37 Years After Uprising, Hungarians Still Seek Justice : Europe: At anniversary rallies, survivors of 1956 anti-Communist revolt call for prosecution of those who thwarted revolution.

Despite the passage of 37 years and defeat of the Communist system, survivors of the 1956 Hungarian uprising demonstrated Saturday that they still long for justice to be brought to those who thwarted their revolution.

At anniversary rallies marking the short-lived revolt, the survivors took up a battle cry for punishment of those who helped the Kremlin block their escape from dictatorship.

The campaign to prosecute Hungarian Communists for “crimes against humanity” got a boost earlier this month when the Constitutional Court struck down a law recognizing a statute of limitations on criminal excesses by those who put down the revolution.

Emboldened by the decision that it is never too late for justice, survivors of the rebellion and the bloody Soviet-led crackdown took to the streets at revolutionary venues throughout Budapest to cheer speakers who called for prosecution of Communist-era tormentors still living among them.

“We won’t have peace among us unless we close the 1956 revolution in a manner everyone will be satisfied with and then start to build a new democratic society in Hungary,” said Geza Benkuty, an underground activist in 1956 who fled his homeland a year later and now serves as an adviser to Hungary’s U.S. ambassador. He is also a leader of the ’56 World Federation, an anti-Communist organization of emigre freedom fighters.

“If we don’t bring these people to justice--those who committed serious crimes--it will be very difficult to step on that road to recovery,” Benkuty said.

Those gathered for a memorial at the baroque Parliament building on Kossuth Square, where peaceful demonstrators were gunned down by Hungarian secret police and Interior Ministry forces 37 years ago, expressed similar sentiments for a righting of history’s wrongs.

“The government is correct to be going after these people. It shouldn’t be just the victims who suffer but those who are known to be responsible for their misery,” said Bela Kesco, a 66-year-old retired electrician, who recalled the witch hunts and retributions that followed the Soviet-led invasion that restored Communist rule two weeks after the uprising.

Even Hungarians born after the revolt say they support a thorough disclosure of the crimes of 1956 and those who committed them, even though some feel it may be too late.

“The investigations should have been made five years ago, when the changes first occurred,” said 30-year-old Csaba Zilahi, a Hungarian disc jockey visiting from the Transylvanian city of Cluj.

Incriminating records are believed to have been destroyed by outgoing Communist officials in 1988 and 1989, when Hungary began the liberalization process that eventually resulted in the downfall of one-party rule and free elections in 1990.

Justice Ministry officials also noted after the Constitutional Court ruling Oct. 12 that many of the leading suppressors of the revolt are now dead, leaving fewer than a dozen people who could ever be charged.

There are no trials yet under way against former Communist officials accused of ordering criminal actions in 1956, but two infamous cases are being actively investigated and are expected to lead to prosecutions, Justice Ministry spokesman Frigyes Kahler said.

The investigations seek to prove who ordered the shooting of unarmed demonstrators in Kossuth Square and a massacre in the border town of Mosonmagyarovar. Officials expect the cases to come to trial within months.

One potential defendant in the Mosonmagyarovar killings--the man who ordered Interior Ministry troops to shoot, many Hungarians believe--has been hounded out of his home and now lives in hiding, Kahler said.

Despite the intervening decades, Justice officials expect the two cases to come to trial within a few months, he said.

“As in the cases of Nazi prosecutions, sufficient evidence can still be obtained in some cases,” he said.

More than 2,500 Hungarians died during the revolt and the brutal crackdown that began Oct. 23, now Hungary’s national day, and ended Nov. 4, 1956. Nearly 20,000 were injured, and hundreds were spirited off to Siberian exile.