Mar 11, 2010

Hungarian Minority in Romania: Reporter Remembers Lead-up to Romanian Revolution


Sample ImageCanadian reporter Jonathan Manthorpe tells the story about how a clandestine interview with MEP Laszlo Tokes helped bring down Nicolae Ceausescu.
 

Below is an article from the Vancouver Sun

I lost touch with Art Szoczi more than 20 years ago, but one can always be sure clan gatherings like the Olympic Games will produce people from one's past.

Art is now a documentary film director based in Berlin, but in 1988 he was running the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation in Toronto.

I was in Ottawa, having recently arrived after a decade as European correspondent and awaiting deployment to Africa.

What caused Art to first get in touch with me was a strange Christmas present I and every other member of the Ottawa press gallery received from the Romanian embassy in December 1987.

It was the start of a story which ended with the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena being executed by his rebel security forces on Christmas Day, 1989.

The present was a book with the unappetizing title Horthyist- Fascist Terror in Northwestern Romania, September 1940-October 1944.

I was doubtless one of the few people in Ottawa that Christmas who was intrigued by the book or who had recent enough experience of reporting in Eastern Europe, then still behind the Iron Curtain, to have some suspicion of what it was about.

While in Hungary a few months before, I had heard a good deal of outrage about the abuse of the ethnic Hungarian minority living in northwestern Romania -- Transylvania -- by Ceausescu.

The Bucharest regime, I was told, was conducting a systematic campaign against the ethnic Hungarians; forcing them out of their villages, banning the use of their language and bringing all the evil arts of the Securitate secret police to bear on community leaders.

This book was a response by the Ceausescu regime to the growing international criticism of its actions, much of it being fomented quietly by Romania's brothers in Marxist-Leninist socialism in the Hungarian government.

The book took the stance that Transylvania had been part of Romania since Roman times, and it was only in recent centuries and under force of arms that ethnic Hungarians had moved into the province.

Particularly vile, said the book, was the occupation of Transylvania and much of Romania by Adolf Hitler's Hungarian pro-consul, Miklos Horthy, during the Second World War.

I wrote a column about the book and its implications for current relations between Romania, Transylvania and Hungary.

Very swiftly I received an invitation from the Romanian ambassador in Ottawa, Emilian Rodean, to come and have coffee and a chat.

Rodean was enchanted that someone had understood what the book was about.

It was the first of many meetings over mid-morning Romanian white wine and syrupy coffee.

Rodean, a historian, would always expound on the story of his country and usually press on me many more books about Hungarian infamy with such titles as The Dangers of Falsifying History.

It took no time before my columns on this subject brought a call from the Hungarian embassy and regular meetings with a man whose principal job did not seem to be diplomacy.

I found myself the recipient of a steady stream of solid information about Ceausescu's attempted ethnic cleansing in Transylvania and the growing exodus of ethnic Hungarians. These people, I was told, were, with the quiet help of the Hungarian government, being ushered over to Austria and refugee status in the West.

It was at this point, early in 1988, that I first came across Art Szoczi and a whole network of people in Canada, the United States and Europe who were engaged with the massive abuse of human rights being perpetrated by the Ceausescu regime in Transylvania.

As 1989 dawned I was starting to make arrangements to get into Transylvania from Hungary to see for myself what was going on and to try to interview the extraordinary community leader and minister of the Hungarian Reformed Church in Timisoara, Laszlo Tokes.

But before I could get all the arrangements made I was posted to Africa and had to abandon the story.

What I didn't know then was that there were two other Canadian reporters who were much further along with the story than was I.

In March 1989, former Quebec cabinet minister Michel Clair and Radio-Canada reporter Rejean Roy got to Timisoara and videotaped a clandestine interview with Tokes.

After many harrowing experiences they smuggled the tapes out of Romania, but had trouble finding anyone willing to broadcast the interview.

Finally in July 1989 a Hungarian television station aired the interview and people in Transylvania were able to pick up the broadcast.

The result was mass demonstrations outside Tokes's church, where the authorities were trying to evict him.

Several demonstrators were killed by troops and the protests blossomed and spread to Bucharest where, on Dec. 21, Ceausescu, while making a speech from a balcony overlooking Revolution Square, suddenly realized his regime was over.

In the last couple of years director Szoczi has gathered all the main players from those events in Timisoara, including the former Securitate officer Radu Tinu who failed to prevent Clair and Roy from escaping with the tapes.

They have re-enacted and recalled what happened then for a compelling documentary called Dracula's Shadow -The Real Story Behind the Romanian Revolution.

There is some analysis in the program where my information from the time differs slightly, but it is a rattling good yarn that has justly won several awards. It is to be hoped that Canadian broadcasters will be more willing to air it than they were the interview that brought down Ceausescu in 1989.