Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been the most outspokenly against allowing Syrian refugees not just into his country but anywhere into the European Union. But of course, he is particularly against what he views as the imposition by other European Union member states of refugees on Hungary. His reasoning is that Hungarian society is homogenous, that there are no blacks, no Middle Eastern people and no Muslims. Everybody, he says, is white and Christian. That is especially amusing, coming as it does from Hungary, which formed part of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the 18th century, and which was under Muslim rule for so long, with mosques, Islamic schools and obviously, Ottoman administration. Some of the top-billed visitor attractions in Budapest today are the Turkish baths built during that period, which are still in use.
Hungary also had a sizeable Jewish population, but we all know what happened to them only 70 years ago. They were carted off on Nazi transport and put to death. It is largely because of that that Hungarian society has been homogenous for the last mere seven decades. After that, homogeneity had to be the rule – there was no choice – for the same reasons that homogeneity was the rule throughout the Soviet satellite states behind the Iron Curtain. People wanted to get out. Nobody wanted to get in – and they couldn’t, even if they were sufficiently out of their minds to do so. It is not a coincidence that the EU member states putting up the most vociferous objections to taking in Syrian refugees are the former communist bloc countries. Their Jewish populations were murdered in World War II and until 1990 they were cut off from civilisation by barbed wire, steel fences and border guards armed with machine guns and an order to shoot to kill anyone trying to escape to freedom.
That brings us to the subject of Hungarian refugees themselves, of whom there were two major outflows – one in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the other in 1956, with the savage Soviet suppression of a major revolution there. In 1956, the West abandoned the Hungarian revolutionaries to their own devices. It was a terrible act of betrayal, perpetrated because the West – in those days of the Cold War – did not wish to provoke any form of Soviet reprisal. The consequences for the Hungarian people were beyond terrible, so you might think that individuals like Viktor Orban would have more empathy today. But they don’t. In 1945 and 1956, millions of Hungarians fled their country into Austria and thence into Switzerland and on to the United States, Canada, South American, Britain and France, in many cases swimming across rivers and in all cases taking nothing but what they could easily carry on their backs and in their hands. There were no suitcases on wheels in those days, and in any case, they had to run at night, over fields and through water. One Hungarian refugee in France had a son who grew up to be the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. One Hungarian refugee in Malta married my grandfather’s brother and became my great-aunt.
But now Hungary is turning itself into the bad man of Europe, the despicable foil to Angela Merkel’s Germany, the very country which caused, through its actions, those two massive rivers of Hungarians refugees in 1945 and 1956 (Hungary only ended up behind the Iron Curtain because of the fall-out from World War II). It hasn’t helped matters that the international press is there, filming and recording every false move, including scenes last week of detention camp guards throwing food to crowds of penned-up refugees as though they were animals. Those scenes zipped around the world. And before that, there was Petra Laszlo, the Hungarian television camerawoman who was caught on somebody else’s camera tripping up one of the refugees as he ran from the police. That would have been bad enough, but what made it so much worse is the fact that he was carrying a young child in his arms and a large bag on his back. Both child and bag went flying, as did he, and the photograph that captured this scene, with Laszlo’s leg still extended, made headline news on social media. Laszlo was fired immediately, and she offered some sort of reluctant apology for her behaviour, but the impression of Hungary as a hostile nation with values that are more the legacy of their repressive recent past than of their 21st-century European identity will not go away any time soon. That, however, does not seem to worry Viktor Orban at all – on the contrary, he sounds proud of it.
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