The Trial
Budapest, Hungary, March 25, 2011 - January 12., 2016
Between the summer of 2008 and 2009 a Neonazi group executed a series of racially motivated attacks against Roma people in Hungary a former Soviet-block country. Six people died and many people were seriously injured in the attacks. From the statements given by the members of the far right-wing group during the investigation we know that their aim was to induce hatred between Roma and non-Roma, to provoke acts of violence from both sides, and, ultimately, to generate a 'civil war like' situation within the European Union.
According to the indictment, "racially motivated crimes never occur in a vacuum but they are violent expressions of the deeper currents of prejudices present in the wider society." It is also said in the indictment that one of the right-wing publicist’s, Zsolt Bayer’s TV report served as an inspiration behind the perpetrators’ choice of the first target of the attacks. The one-sided, and, according to many people, inflammatory TV program was not the first one of this kind at the time when the attacks started, and even the attacks did not make the publicist, who considers himself to be a close friend of Viktor Orbán, change the tone of his programs or the way he edited them.
The series of hearings were held between March 2011 and January 2016. As a result, three of the perpetrators were sentenced to life imprisonment while a fourth man, who, as a member of the group, served as the informator of the Military Office (KBH) of the Hungarian Defence Forces during the attacks, was sentenced to 13 years in prison. It is an especially alarming fact that primary and secondary defendants had been under surveillance by the National Security Office (NBH) right until the period before the attacks.
The procedure and the subject of the of the trials are basically defined by the activity of the prosecutor’s office and the contents of the indictment. According to the experts in the field, what the judge is doing is like "reading sheet music", which in this case meant that the background of the persecutors’ circle, their social network and the questions of how did the defendants became capable both mentally and technically to commit the murders could not be included within the frame of the trials. According to the ex-trooper who spoke in the media and the police expert who also attended public debates, none of the persecutors were trained in a specific way that could have helped them in the execution of the meticulously planned sneak attacks which took place at night.
Beyond the technical preparation which was already a complex task in itself, according to the expert who was asked in the subject the mental "preparation" that leads to committing murder cannot be merely regarded as a direct consequence of racist prejudices.
The most serious sequence of anti-life and racially motivated murders in the history of Hungary after World War II have shown, beyond the failure of the security services, the fundamental disfunction of the educational and social care system by the fact that after the attacks no mental help was provided systematically for any of the survivors and there was no intention to launch rehabilitation programs.
