Posts
All Comments
Image via Wikipedia/ former Hungarian prime minister Medgyessi
| | ||
| MTI April 25 Hungary's national police chief told MTI on Saturday that he had increased the reward for information leading to the perpetrators of recent attacks against the Roma to 50 million forints. | ||
 Jozsef Bencze said the attacks committed against Roma in Nagycsecs, Tatarszentgyorgy and Tiszalok are connected and the perpetrators are believed to belong to the same circle. Instead of the 10 million forints reward that police offered in each of the cases, 50 million forints will be given to anyone supplying information that will lead to the perpetrators, he added. Bencze noted that two people were killed in Nagycsecs last November and a father and his five-year old son were shot dead in Tatarszentgyorgy in February. In the most recent attack, a Roma man was shot dead on Wednesday. The attackers left behind various traces, including two DNA samples, but these have not been found in the criminal registry, Bencze said. A team of 70 police officers are involved in the in  vestigation, including highly experienced criminal experts, he added. Police have so far investigated as many as 10,000 people who were in the vicinity of the incidents, including 2,000 who were questioned, Bencze said. Hungarian police has also received much useful help from international experts in drawing up the suspects' profile, he added Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai said that the government will do all it can to assist the police and create law and order so that no one should have to live in fear in Hungary. He said that the killing of a Roma citizen in Tiszalok was part of a series of shameful acts, and amounted to an offense against the whole of the Hungarian Republic. | ||
Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom on Wednesday rejected a charge by his Romanian counterpart Traian Basescu that he had not respected Romania's constitution.
In a television interview on Tuesday, Basescu accused Solyom of failing to respect the Romanian constitution. The Romanian president said that Hungarian officials were welcomed in his country but none of them should make any statement incompatible with the Romanian constitution.
Referring to the interview, Solyom said on Wednesday that whenever he speaks about the rights of Hungarian communities beyond the border, he always expresses endeavours that comply with the European norms and practices and are compatible with the constitutional order of the given country.
Solyom was to travel to Targu Mures, a city in western Romania's Transylvania region inhabited by many ethnic Hungarians to attend celebrations on March 15, Hungary's national holiday. The Romanian authorities, however, withdrew the landing permit of his plane so the president had to bring forward his visit by one day and travel to Transylvania by car.
Hungarian Foreign Affairs Spokesman Lajos Szelestey said earlier today that the two countries should step beyond the problems related to Solyom's recent visit.
"In view of our ties within NATO and the EU, our good neighbourly relations and the minorities living in both countries, we say now that we should look ahead, and try to find the opportunities for further cooperation," he said.
See also:
March 15 in Budapest
Radical nationalist Magyar Garda inducts 650 new members
| Budapest Times March 15 | |
The Magyar Garda, a radical nationalist movement, inducted 650 new members at an event attended by its supporters in Budapest's Heroes' Square on Sunday afternoon. Gabor Vona, the founding chairman of the Magyar Garda and head of the Jobbik party, said the movement's members would "write a new chapter in Hungarian history". Lorant Hegedus Jr, a priest of the Reform Church, said in a speech that the government was the "darkest and dirtiest in world history" and was sending a "breed which hides under the subculture to attack the Hungarian people." Magyar Garda Captain General Robert Kiss said guard members embodied "Hungary's living conscience".  Police set up a double cordon around the square and around 1,500 people stood around the cordon holding Magyar Garda flags and red and white Arpad-striped flags, associated with Hungary's WWII Nazi regime.Several hundred riot police stood alert in the area. Police also checked some of the supporters' IDs. The Magyar Garda was registered as an organisation to "protect the country's heritage and culture" in June 2007 with the aim to establish "the framework for national defence". The first 56 members of the movement were inducted in August 2007. In December last year, a Budapest court ruled that the organisation must be disbanded, a ruling which the Magyar Garda is in the process of appealing.  Radical nationalist Jobbik party holds rally in C Budapest Over 4,000 supporters of the radical nationalist Jobbik party gathered in Budapest's downtown Deak Square on Sunday afternoon, to mark Hungary's March 15 national holiday. Krisztina Morvai, who is leading the party's list for the upcoming European Parliamentary elections, said her party would make every effort to "regain national assets illicitly given away" and added that all laws should be abolished that "granted privileges to foreigners to the detriment of Hungarians." Morvai, calling Hungary's government a "gang of robbers" also said that loans taken from the International Monetary Fund and other international banks were to be considered as repaid and Hungary would not make any further payments in debt service. After the rally, police called on a crowd of some 1,500 people, who stayed, to disperse. MTI's on-site correspondent reported that riot police were trying to force the crowd, many of whom were wearing masks, to leave. Water cannons were also deployed in the area. |
The State Language Act amendment approved by the Government on Wednesday won't restrict the rights of ethnic minorities to use their language, Parliamentary chairman Pavol Paska said following talks with his Hungarian counterpart Katalin Szili in the village of Bela (Nitra region) on Thursday.
"Let us defend our national language at home, it's quite common even by larger nations in Europe," said Paska.
Paska appreciated the meeting for its openness. "Formerly, I used to have a feeling that I'm standing in the dock," said Paska, adding that Slovakia is able to respond to all questions Hungary raises, but currently its foremost concern is to focus on bolstering the economic situation of all people living in the country, without regard to their nationality.
Conversely, Szili expressed Hungary's concerns about the Government-proposed bill toughening up use of the ethnic minorities languages.
"The words of Mr. Chairman are a guarantee that no elements restricting the rights of ethnic minorities to use their language will appear in the final version of the bill," said Szili.
The chairs also agreed on future talks of the constitutional and foreign affairs parliamentary committees of the two countries, which are expected to resolve issues surrounding the legal status of the ethnic minorities in both Slovakia and Hungary. Paska and Szili are to meet in June again in order to evaluate the results of the co-operation.
Over 80 percent of people asked in a recent survey were prejudiced against the Roma, Nepszava reports, quoting pollster Median.
Four fifths of the sample said that "Gypsies make no effort to fit into society."
Almost 60 percent of the respondents openly said that they thought "crime was in the blood of Gypsies," and 36 percent said that the Roma should be "separated from the rest of society".
The survey also established a correlation between citizens' political views and their attitude towards the Roma minority: the closer a respondent was to the far right, the more anti-Roma he was.
Median also noted that it was people of modest incomes in small villages that appeared the least intolerant of their Roma neighbours.
Hungary's Roma population is estimated at around 600,000. Only about 100,000 declared themselves to be ethnic Roma during the minority government elections in 2006, said the paper.
The paper also pointed out that while in the 1980s 70-80 percent of Roma men were employed, only 28 percent of them had jobs in 1993 -- the situation having stagnated or even deteriorated since then.
When night falls in Hetes, a gypsy settlement on the edge of the northern Hungarian town of Ózd, the men take to the streets and mount a guard, arming themselves with all kinds of makeshift weapons, from clubs to kitchen knives.
"We're up all night," said Henrik Radics, his hands resting on a scythe. "If a car comes in, we stop it and find out what they're doing. If they're peaceful we let them go."
Mr Radics and his companions took matters into their own hands after a spate of incidents that culminated in a house being set ablaze and plans by Magyar Garda, a rightwing uniformed group that claims to protect ethnic Hungarians from "gypsy crime", to hold a recruitment rally in the city.
Ózd is typical of the towns of Borsod county: once a proud industrial centre with a giant steel plant, it has struggled since the fall of communism in 1989, with no employers emerging to create jobs on the scale of defunct socialist-era heavy industries.
But the economic downturn in central and eastern Europe has added new urgency to a problem of marginalisation that goes back decades. Surveys show Hungarians, like many of their neighbours in the region, nurture strong feelings of prejudice against gypsies. That means Roma stand to be hit first and hardest by rising unemployment, which stands at 14 per cent in Borsod county, with its high gypsy population, twice the national level. With the government's own forecasts predicting that the economy will contract by 2.7 per cent this year, unemployment is set to rise sharply.
"The matter has reached critical mass," said Peter Hack, a criminologist. "With the economic downturn, the traditional scapegoat hunt has happened. Since there are no immigrants in Hungary, the Roma are the target."
Zsolt Farkas, a gypsy in Miskolc, Hungary's third largest city and the county's capital, speaks for many when he says work is becoming impossible to find.
"I worked on an assembly line at Bosch, and then I installed shutters in houses, but now it's impossible to find a job. When . . . they see I'm a gypsy, they're no longer interested."
Last month the Movement for a Better Hungary, a far-right party, won 8 per cent in a district election in Budapest after campaigning on a slogan of "gypsy crime". Last week Albert Pasztor, police chief in Miskolc, attracted opprobrium and praise in equal measure when he told a press conference that "all the muggings" on a Miskolc council estate over the past two months had been committed by gypsies, adding: "Hungarian and gypsy culture can't live together." He was suspended on the orders of the justice minister but reinstated less than 24 hours later after a chorus of protest from senior police officers, a cross-party show of support from the city's local government and a 1,000-strong rally well attended by skinheads.
This week the gypsy panic reached hysteria when three professional handball players from Croatia, Romania and Serbia were stabbed in a nightclub, allegedly by a 30-strong gang of gypsies, in the western city of Vesz-prem. The Romanian, Marian Cozma, a rising star, died from his wounds.
In the wake of the murder, Ferenc Gyurcsany, the socialist prime minister, promised to "act decisively" against violence, and the rightwing opposition party said the government's focus should be on catching criminals. "The number of serious crimes committed by people of gypsy origin is rising at an alarming pace," it said.
Janos Ladanyi, a sociologist, says that gypsies, deprived first by resettlement programmes in the 1970s of their traditional itinerant lifestyle and then by the deindustrialisation of the 1990s of the low-skilled jobs on which they depended, have turned to crime, both petty and organised.
"We now have a population that's lived completely outside society for 20 years. Every so often, somebody calls for a quick, simplistic solution, which leads to an outbreak of gypsy-related panic, except this time the economic crisis makes it more serious," he said.
This excluded group, which makes up six per cent of Hungary's population, is also the fastest growing.
"If we can't integrate them into the labour force, then the long-term stability of the fiscal system is in question," said Gordon Bajnai, the economics minister. A package of €2bn ($2.5bn, £1.8bn) to be ploughed into the construction industry is part of the answer, he says, creating the kind of low-skilled jobs this population needs.
