part in their elimination".

"We have learned from the past, we know exactly what happened here, every Hungarian is duty bound to face this responsibility: 70 years ago it was Hungarians who killed Hungarians," he added.

Some 600,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust, most of them deported to death camps in Poland and elsewhere in 1944. The local Jewish community here is still one of the biggest in Europe, however, at around 100,000.

US representative Ira Forman, special envoy to monitor and combat anti-semitism, welcomed Navracsics's "important and explicit" words at a time of rising anti-Semitism in Europe.

The deputy prime minister's comments also stood out amid criticism that the Hungarian government has not done enough to fight growing anti-Semitism. In May, the World Jewish Congress held an assembly in Budapest to send a strong signal about the rise in anti-Semitism in the central European country.

Physical or verbal attacks on Hungarian Jews, although rare, have increased
in recent years.

"Today's Hungarian democracy will protect all its citizens against those who want to incite hatred," Navracsics vowed Tuesday, adding that Holocaust education was key "to ensure the horrors are not repeated."

He also denounced remarks made in parliament last November by Marton Gyongyosi, a member of the openly anti-Semitic Jobbik party, who proposed drawing up a list of Hungarian Jews to identify possible national security threats.

Such remarks "tarnished" the image of Hungarian democracy, Navracsics said. The two-day conference in Hungary's parliament, titled 'Jewish Life and Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Europe', brought together dozens of diplomats, politicians and experts on Jewish issues and anti-Semitism.