Monday, October 23, 2006

A Revolução Hungara de 1956 (VII)

Relatório da ONU, pags. 159-160:

3. Budapest

510. Revolutionary Councils or National Committees were set up all over Budapest. As early as the night of 23 October, individual fighting groups elected from among their members the first temporary Councils to co-ordinate their forces and to present their demands to the Government. These Councils received added responsibility after 28 October when they took over public administration in their respective districts. The leaders of these Councils came together at an early stage with those of the Workers’ Councils in the same area, and proceeded to set up unified Revolutionary Councils, consisting of representatives of the freedom fighters, Workers’ Council and political parties. Several of the Revolutionary Councils of Greater Budapest were elected by democratic voting, but in many districts there had been no time to organize mass meetings for a democratic election before the Soviet forces intervened again on 4 November.

511. Information is available on the Revolutionary Councils of South Budapest, Csepel and Districts II, V, VII, VIII, XII, XIV and XX. These Councils and Committees had an average membership of twenty to twenty-five. Among the members were workers, soldiers, police, students and other intellectuals, small artisans and small shopkeepers. They met every two or three days and, like the provincial Councils, undertook various responsibilities of public administration, as well as emergency tasks rendered necessary by the fighting. Several Budapest Councils, after adopting the sixteen demands of the students as a political platform,(10) made other statements of their own concerning their recognition or conditional recognition of the Nagy Government. The Councils expressed their views in a newspaper, Esti Hírlap (Evening News) which appeared until 3 November. The following is a summary of the major tasks outlined for themselves by these Councils:

a) restoration of order and peace;
b) organization of National Guard;
c) reorganization and democratization of public administration;
d) immediate tasks of daily public administration;
e) organization of supplies to hospitals, mainly from the hotel industry;
f) treatment of, and supply to the sick;
g) just and equitable distribution of food and other gifts from the Provinces and from abroad, in co-operation with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Hungarian Red Cross;
h) equitable distribution of available apartments;
i) repair of apartments and the communications system;
j) he clearance of rubble.

By 3 November streetcars and buses had started, and on 5 November schools and normal work were to resume. In addition, the Councils spent a great deal of time with political questions. Some of the Councils suggested that the Government should be reorganized on a broader national, democratic and coalition basis. General support was expressed for an independent, socialist and democratic Hungary and for the three people who, in their opinion, stood for these ideals: Imre Nagy, János Kádár and Béla Kovács.

512. A National Committee and a Revolutionary Council, composed of representatives of the different parties, took over on 30 October the “ideological and political administration of the municipal authority” of Budapest, and pledged the restoration of full autonomy to the capital. The Committee, at its meeting of 2 November, elected József Kővágó, Mayor, and Péter Bechtler, Vice-Mayor of the city - the first a member of the Independent Smallholders’ Party, the other of the Social Democratic Party.(11)

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