Saturday, 23 July 2011 |
budapesttimes.hu |
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Comment: Justice
on trial as Képiró goes free
by Anat Kalman |
Somehow it all seemed unreal: the unbearably sticky heat in
the courtroom of Budapest Municipal Court, the 97-year-old
wheelchair-bound defendant Sándor Képíró who
was pushed in with red-rimmed eyes and an IV drip, the poor
quality of the microphones, the lawyer of the accused who
nodded off briefly, and the elder of Képíró’s
two carers who unexpectedly leapt to her feet and asserted
what a fine man he is and that he had told her how homesick
he was for Hungary.
Finally there was cheering when the judge issued the court’s
verdict: Képíró was acquitted. The judgement
was a triumph for Hungary’s far-right, whose representatives
marched out of the courtroom in T-shirts decorated with Árpád
flags and their right fists proudly raised in the air.
The verdict is not yet legally binding: the prosecution – which
had called during the trial for a custodial sentence despite
Képíró’s age – lodged an appeal
and Képíró’s defence lawyer also
lodged an appeal, saying he wanted his client declared innocent,
not merely acquitted for lack of evidence. The court’s
verdict was strongly criticised by both Efraim Zuroff, director
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Bruno Vekaric, spokesman
for Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor. Both insisted itg
had made a mockery of the victims. The accused acknowledged
that he was present at the raid in January 1942 as a member
of the Hungarian occupation police stationed in Vojvodina – although
he denied any knowledge of the killing of civilians.
Nevertheless the court ruled that there was no firm evidence
of Képíró’s direct involvement,
and that it cannot even be proven beyond doubt that he was
aware of it. Képíró himself said that
the massacre was a cleansing action carried out by the Hungarian
army and that he, as a simple policeman, could not have had
anything to do with it.
It is not only the international press that is questioning
how Képíró can have been acquitted so
fully. There is also astonishment in Budapest: could the court
not have exercised a little more juristic imagination? Even
if “not guilty” of the massacre, Képíró was
undoubtedly among those who were present in Novi Sad and played
an active part in rounding up the victims. Accessory to murder
or failure to offer assistance to the victims... surely there
must be a wider spectrum of possible verdicts?
The Képíró trial shows once again how
difficult it is to bring crimes of long ago to court. Historian
Krisztian Ungváry said that Képíró cannot
easily be proven guilty in a legal sense, even if morally he
can certainly be held responsible. The experience is undoubtedly
a very painful one. It is an experience shared by the representatives
of the association of the victims of the Recsk forced-labour
camp, which sought at the beginning of the 1990s, led by the
jurist Tibor Zimányi (who died in 2007), to have communist
criminals sentenced by the courts. Those trials also failed
because of lack of evidence.
János M. Rainer, director of the Institute for the History
of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, said in an interview with
Saarland Radio in 2000: “We no longer want such trials
because they always end tragically for the victims. Most of
the files have disappeared and little of what actually happened
can be proven with tangible evidence. That’s why we proceed
differently: we name those who are responsible for crimes committed
in our publications, with our sources. That means, we pass
sentence on them historically.”
That is one point of view. Perhaps that is what historian László Karsai
was thinking of when in the daily Magyar Hírlap he called
on Zuroff to cease bringing trials for which evidence is no
longer available after 60 or 70 years.
There is, however, another point of view that cannot be dismissed
lightly. Our civil societies condemn all forms of murder, whether
it be mass murder or murder of one individual. Murder has no
statute of limitation and murder must be punished, regardless
of when the crime was committed and regardless of how old the
murderer is.
That is the view taken by Zimányi, who said in an interview: “What
kind of morals can be established in a society where former
executioners are simply allowed to carry on living a good life?” Zuroff
and Vekaric refer to survivors of the massacre, whose reports
agree on what happened in the ice-cold days of January 1942,
when over 1,200 people were rounded up from their houses, shot
and thrown in the Danube.
For the survivors, Képíró is far from
being an unknown quantity. Zuroff and Vekaric hope that the
court of the next instance will pay greater heed to those witness
reports.
Shortly after the verdict was pronounced, the Belgrade Institute
for the Hebrew Language and Literature announced a protest
rally for this Sunday in Belgrade and Novi Sad.
budapesttimes.hu
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