Saturday, 23 July 2011 budapesttimes.hu
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.

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