The Hungarian government will continue to take the strictest possible action against all manifestations of extremism, racism, anti-Semitism and hatred, a senior government official said on Thursday.
The government makes every possible effort to suppress voices of hatred and protect all citizens of the country from attacks, Gyorgy Holvenyi, state secretary in charge of churches, national minorities and civil-society relations at the Ministry of Human Resources, said at a commemoration in the Holocaust Memorial Centre.
“Hatred should have no place in public life and its horrors should never be let to be repeated,” he said.
On behalf of the Wallenberg Memorial Committee, green LMP deputy Andras Schiffer said it would harm discourse about the past if any political force attempted to monopolise the sufferings.
“Just as Trianon can’t be [the tragedy] of one side, so the Holocaust can’t be that of the other,” he said.
The Socialist Andras Balogh, also of the memorial committee, said that the Roma are part and parcel of Hungarian society and what happens to them can happen to anyone. There is a pressing need for fundamental changes in the whole of society so that everyone should be in a position to satisfy their basic material and intellectual needs, he said.
Rita Izsak, director of the Budapest-based Tom Lantos Institute, said that calling the Nazi criminals to account was not an alternative to but an indispensable condition for lasting peace and co-existence.
The participants, including ambassadors and members of the diplomatic corps, commemorated the tens of thousands of Hungarian Roma Holocaust victims killed during the Second World War.
