Magyar Baráti Közösség

Hírek  :: Csaba Lukács: Murder in Veszprém Part 2 ::

Közölte elajos Időpont: 2009. március 10., kedd, 03:17 PST (2616 olvasás)     

We went and sat in the nearest tavern. A sign read “We serve only club members,” but we got tea with no trouble. Here, too, people were talking about yesterday’s murder, the barmaid cheerfully told them that traffic had been heavy that afternoon on account of the press. “I didn’t tell them anything”, she added, and we heard similar statements from many people in the course of the day. One couldn’t say that the air was charged with fear, but there was much revealed about the situation by the fact that no one was willing to state his name or to allow his picture to be taken. Everyone thought the news about the coming of a Serb free corps to be nonsense, but almost all had a story to tell about the local mafia-style gang. They had driven poor people from their homes, they told us, others have had to pay them protection money, and some said they pimped girls along Route 7 and around Lake Balaton. Sztojka had been accused in the Prikkel case, and was under arrest for months. The police confirmed this, adding that they finally released him, because it turned out he had not played a part in the murder of the married couple in Mezőszilas.

Evening news started on commercial TV, and of course they talked about Sztojka. The locals thought he had long since left the country. They brought up a crime committed in the small town a few months earlier: an elderly Geman-Hungarian couple had resettled in Hungary. The wife, at home alone, was robbed and raped. At seeing the report shot in the village, one of the men told a fellow villager, who had given an  interview to the media: “You’re a goner, old boy, they’re going to beat you to death.” When the mayor came  on and stated that people here are not afraid, and that he knows nothing about protection rackets or locals driven from their homes, they literally laughed him off. “What does this guy know about the world?”, they asked, then drank up their beer and went home. We did likewise, and when we reached the gas station at the outskirts of the village, we saw three very expensive cars parked over by the espresso. This was said to be the favorite hangout of the group; they had allegedly departed from there Saturday night, to have fun in Veszprém.

I, too, started the next day in Veszprém, looking for the sports arena of the handballers. Being familiar with the layout of Hungarian cities, I had thought it would be in a park setting not far from downtown, but I was wrong: I had come downtown in vain; I had to go back to the beltway.  There, almost in the middle of nowhere, two buildings popped up: the shopping center of the largest multinational chain, and the arena, which looked modern and brand new.

The place sets one musing: competitive sport has now become entertainment like shopping, you can only drive here.  Poor kids do not climb the fence anymore to sneak in, you can’t wait for the players ambling home after practice in hope of getting a hasty autograph on a photo. Handball, too, has become a stone-hard business in this commercialized world with its tickets, gates and cars with tinted windows. At the entrance, small flickering lights before a black-ribboned picture signaled the result of a tragic meeting  with another, primitive world, of a new kind of clash between civilizations.

At ten o’clock a closed memorial started, while outside TV news trucks with Romanian license plates and an army of cameramen and photographers waited for the hearse with Marian Cozma’s body to begin its journey toward Bucharest. “Breaking news! give them breaking news!” I heard  the Romanian reporter whisper excitedly into his cell phone as a gate opened and beyond it the black vehicle appeared. Two Romanian news trucks were transmitting the rolling automobile live, and dozens of others took shots for the evening news.

The convoy, led by police, then stopped at Szeged, where a huge crowd said farewell to the twenty-six year old athlete. A reporter of Pro TV, Romania’s most popular commercial channel, stateed when signing in from  the city on the Tisza River [Szeged]: The Hungarians have even abandoned sports rivalry so they might, in the spirit of fair play, say a tearful good bye to Little Bird (this, or Pasarilla in Romanian, was the nickname of the Romanian player.- Cs. L.)

This is a tragedy that has united two nations,  the leading Romanian news anchor said the next day, and we watched, for minutes, as the convoy stopped at all Romanian citadels of handball, and hundreds strewed flowers on the hearse in spite of the late hour.

The ever more hysterically overblown tragedy was found odd by ever more people.  “Death-broadcast live, or how a drama becomes soap opera” - the commentator of the most viewed Romanian news webpage, Hotnews.ro titles his article, in which he avers that commercial television is treading on corpses to climb higher on the viewer lists. He mentions that a TV reporter recorded an interview on that fateful morning with the victim’s half-crazed mother. Another said that people who had not known the victim were making statements about him in connection with the murder. Instead of analyzing the socio-cultural background of the event and seeking solutions, they broadcast tearful faces  all day. An article, “Breaking news from the coffin” mentioned that someone reporting from the bier had mixed up the victim’s name with that of Miron Cozma, the infamous leader of the miners.

The resentment of the media-hyenas was strongly felt on the communal forums too, but here the incompetent Hungarian police were targeted as well, for not having arrested a single one of the killers.  In addition, they were offering a ridiculousy small reward for information leading to their arrest, the forint equivalent of 3,500 euros. (This was later doubled by the Veszprém County Assembly - Cs. L.). The  Raffael clan spends much more than that for a dinner in a restaurant, a commentator wrote, that is, if they deign to pay at all.

The fruits of the tragedy could already be seen.  Sober-minded newspapermen emphasized that the sacrifice will not have been in vain if it called attention effectively to the mafia-like clans, consisting mostly of Gypsies, raising hell also in Romania, and who were now a worry all over Europe. See how the humble, amicable Marian reconciles us with our neighbors, one of them wrote.

An op-ed piece of the renown journalist Constantin Racaru merits a longer quote. Under the title “Lessons of the Cozma case”, which appeared on Ziare.com, he stated that the athlete’s death will help demolish one of the oldest and most poisonous nationalist myths of Romania - i.e., the basis of Hungarian-hate. “Hungarians do not eat Romanians”, he wrote, “not marinated, not smoked. A Romanian may become a real hero of a Hungarian city, he can live there happy and honored. The Hungarians can suffer at the death of a Romanian, exactly as if they suffered at the death of one of their own. They can cry for a Romanian, they can light a candle for him, they can pay him a final respect. The reaction of ordinary people in Veszprém and Szeged inspires awe, it is a lesson for all (Romanian) fanatical nationalists. It is a discreet but deep emotion that their shock awoke at the death of a foreigner - of a foreigner who they felt was their own. It is our misfortune that it took a tragedy like this to make us understand that it is not enemies who live on the other side of the border, and that our fervent nationalists are only pitiful aberrants. The Hungarians have given us an example of being civilized.”

Csaba Lukács
Magyar Nemzet
“Kapcsolat”
1111Febr. 14, 2009

Translated by
Louis Elteto
Portland State University