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Ethnic clashes of Târgu Mureş

Târgu Mureş (Hungarian: Marosvásárhely) is a town in Romania with an ethnically mixed population that was almost equally distributed between Romanians and Hungarians after the fall of the communist regime in December 1989. In March 1990, short-lived, but violent clashes occurred there between the two ethnic groups in the town, involving ethnic Romanians from neighboring villages, too. These clashes (also known as Black March by the Hungarians) left several people dead and hundreds injured. The riots were broadcast nationally on Romanian television, and were covered by media around the world.

It is still widely disputed what exactly triggered the riots. The nature of the involvement of the Romanian government and of Western media is also questioned.

The position of Human Rights Watch World Report for 1990

In March, violence broke out between ethnic Hungarians and Romanians in the Transylvanian city of Târgu Mureş. On March 19, the headquarters of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR) was attacked by a large group of ethnic Romanians. The police and army did not respond to the UDMR's calls for protection until several hours after the attack began. Many ethnic Hungarians trapped inside were seriously injured.
On the following morning, some 15,000 ethnic Hungarians gathered in the town square to protest the previous day's events. A group of approximately 3,000 ethnic Romanians hostile to the Hungarians' demands for autonomy began to gather on one side of the square in the early afternoon. Tensions escalated as word spread that buses of ethnic Romanian peasants from neighboring villages were heading toward town to support the Romanians in the square. By 2:30 p.m., the Chief of Police gave assurances to ethnic Romanian and Hungarian leaders in the square that the police had blocked off entrances to the city. However, unconfirmed reports indicated that the police allowed buses of ethnic Romanians through the roadblocks. Romanian peasants from villages outside Târgu Mureş arrived in the town center long after the roads should have been closed, and joined the Romanians already in the square.
Around 5:00 p.m., violence erupted as ethnic Romanians surged forward and attacked the Hungarians, breaking the single line of 50 police that the authorities had sent to divide the two groups. Although the police and army had been made aware of the potential for violence by both Hungarian and Romanian leaders, who had made numerous reports of the escalating tensions in the square, the authorities once again failed to respond in an adequate manner to protect the citizens of Târgu Mureş.

Unfortunately for the unbiased understanding of those events, what the Human Rights Watch failed to cover in this Report and never rectified after was that international public opinion was influenced after the clashes by a videotape where one of the ethnic Romanians from Ibăneşti village (Mihăilă Cofariu) can be seen being beaten violently by an ethnic Hungarian (Pál Cseresznyés). The tape was misleadingly presented as ethnic Hungarians being beaten by the Romanian majority. The images and their wrong interpretation were quickly used by Western European television. After a few weeks the truth came out and late retractions were made. Indeed, there were many ethnic Hungarian injured, but they have never been misleadingly presented as Romanians.

Pál Cseresznyés was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in prison but was released in 1996 by Romanian president Emil Constantinescu, as an act of reconciliation. As of January 2005, Cseresznyés is the Honorary President of the Romanian wing of the Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement (Hungarian: Hatvannégy Vármegye Ifjúsági Mozgalom, abbreviated: HVIM; Romanian: Mişcarea Tinerilor din cele 64 de Comitate), a revisionist and irredentist Hungarian organization founded in 2001 by László Toroczkai.

Hungarian organisations strongly criticised the way the Romanian authorities and judicial system dealt with the suspected perpetrators, because significantly higher number of ethnic Hungarians and Roma were convicted after the clashes than Romanians. According to the US State Department Human Rights Report for 1993:

The UDMR condemned the Supreme Court's June 7 rejection of an appeal in the case of Pal Cseresznyes, an ethnic Hungarian serving a 10-year sentence for attempted murder as a result of his involvement in the Tirgu Mures incidents of March 1990. Cseresznyes participated in the savage beating of an ethnic Romanian, which an international journalist captured on film. The UDMR's complaint centered on the length of his sentence and on the fact that he was the only one of those filmed who was brought to trial. The court maintained that, regardless of the fates of the others involved, Cseresznyes had received a fair trial and was guilty as charged. Thus it found no legal reason to grant an appeal.

The casualties

The balance of clashes is 5 dead (2 ethnic Romanians and 3 ethnic Hungarians), and 278 injured. During the penal investigation and court trials that followed, one Hungarian (Pál Cseresznyés) and 7 Roma were condemned.

Emblematic victims

There were victims on both sides, two of them receiving the most attention:

On 19 March 1990, the Hungarian writer András Sütő was seriously beaten when ethnic Romanians attacked the offices of the Democratic Union of Hungarians (UDMR). With several bones broken and his eyes injured he was carried to the Bucharest Military Hospital, then, later, by a military aircraft to Budapest, Hungary, where his life was saved, but he retained a permanent eye injury. The attackers were never officially identified, or convicted.
On 20 March 1990, Mihăilă Cofariu, one of the ethnic Romanians from Ibăneşti village was severely beaten until unconsciousness and even after. As a consequence, he remained neurologically disabled. The event was presented in international media as a Hungarian being beaten by Romanians. Mihăilă Cofariu was brought in coma to the county's Emergency Hospital and he spent several months in hospitals in Romania and Germany. One of the perpetrators, ethnic Hungarian Pál Cseresznyés, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but was released in 1996 by Romanian president Emil Constantinescu, as an act of reconciliation. The other convicted perpatrator, Barabas Erno, emigrated to Hungary. He has also received a 10-year imprisonment sentence, but the Hungarian authorities denied all extradition requests from the Romanian authorities.

Dispute over the causes

The prevalent opinion among the Romanian public is that the incidents were triggered by direct attacks by ethnic Hungarians against Romanian institutions, symbols, statues and policemen. Certain Romanians link these events with the killings during the Romanian Revolution of 1989 of Romanian policemen and local government employees in areas with large Hungarian minorities or where Hungarians form a majority. Supporters of such opinions claim that the riots are part of a plan to separate part of Transylvania from Romania and re-integrate it with Hungary. In such a setting, a direct involvement of the Hungarian national government is also claimed although never really proven.

Most ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Hungarian public opinion in general maintain, however, that these rumours about Hungarian violence against Romanians and/or state institutions were unjustified or widely exaggerated. Hungarians also state that rumours about ethnic Hungarian violence were spread in order to undermine legitimate demands of ethnic Hungarians (such as language, cultural rights, or ethnic-based regional autonomy) and to foster a general anti-Hungarian sentiment. Sütő András himself called the clashes a pogrom.

Romanian government involvement

The nature of the involvement of the Romanian government is also disputed. The official account is that the government quickly succeeded in calming the situation and ended the clashes. However:

Part of the Hungarian minority maintains that the government was purposely slow to act, failing to stem the violence at the beginning and thus responsible for its escalation. They allegedly support their arguments with filmed scenes, where police or other representatives of the authorities overlook some misdoings. They also criticise the fact that the vast majority of persons taken under custody after the events were ethnic Hungarians, which, in their opinion, suggests an ethnic bias.
Part of the Romanian majority maintains that the government did not intervene fast enough to protect the population, and that clearly identified Hungarian criminals were not condemned.

According to a 1990 report by Human Rights Watch, "the authorities (...) failed to respond in an adequate manner to protect the citizens of Târgu Mureş". In this sense, the riots can be seen as a symptom of the fact that police and the law enforcement agencies in general were very weak and morally compromised at that time, as a consequence of the way the Communist regime had fallen. This opinion is reinforced by the similar pattern followed by some subsequent events (Piaţa Universităţii and the miners' invasion of Bucharest).

Western media involvement

The quality of Western media coverage of the riots is contested by many Romanians. An often-cited example is the gruesome footage of Mihăilă Cofariu mentioned above. Western media presented him as a Hungarian being beaten by Romanians. This particular disinformation is often used in Romanian media to link various similar cases of anti-Romanian disinformation in Hungarian and Western media.

Notes

References

Romania, Human Rights Developments, Human Rights Watch World Report for the year 1990. The section dealing with Romania contains a description of the events and their context. Accessed 17 Jan 2006.
1993 Human Rights Report, January 31, 1994, US State Department (Archive), ROMANIA HUMAN RIGHTS PRACTICES. Accessed 17 Jan 2006.