When Romania Flirted with a Fate like Yugoslavia’s

The December 1989 uprising against Ceausescu saw hundreds of thousands of Romanians of all ethnic origins risk their lives to bring down a repressive regime.

But events took an ugly turn between March 19 and 21, 1990, as mobs of Romanians and Hungarians in the Transylvanian town of Targu Mures fought each other to the death.

Events marking three decades since one of the darkest chapters of Romania's transition from communism have been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic convulsing the globe.

But BIRN has spoken to some of those directly or indirectly involved in what is known in Romania as Black March, in an effort to reconstruct what went on and ponder the chapter's impact on the development of Romanian democracy. 

The facts

The end of 24 years of nationalist-tinged hardline communism threw up considerable challenges for Romania, not least the question of national minorities and in particular that of 1.5 million Hungarians against whom the old regime's chauvinist narrative was ostensibly built.

The advent of democracy was seen by Hungarians in Romania as an opportunity to gain a level of self-governance and education in their own language. Such a prospect, however, caused alarm in Romanian political and cultural circles at the time.

Concessions regarding collective rights were denounced as potentially opening the door for Hungary to reclaim some degree of influence and control over Transylvania, home to the overwhelming majority of Romanian Hungarians. Hungary lost the region in World War One, a cause of much resentment in the country even today.

Ethnic Hungarians, who at the time constituted more than 60 per cent of the population of Targu Mures, moved quickly to demand a separate Hungarian...