Now, with the Hungarian Defence Ministry having made a timid admission to the allegations, conspiracy theorists are having a field day. Over the years, six Roma, including a five-year-old boy, have been gunned down by unknown assailants, striking terror into Hungary’s half a million Gypsies. Last week, after what some are calling an unconscionable delay, police closed their investigations into the serial Gypsy killings and transferred the cases of the four suspects to the Pest County Superior Court. At a press conference, a police spokesman named the alleged assassins as Istvan Cs, Istvan K, Arpad Sandor K, and Zsolt P, as under Hungarian law suspects cannot be named while in preliminary detention. The four are charged with murdering six strangers in nine predominantly Gypsy villages, and injuring another five. In the raids they allegedly fired 78 shots and threw four firebombs, endangering the lives of 55 others. They are facing charges of premeditated murder, arms control violations and stealing weapons. They all pleaded not guilty.
Given the prevalent antagonism towards the “thieving, workshy Roma”, as they are labelled by the far right, it is widely assumed that the alleged murderers are neo-fascist activists. But in a startling twist to the emotive race-hate issue, further exacerbated by lynchings of Hungarians by Gypsy mobs, the possible involvement of state security organs for political ends has been unearthed. The Hungarian Defence Ministry admitted last week that the murder suspect Istvan Cs. had served in the Military Intelligence Office’s counter-intelligence section, but had left the service before the Gypsy murders. According to investigation sources, he was the driver at two separate Gypsy murders. A second accused, Istvan K, formerly a security-service informer, has been charged with three Roma murders, involvement in eight other attacks and masterminding an arms theft. Here the plot thickens because, after being on the radar of the civilian secret services for years, Istvan K was inexplicably removed from their watchlist just when he began to acquire illegal guns prior to the attacks.
According to Magyar Hirlap, a right-wing Budapest daily, the third serial murder suspect had family ties with the forces of law and order. His brother-in-law is a serving policeman and his sister is the personal assistant to the Hajdu-Bihar County’s police commissioner, a county in which several Roma shootings have taken place. In an extraordinary open letter on a far-right website, Arpad Sandor K, the fourth accused, charged the National Investigations Office with “once again impudently claiming ‘seamless intelligence work’ but failing to look at its own backyard [in the Roma murders]”. He accused his fellow murder suspect Istvan Cs of being a military intelligence officer and “a plant in the Debrecen cell, who ratted on his comrades”. In his letter, published on Barikad, an internet website sympathetic to the far-right Jobbik Party, Arpad Sandor K analysed and refuted all the police evidence in the case, including the DNA samples, foot and wheel marks, and spent cartridges found at the Tatarszentgyorgy murder site.
Last year, in response to a parliamentary inquiry, the Defence Ministry categorically denied any link to Istvan Cs. Last week, however, it admitted that the man had been one of its officers who worked, among other assignments, as a field intelligence officer in Kosovo. Last week, Ervin Demeter, the Orban government’s overseer of the security services, offered a reality check. He said that “the intelligence services could have prevented at least some of the [Gypsy] murders”, thus pointing an accusing finger at the previous Socialist administration’s national security track record. And at this point, conspiracy theories and a murderous reality appear to meld. The emerging picture reveals, in view of the Defence Ministry’s admission of one of the key accused’s links to military intelligence, the previous Socialist government’s exploitation for party-political ends of the country’s anti-Roma feelings.
The killings were to apparently discredit the ascendant neo-fascists with the Gypsy murders, appease public opinion and boost the Socialists’ standing in the popularity charts. Simple really: one ploy promising to kill three birds with one stone, with the added bonus of cowing the “criminal Gypsies” who were allegedly “getting above themselves with their human rights”. It is, of course, always possible that what the country is being presented with as facts are massaged images in a hall of mirrors, both from the left and from the right. At the same time, the possibility cannot be excluded that the four arraigned men slaughtered the Gypsies because of their own hate “of this inferior race”, or on behalf their party “cells” without the help of some or other secret service, but not without their knowledge.
The Herald Scotland
