Hírek [3]

The murder at Veszprém last Sunday [Febr. 8] at dawn threw back by decades the cause of fighting prejudice and of Roma-Hungarian coexistence. Yet, paradoxically, the death of hand-ball player Marian Cozma of Bucharest has done more to advance Romanian-Hungarian reconciliation than years of joint government meetings and diplomatic attempts. [Translator’s note: European handball, also known as Olympic handball, is a team sport played on a soccer field. Marian Cozma was a Romanian national, a professional player for the Veszprém team in Hungary.] The repercussions of the tragic event may fundamentally reshape people’s thinking in both countries.

It was a scene from the old Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: Gypsies attacked athletes at a night spot, mortally wounded  a Romanian, seriously wounded a Serb and a Croat, all of whom had fought together the pevious night in the Hungarian team’s colors for victory. After the murder, Hungarians and Romanians both lit candles. The Gypsies feared Serb retribution, and, to round things out, the two suspects were arrested that evening by Austrian police. But let’s not skip forward, let’s proceed step by step.

A text message woke me up Sunday morning: the news agency of my wireless service provider began to pour out informatiion about the bloody tragedy in Veszprém. There was also a private message, in which my friend told me to see the internet for how the Romanian press was reporting the event. The difference was, indeed, striking: while all Hungarian news pages reported of unknown perpetrators, the Romanians noted, in the first sentences, that it was people of Gypsy origin who had murdered the athlete. It was surprising how well the Bucharest papers were informed: they gave exact details about the morning scuffle, and interviews with relatives of the victims. To be sure, they were also the source of the information, later proven false, that “Arkan”  [Željko  Ražnatović], former paramilitary leader, father of the slain Serb player, was recruiting a troop of his old fighters to avenge his son. The forums sprang to life also, and a large number of messages spouting anti-Hungarian and anti-Gypsy invective popped up among the comments.

By evening photos of two unappealing young men had appeared at the tops of the Romanian home pages: the portraits of Iván Sztojka and Sándor Raffael. Passport.ro stated that the reason they published pictures that almost leaped at the viewer from his monitor was so that they would be recognized, should they escape to Romania. (An odd addendum: on the web page of the [Hungarian] National Police Headquarers the pictures of the suspects did not appear on the title page Sunday night; they could be reached only with a series of clicks, somewhere in the wanted column.

Hungarian readers found out only from the photos that it was Gypsies who had committed the murder in Veszprém. A never-before-seen activity began to buzz on the net: the forums  started spinning, the server of C-press.hu, the Gypsy news webpage, collapsed or was shut down because of the explosive mood.  Thousands looked for the personal data of the suspects on various communal pages.  Sándor Raffael’s registration had been erased, but Iván Sztojka could be found easily on iWiW [a Hungarian Facebook]. There were pictures, too: one showed a huge, black  Mercedes parked (illegally) in front of a department store, below which there was a brief caption: “My car”. The picture was made colorful by a tattooed back (“Iván” in fancy letters), a muscular body, tank top shirt, a similarly broad-backed buddy. According to the record, the owner had last accessed the page four days earlier.

We observed a seldom seen phenomenon on the profile page: Sztojka’s friends quickly became fewer (in two days their numbers shrank from over a hundred to half as many, several did not stop at deleting Sztojka from their list of acquaintances, but removed their own data from the page as well), and thousands of crude comments accumulated beneath the pictures. This was strange, because as we learned from his profile page and the police circulars, Sztojka and his friends were not known for their non-violence (one of the latter, since deleted, had the iWiW username “you deserve six bullets in your body and three in your head”), but because of the features of the page the comments calling for the death of the young man - or of Gypsies in general - appeared, in most cases, with full name, a photo, address and phone number of the writer. Mothers with little children and teenagers typed in selected curses, and the game of “How many acquaintances removed am I from him” commenced. It’s a small world: the present writer was merely three steps away from the suspect, as he knew a liberal in Budapest, who knew a civil rightist in Székesfehérvár, who in turn knew Sztojka.

The evening TV news carried scenes of candle-lit memorials, and the shock was obvious on the Romanian forums. “Imagine the reverse: how many Romanians would take to the street with candles, sobbing, if a Hungarian were killed in our country?,” someone asked; and a man from Moldova pleaded: “Dear Hungarians, we’ll give you Transylvania [part of old Hungary given to Romania by the Allies as payment for entering World War I  against Austria-Hungary] if you will just let us punish the murderers!” And then the unimaginable happened: the majority jeered those who were still posting anti-Hungarian comments, and the mood became more and more anti-Gypsy. This minority was also blamed  for the fact that Romania’s image in Western Europe was worsening because of criminals hailing from Romania. “We ought to put an end to the Romanian-Hungarian conflict, and realize that we must join forces, as the great parasites are among us all”, someone wrote.  User “valahul” wrote “I thank the Hungarian nation for the special gesture, with which they have given us an example of human solidarity. I was unbelievably moved when I saw the weeping Hungarians. A wonderful people! I hope we Romanians will deal with the Hungarians in a like manner.” And another: “Hats off to our neighbors!”

Monday afternoon found me in Enying, Iván Sztojka’s home town. There were few people walking on the streets of the Fejér-County settlement, but only a city dweller would say it looked abandoned. City people do not understand that villagers usually step outside only for a definite purpose; they are not wont just to loiter.   I have called it a village, because this settlement of 7,600 souls, raised to the status of a town in1992, looks like a village.  Because it is surrounded by very good farmland, rich people had once lived here. But nowadays agriculture is not the best business, and its population has become impoverished. It is an accepting community: at the beginning of the 90’s, more than a hundred Transylvanians came here, then the number of Roma began to rise.

We were shown Sztojka’s house, an ostentatious example of the currently fashionable “Mediterranean” style with a paved yard, in which we could see a grill, but no one came to open the gate at the sound of the bell. Nor were the curtains lifted on the windows with the plastic frames.

Continued in Part 2