I welcome the Minister to the House. I am sorry for the late hour but I am sure of his goodwill and interesting comments as always. The motion refers to a resolution of the European Parliament. This is the most appropriate context into which I can put it. The motion was notified to the European Parliament on 10 May 1990 in the names of Mr. Tindermans, Mr. Habsburg, Mr. Robles Piquer, Mrs. Lenz, Mrs. Oomen, Mr. Chanterie and Mr. Klepsch. The motion read:
The European Parliament:
A. having regard to:
(a) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
(b) the European Declaration of Human Rights,
the Heklsinki Final Act,
(d) the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
B. having regard to:
(a) the extraordinary humanitarian actions of Mr. Raoul Wallenberg which saved some hundred thousand Hungarian Jews during the Nazi final solution,
(b) his arbitrary arrest in January 1945 by Soviet troops after the liberation of Hungary,
(c) his indefensible detention in numerous Soviet prisons,
(d) the number of witnesses who have testified to seeing Mr. Wallenberg alive subsequent to July 1947, when according to the Soviet authorities of the time, he is supposed to have died,
(e) the anomalies found in his death certificate, such as the absence of Christian name and date of birth,
(f) the lack of irrefutable evidence that Mr. Wallenberg died in 1947,
(g) the attitude of openness and understanding recently displayed by the Soviet authorities in connection with the case, as evinced by the Kremlin's official invitation to the Wallenberg family to visit Moscow,
Calls on the Soviet authorities:
1. To reopen the case of Mr. Raoul Wellenberg and his driver, Mr. Vilmos Langfelder;
2. To allow an international commission of historians and experts to examine all the archive material;
3. To use the press, radio and television and all other legal avenues to launch a search throughout the territory of the Soviet Union
I am sure the Minister was aware that this was passed unanimously on 17 May by the European Parliament. When I say unanimously I mean unanimously, including the fact that no one abstained. It is a most important resolution. The Minister, who is used to interpreting this kind of documentation, will note a very considerable shift because the prsumption behind the motion is that Wallenberg is still alive. This is the belief of the European Assembly so it is important that we take it in this context.
I spoke this afternoon to Mme. Simone Lucki who is the distinguished advocate in Brussels who framed this motion on behalf of Mr. Tindemans who is a distinguished former foreign Minister of Belgium. She explained the background to me and also the fact that it was passed in this manner as a matter of urgency because it was wished to have this as an instrument before the recent meeting of CSCE in Copenhagen where it was raised with some of the Russian delegates. I will return to that and place some further information on the record.
The matter of Raoul Wallenberg had been raised by a senior diplomat with Mr. Shevardnadze in Brussels in December 1989. Mme. Lucki, the advocate to whom I have already referred, who is the president of the Belgian Raoul Wallenberg Society met with Perez de Cuellar, the Secretary General of the United Nations in the presence of Foreign Minister Eychens in Brussels within the last six weeks. He has promised to raise it directly with Mr. Gorbachev.
Returning to the question of the CSCE meeting in June it is important to recognise that major advances have been at that time, which is the very recent past indeed, in direct discussions between senior Swedish diplomats and Russian personnel. The Russians have now agreed to the establishment of the group within the Soviet Union to examine the Wallenberg case in detail. At a meeting on 15 June in Copenhagen the phrase was used by a senior Russian diplomat: les imprausions sur les circonstances de déces de Wallenburg, the uncertainty surrounding the death of Raoul Wallenberg. It is a very interesting point that the Russians themselves have now accepted even from their own perspective that there is a degree of uncertainly about Wallenberg.
This is important because it is essential to understand that Wallenberg is still alive. I spoke also to Sonja Sonnefeld, who is the secretary of the international Wallenberg committee, and she supplied me this afternoon with further information which I place on the record of the House. In speaking to me on the telephone, she said that she was particularly pleased because I stated at the beginning that I believed Wallenberg to be alive. This is, in fact, the case. I would make the point to the Minister in the criminal law one presumes an accused to be innocent until proved guilty. In the case of Wallenberg there is an absolute moral obligation on us to assume that Wallenberg has survived. It is frequently asked: How can anybody survive a labour camp? Wallenberg is not in a labour camp. He is 77 years old. He is in a very special kind of camp, the existence of which is not widely known, camps known as schneigelagern, and that is the German translation which means camps of silence, into which outside the Gulag Archipelago persons who have been for political reasons declared to be dead are kept in such absolute secrecy that not even members of the top echelon of the Russian political regime may be aware of the fact that they continue to exist. It was interesting that at the meeting between members of the Wallenberg family and the Swedish Wallenberg society last October, the KGB, having handed over some documents, said not that he was dead but that he could not survive the camps, they presumably meant at any of the camps, but particularly the labour camps. He is not in a labour camp.
I have a number of examples of people who have survived. I would like to place on the record the detailed story which I have here of a woman called Oxana Bandera who was arrested in 1941 and sentenced to a labour camp incarceration. She was released inexplicably in 1989. She is a perfectly healthy woman. She has been in the camp four years longer than Wallenberg and she has managed to survive.
I would like to turn to another document and I will have to treat this very much more briefly than I would if I had more time, but perhaps that is a useful discipline. It was faxed to me from Stockholm today. It is a series of interviews with Per Angor who was Second Secretary of the Swedish legation in Budapest during the period that Wallenberg was saving the Jews. The question is asked: how come you believe Wallenberg is still alive? This is the answer:
Prisoners of various internationalities were released, went back to their countries and witnessed to have seen Raoul in prison or to have been in "knocking contact" with him. Since there is evidence that Raoul has survived the Stalin era and it is known that after Stalin prisoners have to serve their sentence, no matter how many years, our belief is justified. There are other strong indications that Raoul lives in a place together with other prisoners of different nationalities who are all declard dead. That is the Schweigelagern. It is said that Raoul was given another identity, but this information could not be checked. Soviet declarations that Raoul should have died in a Soviet prison in 1947 have always been rejected, both by Raoul's family and the Swedish Government.
This is a man who was a professional diplomat, a realist, somebody who had direct personal experience of this world and of Wallenberg himself. It seems to me that it is very strong evidence indeed.
I would like to mention also the fact that until his recent and tragic death this was the opinion of Academician Andre Sakharov who was no fool. He was a scientist who was used to the evaluation of precise scientific material. Not only that, but in an interview Sakharov makes the point also that not only does he believe that Wallenberg is alive, but that he considers it quite extraordinary and incredible that the Russian Government are unable to produce documentation about Wallenberg and his fate because, as he points out, everybody knows that for a person of Wallenberg's significance and diplomatic status it would be unthinkable that NKVD and subsequently KGB files about a man of this standing would be allowed to disappear or could disappear.
I would further make the point to the Minister that it is certainly incomprehensible to me that if Wallenberg were dead, nothing, except for the forged documents produced in handwritten form to suggest that Wallenberg had died in prison in 1947, has been found or produced by the Soviet authorities. I would remind the Minister that in the case, for example of Martin Boorman who was killed in a bombing raid while he was trying to escape along the underground railway line in Berlin and whose bones were discovered a couple of years ago, the very same Russians who came across his corpse by accident were able to tell who it was and identify him positively by means of his dental records. They have not produced any comparable physical evidence that Wallenberg is dead, despite the fact that they actually had Wallenberg in their custody. This is a very remarkable, indeed an extraordinary situation.
I would like to point also to the fact that the Russians in 1947 said in a communication under the signature of Mr. Vyshinsky, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR:
As a result of careful verification, it has been established that Wallenberg is not in the Soviet Union and we do not know anything about him.
That was accepted in 1957, ten years later, by Mr. Gromyko as a complete downright and utter lie, but this statement, as the Minister knows and as the Swedish Government have continued to insist, was also untrue and this, I would remind the Minister, remains the consistent position of the Swedish Government.
Who are we going to listen to in the matter? Are we going to listen to the Russians who have lied once so categorically that they had no record of Wal lenberg in 1947? Then in 1957, Mr. Gromyko suddenly discovers that it was all a lie and that they did have him in the Russian prison system but mysteriously he died, and even more mysteriously all the people who were involved in his medical treatment, in the autopsy and so on have also disappeared, the principal one, Abakumov having been executed for treason so there is not very much reason to place any credibility on his testimony. It is quite unusual to say the least and to put it at a very mild level that the Russians would trot out the word of a traitor to support their contention that Wallenberg, about whom they had already lied, and admitted they had lied, was dead.
I take the view — I believe it is a view that is increasingly held and supported by a growing number of international statesmen — that Wallenberg is alive. I would like to say a few words about what is so very special about Wallenberg. I need not repeat the entire story of Wallenberg but in the closing years of war Wallenberg went voluntarily to Budapest. He was a son of a very distinguished family who had an enormous interest in industry and commerce throughout the Scandinavian countries and, indeed, throughout the world. He went with the mission of saving the Hungarian Jews. It was an act of extraordinary Christianity on Wallenberg's part during a period when the Christian world did not behave always in accord with those values. He went unarmed into the railway trains that were taking the unfortunate Jewish people to extinction at the camp at Auschwitz. Armed only with his own extraordinary integrity, he was able to defy the armed might of the Gestapo and rescue 100,000 of these wretched people by giving them the protection of his own charisma and extending to them diplomatic passports which he was manufacturing in the Swedish legation in Budapest. That is what makes him a most important figure. We are continually talking about peace and the question is asked in this country, how can peaceful means operate against an armed aggressor? Wallenberg demonstrated how moral authority could win out in the end.
In 1945 when the Russians were closing in on the city, Wallenberg crossed into the Russian zone in order to negotiate for food for the people he was protecting. He was taken into protective custody by the Russians and when they interrogated him and asked him what he was doing, he said that he was trying to save the Jews. In 1945 that was absolutely laughable. You may remember that the Allies would not divert even one aeroplane to bomb the railway siding into Auschwitz and save people whom they knew they would save by this very economical measure. Wallenberg also had a plan for the reconstruction of Hungary after the War using Jewish intelligence, financial expertise and American money. Putting all these factors together, the Russian read into the situation, American spy. By the time they got him into their clutches the bureaucratic system had closed around him and it was virtually impossible to get him out again.
I would like to place on the record the kind of thing that used to happen because I think in a vignette it tells the quality of Wallenberg. In a book called Righteous Gentile by John Bierman, a man called Tommy Lapid who subsequently became head of the Israeli television network, tells a story of how in 1944 he was waiting in hiding with his mother and grandmother when suddenly the door burst open and they were taken away. His mother and grandmother disappeared. He was nine years old and he sat on the floor crying. He knew they were going for ever to extinction. However, an hour or an hour and a half later the door opened and the two women came in and they only said one word: Wallenberg. That was enough for the child to know precisely what had happened. As he said in the book, there was only on man who cared for the Jews and it was that extraordinary angel, Wallenberg.
That is why it is important that we take this motion seriously and that we believe, as we are morally impelled to do, not only by every decent civilised principle but also by virtue of the enormous evidence that is available, that Wallenberg is still alive. We must believe that he is still alive and we must move to persuade the Russians that it is now time and in their interests, as I believe it is, that Wallenberg should be released.
The time is critical because in September 1991 there will be a very large international human rights conference in Moscow and if in the 15 months before that confreence Wallenberg is not released it will be immensely more difficult for the Russian regime to be able to release him.
I appeal to the Minister to discuss with the Government the possibility of something which is the subject of a motion I have on the Order Paper and which I believe would be supported throughout all sections of this House — and also I believe in the Dáil and that is that the Government should set in motion, as a matter of urgency, the legal machinery required to confer upon Wallenberg the status of honorary citizen of Ireland. This has already been done by the United States, Canada and Israel. I mentioned this to my contacts in Stockholm and also in Brussels today and they both said that is fantastic. That is what Ireland could do. It would be remarkable.
Most of us were in the Dáil when that great statesman and great human being, Nelson Mandela, addressed the Dáil, because this country had such a feeling for human rights that Dublin, this great capital city in which we are standing tonight, made him a freeman of this city. Can you imagine what the feeling throughout the world would be if Raoul Wallenberg, on his release, came also and addressed a meeting of both Houses of the Oireachtas?
What more appropriate day could there be to discuss this than the day in which we seem to have moved very close indeed to the release of another hostage, Brian Keenan, who has been incarcerated for four years? Wallenberg has been inside and continues to live in a camp of silence, and this is his 44th year. He is 77 years old. We owe it to him to break the silence.
