A Centretown-based online petition, protesting a proposed law in Hungary that may lead to white-washing the country’s communist past, has attracted international attention.
Christopher Adam, a history lecturer at Carleton University, created a website –www.hungarianarchives.com – in December that included the petition after the Hungarian government announced that it would pass a law to enable it to destroy secret police files currently preserved by the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security.
“The government needs to clarify if they are going to withhold the secret police files which are currently open to researchers, students and survivors,” the MacLaren Street resident said.
The online petition was endorsed by at least 1,950 people, including British historians Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans, Canadian author and publisher Anna Porter, and Loryl MacDonald, president of the Association of Canadian Archivists.
The law would allow all those who were spied on by the former communist regime’s secret police and Ministry of the Interior officials to remove files produced on their activities from the archives. They would have the right to destroy their files, resulting in the loss of irreplaceable archival documents on the history of communist Hungary and its state security agencies.
A copy of the petition was presented to the Hungarian embassy in Ottawa on Feb. 25 and has since been forwarded to the government in Budapest for further analysis, said Tamas Kiraly, first secretary at the embassy.
Adam’s has a long-standing interest in Hungarian affairs. His parents immigrated to Canada from Hungary in the 1960s. His grandfather, he said, was imprisoned by the secret police but escaped.
Adam said he was the first Canadian academic to take an interest in the secret police files.