‘Hungary’s Challenge’

The June 16 commentary (“Hungary’s Challenge for the West,” Op-Ed Page, June 16) by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) contained factual errors and misrepresentations. The congressman stated that Imre Nagy, the prime minister of the Hungarian government formed during the 1956 Revolution, “was secretly executed by Soviet troops.”

Nagy was tried and sentenced to death by a court of the People’s Republic of Hungary. This court was constituted under the aegis of the government lead by Janos Kadar, the man who betrayed Nagy and Hungary the entire nation. He was put in power by the Soviets after the Revolution was crushed on Nov. 4, 1956. Nagy was executed by a Hungarian hangman.

Lantos also implies that Nagy was rehabilitated. True, the Hungarian chief prosecutor--aiming at legal rehabilitation--scheduled the retrial of Nagy and his associates beginning on July 6 of this year and the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party on May 30, 1989, announced: “Although the relevant documents need to be carefully studied, it can already be concluded that (Nagy’s trial) was a political show trial, Imre Nagy’s execution was it seems, certainly judicially unlawful.”

On the same day, however, the general secretary of the party, Karoly Grosz, in a television address to the Hungarian nation said on Nagy’s rehabilitation: “On the basis of the information available today I can still say that we have no knowledge on the basis of which the previous decision (of denying rehabilitation) must be changed.”

The ambiguity, the contradictions in the statements by party and government officials concerning the Nagy case should provide ample reasons for Lantos to refrain from definitive statements, and to elaborate on the significance of the difference between the possible judicial and the categorically denied political rehabilitation.

Lantos’ accolades directed at the government in Hungary are premature. The hailed new laws regulating taxes, investments are favoring foreign investors and discriminating against Hungarian entrepreneurs. These laws are the cause of the mass withdrawal of scarce native private capital from the economy. The newly drafted constitution contains major provisions which are strongly opposed by the forces of democracy in Hungary.

I wish that Lantos would have been more explicit in his definition of what Washington could or should do to aid not the “reform-minded regime to overcome its difficulties,” but the Hungarian people who day by day express their aspirations for genuine freedom and democracy and their distaste for the “reform-minded regime” and the political, economic system it represents.

ISTVAN B. GEREBEN

Executive Secretary

Coordinating Committee of Hungarian

Organizations in North America

Rockville, Md.