BUDAPEST, Nov 3 (Reuters) – Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Tuesday that Communist secret services had tried to recruit him as an informer while he was doing his military service but he refused, and that he later became the target of heavy police surveillance.
Orban issued a statement on Facebook, along with secret service documents from 1982 and the late 1980s.
Hungary is due on Wednesday to start releasing tens of thousands of Communist-era police files in an online public database, giving people access to lists of informers and collaborators used by the former state security services.
“During the early part of my military service, they attempted to recruit me, but I refused, so the attempt proved unsuccessful,” Orban wrote on Facebook.
“Later, I, my wife, and my fellow opposition members were kept under constant surveillance. We were all targets of the state party’s secret investigations.”
Orban, whose 16-year nationalist rule ended in an election in April when Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s centre-right Tisza party ousted him, said the documents revealed that “informants were set upon us, and listening devices were installed in our workplaces, our homes — and even in our bedrooms.”
The opening of the archives on Wednesday is part of Magyar’s pledge to make the records — stored in a vast basement of archives in Budapest — public and to allow Hungarians to come to terms with their totalitarian past.
Although Communist rule ended in 1989, Hungary delayed fully opening the files due to a lack of political will from successive governments. Until now, apart from researchers, ordinary people were only able to request access to their own records or those of close family members. Now anybody will be able to conduct searches in the online database.
Between 1956 and 1989, some 55,000 secret collaborators were recorded in Hungary.
(Reporting by Krisztina ThanEditing by Gareth Jones)
