Romanian hooligans suspected of beating up the Hungarian rector of a Roman Catholic theological institute in Transylvania were drunk and not racially motivated, Romanian police said this week.
The rector, Zoltán Oláh, told daily newspaper Krónika that he saw three drunken Romanian youths throwing stones at the institute in Gyulafehérvár, breaking windows in six buildings. He called police and went to photograph the vandals. One tried to grab his camera and the others hit him in the head and the back with a baseball bat until he lost consciousness. The husband of one of the institute’s employees who went to his aid was also attacked.
Police arrested one alleged attacker at the scene and later apprehended the other two suspects. A police spokeswoman said the three left a club while drunk and had attacked two people and took a EUR 400 camera. They are charged with vandalism, assault, robbery and disorderly conduct.
The spokeswoman opined that the attack could not have been ethnically motivated because the institute’s walls were not tagged with anti-Hungarian remarks nor were Hungarian symbols defiled.
A spokesman said on Monday the Foreign Ministry was shocked by the attack, and the incident was in sharp contrast to the close cooperation that had characterised Hungarian-Romanian relations recently.
Relations decay over plaque
The evidence suggests otherwise. In May Hungarian ambassador Oszkár Füzes was stopped by police from placing flowers on a controversial plaque put in front of a statue of medieval Hungarian King Mátyás in the ethnic Hungarian town of Cluj. The plaque, noting a rare battlefield loss by Mátyás to Moldavian forces in 1467, read “he suffered defeat at the hands of his own nation”.
The Romanian Culture Ministry said the inscription had not been approved by the state historical commission and is therefore illegal. However, Cluj town hall claims it proceeded within the law. The statue was recently restored as part of a Hungarian-Romanian agreement.
Mincing words
In March Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sent a message to the Hungarian minority in Romania on the anniversary of the 1848 revolution, saying “Let Transylvania and the Hungarian nation be as they were in the past,” according to the Romanian news agency Agerpres. The Romanian opposition said the message was “revisionist” and “anti-Romanian,” and betrayed Budapest’s wish to annex Transylvania, which was part of Hungary until 1919.
The Hungarian embassy said Orbán had been misquoted and published his official message, which made no mention of Transylvania. According to the right-leaning daily Magyar Nemzet, the comments were made in a speech by the ambassador’s wife. It said the news agency had blended the two speeches together.
