What happened in Budapest On the evening of October 22, 2007 ?

On the evening of October 22, I and a few friends went to the Szabadság tér (Freedom Square) where we heard there would be a demonstration, which was to include some of the characters prominent in last autumn’s events: László Torockai, head of the 64 Counties organisation (64 was the number of counties in Hungary before the country was dismembered by the post-World War I Treaty of Trianon), György Budavári, and a chap who called himself Tomcat. We were peacefully drinking in a Mexican restaurant in a side street that led to the square when a battalion of police materialised. They stood there for a while, then suddenly donned riot gear. I ran off to the Square to see what was happening. There were about a thousand or two people listening to a rock group called Hazaáaruló, Gyurcsány Takarodj Együttes (Traitor, Gurcsány, Get Out, Band). Things looked quite peaceful, so I returned to my friends. Then suddenly the police moved. I asked one of them what had set them off. He replied that the police had been pelted with rocks.

My friends decided they weren’t going to risk getting beat up or thrown in jail for a bunch of provocateurs, for that is what we thought this was about. In any event, I and many others believed there would be provocation on the part of the government. After a year of making things very difficult indeed for people in his country, Gurcsány was looking very bad. His poll numbers were in the cellar at 16 percent. His one card was scaring people at home and abroad with the far-right and anti-Semitic danger. He pretended to be the only bulwark that stood against a far-right populist take-over.
Not to mention that it would be in his interest to scare Hungarians into staying at home instead of celebrating outside the 51st anniversary of the ’56 Revolution. The fewer people attended the Fidesz, (Young Democrats’ Alliance)the main opposition party rally on the 23rd, the better for him.

There were a hundred or so demonstrators or just bystanders straggling along Arany János utca. I headed for Andrássy út, the long avenue on which stood the opera. The whole avenue was blocked off by police. The Prime Minister was attending the opera, and the entire neighbourhood was completely off limits. So I walked back. All along Bajcsy-Zsilinszky avenue, the side streets were blocked by police. This made me very nervous, for under such circumstances one naturally looks for a bolt hole. Then fortunately I bumped into Krisztina Morvai, president of the Civil Jogász Bizottság [Civilian Jurist Committee] and Tamás Gaudi-Nagy, president of the Nemzeti Jogvédő Alapitvány [National Foundation for the Defense of Legal Rights]. All last year they had interviewed hundreds of people beaten and detained and came out with a hard-hitting report. Hundreds of police headed toward us, we ran, for we did not wish to be caught. Also enormous lorries carrying water cannon passed us. The air was bitter with tear gas, which wafted from Nyugati (the Western Train Station) and from Andrássy út. We heard on our mobile phones that there were encounters at Nyugati and rumours that the police had overturned some cars on Andrássy út. We also heard that someone had been hit in the leg. Later in finding refuge in a pub we saw confirmation of this on Hír TV (the main opposition channel). This when the government had promised to refrain from using rubber bullets! Apparently, no one knew what precisely had caused the wound, but it certainly looked like the result of a rubber bullet. Several other people bore similar wounds.

We huddled in a shop doorway. Morvai phoned Ilona Ékes, a Fidesz MEP, who had done great work with the victims of last autumn’s disturbances, and she joined us. What appalled us was the overkill. As I said, there were only a few, perhaps a hundred or two people standing about in the rain, and the police were everywhere, blocking side streets, marching down the main streets—all in sinister black. We also heard that the police had charged because although permission had been given to demonstrate in place, people weren’t allowed to move or march. We then received information that a group of about seven young people had been arrested and held, forced to hold up the wall for an hour and a half in the cold and rain. We took off immediately, but by the time we arrived they had been taken away. Two cars had been overturned (no one knew who had done it). We then went to the Seventh District Police Station where the young people had been taken. The station was chock full of police in riot gear; it was pure science fiction. They looked like Robocops. We went to some of the young people, two looked very young indeed, and they were, 16 and 17 years old. Just children and they were very scared. The mother of one of them, a nineteen- year-old girl said that while they were forced to prop up the wall, her daughter had been taken ill, but no one helped her. Quickly a sergeant came over to us and herded us away. We weren’t allowed to talk to the detained. The police sergeant was a large, coarse man who called the demonstrators csótány (cockroaches) and said he was the broom who would sweep away the dirt. We all shivered.

What we did gather from the few minutes we were allowed to talk with the detained was that they had been arrested for nothing more than taking pictures of the overturned cars. In the meantime, the police made the young people who had been sitting stand up and stay there facing the wall again. But quickly they were taken away. Krisztina Morvai and Tamás Gaudi-Nagy insisted on being allowed to talk to them, but to no effect. In the event, we were left there cooling our heels. Subsequently Gaudi-Nagy was allowed to talk to
one person. Finally around two o’clock in the morning (we had been there since around ten) they let the detainees go without booking them. I do believe that our presence had its effect. Morvai and Gaudi-Nagy’s work with those who had been beaten and arrested last autumn had borne fruit. They were well known and I believe the police did not wish to make trouble for themselves. Also we saw that the police this time were wearing identification numbers. So they had learned some lessons from last year.

Today we are waiting to see what will happen on this day of celebration. We hope it will be peaceful, but as I have said it would be in the government’s interest to have trouble.

Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay

Free-lance journalist, writer, translator, editor, former correspondent for Hungarian BBC radio, and present secretary of Writers for Peace Committee of International PEN