THIS week saw events in Nicosia to remember the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In a small theatre at Intercollege, we watched a black and white film. The film that never got shown: archived material from eye witness accounts of the days, 50 years ago, when a movement swept through Hungary to overthrow the Soviet regime and replace it with a people’s democracy. A tale of hope and then despair: a popular spontaneous uprising, brutally quashed. Of peaceful demonstrators fired on by tanks; of convoys of aid given by neighbouring countries; of mass movements of support and candlelit vigils for the young deaths, in places as far a field as Buenos Aires and Seoul. As we know, the revolution was unsuccessful, the Soviets returned and executed the leaders; but it had lit a flame that would eventually lead to Hungary being the first country in 1989 to break the Iron Curtain.
That movement led by university students was a movement of grass roots passion: the footage on Thursday night was a poignant reminder of the power of young people to take control of their own futures. One of those young people who had been at university in Budapest in 1956 was George Vassos Vassiliou, President of Cyprus between 1988 and 1993, a student of Imre Nagy, who was one of leaders of the uprising who was eventually executed. Following the Soviet invasion, George fled Hungary and continued his studies in London.
In a talk following the film, Vassiliou said there were two major lessons for political leaders to learn from those events. “Don’t allow yourself to get too distant from your people and don’t put off until tomorrow what you should tackle today.”
If there were ever wise words for politicians to hear it is these. As we know, Tony Blair took a reluctant Britain into a war with Iraq. Despite mass demonstrations, he refused to listen to his party and he refused to listen to his people. Now we are paying the cost, economically, politically and emotionally: but the main victims are Iraqis, paying the cost with their lives. It seems a long time ago that he and Bush flaunted UN resolutions, assuring us that they were legally entitled to invade because of weapons of mass destruction.
The truth is that guns will never solve political problems.As soon as you shoot someone’s son or brother or father you create another generation of revolutionaries, another layer of resentment and resistance. The Soviets did not win by their tanks firing into a crowd, the Chinese did not succeed in Tiananmen Square, the Israelis will not subdue Hizbollah by scattering a million cluster bombs in Lebanon. Those heroes of political resistance that will be remembered and admired by future generations will be Gandhi and Mandela, advocates of non-violent protest, who have inspired through their own actions and commitment to humanity. As Martin Luther Kings once said, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”
As the world faces its new crises of climate change, global poverty and religious conflict, I was reminded that young people will inherit the world they deserve.The biggest danger the world faces is apathy. There were, maybe, two or three students in the audience on Thursday night. Yet I was left with the haunting frieze frames of those young University students of 56, idealistic enough to fight unarmed for freedom and of the candles lit around the globe in their memory. Edmund Burke once wrote about apathy, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”, but more hopeful is the proverb left by a Chinese girl in memory of her 18-year-old brother killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the year Hungary gained its freedom. “Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.”
