State secretary marks anniversary of 1956 martyr Imre Nagy’s reburial

The deeds of Imre Nagy, the martyred prime minister of Hungary’s 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, carry the message that Hungary’s national interests must come first, a foreign ministry official told a commemoration event on Friday.

Marking the 65th anniversary of Nagy’s execution and the 34th anniversary of his reburial at the late prime minister’s memorial statue in Budapest, Tamás Menczer, the state secretary for bilateral relations, noted that the martyrs of 1956 had not been given their last rights until decades after their executions.

The rehabilitation of Nagy and his fellow martyrs was a symbolic and cathartic event of Hungary’s change of regime in 1989, Menczer said, calling the event “the start of a new period in Hungarian political life”.

Menczer said Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s speech at the ceremonial reburial held in Heroes’ Square in which he demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary and free elections was “burned into the nation’s memory”.

“We must also remember the unmarked graves, because it is those that symbolise the regime that had been incapable of doing, or — what’s even worse — refused to do the moral minimum,” the state secretary said.