New level: the Oradea RMDSZ is threatening Ugar readers

Some worrying information has reached our editorial office: the Oradea (Nagyvárad) branch of RMDSZ (the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania) has been approaching people who shared our latest article in Ugar about the church of the Premonstratensian order in Oradea. According to what we were told, the tone was threatening, and blackmail wasn't missing from their toolkit either, in case people kept sharing Ugar — well, you can also read us in secret, you can subscribe to our newsletter, and you can click the button that ranks us higher in Google search. I'm just saying this because RMDSZ alone isn't enough here, but let's look at the story in a broader context, because context is the kind of animal that doesn't ask to be fed but takes out the garbage in return — mostly from our heads.

So: we've learned from several independent sources that the section of the Oradea RMDSZ led by Rozália Bíró threatened several people for sharing the Ugar article that raised the future demolition of the Premonstratensian order's church in Oradea as a possibility. The piece was written because, based on documents we obtained, it became clear that the Bihor County Directorate for Culture had granted permission to modify, move and demolish walls of the sacristy attached to the church, among other things. The details can be read in our earlier article.

The piece went viral online, but there's not much to be surprised about: the Transylvanian Hungarian press, loyal to RMDSZ and playing the mute knight, either completely ignores the Premonstratensians' ordeal, or raises the issue only cautiously, without even mentioning RMDSZ's responsibility, every now and then, for the length of a single article. "They're holding the dick with a napkin," my boyfriend would say to that, and he'd be right.

Well, it's hard to imagine that we'd call up Rozi Bíró and ask, "Hello, this is Ugar, are you threatening our readers?", and that the woman — who lives quite comfortably off our tax money — would simply snap back, "I'm glad you called, dear Ugar, yes, I am threatening them, and as for you, go to hell". I wouldn't mind if that were the world we lived in, but it isn't. So, our readers flagged this problem; we didn't take the first such report seriously, we thought it was just a drop in the usual sea of Transylvanian gossip, but then another report came in, giving us fuller information about the content of the tulip-branded outreach, and that's when we had the chance to confirm that the threat was real, that it actually happened. The so-called advocacy organization led by the Oradea troika of Ödön Szabó, Rozi Bíró and Attila Cseke is thus spending the time it took from us as a pledge for representing our interests by playing censor in the Paris on the Peța.

The context of the story
makes this matter even more serious:

In the Premonstratensian affair that has been dragging on for decades, the alliance has not lent a helping hand to the persecuted abbot and his order; on the contrary, it demonstrably colluded with the Oradea municipal government, and moreover, our so-called advocacy organization voted without objection for the land registry reclassification that later became one of the main sources of the current problems. So as not to draw criticism, Ödön Szabó, the Bihor county RMDSZ, and the untouchable László Böcskei, the Catholic bishop of Oradea, were both at the forefront of issuing victim-blaming statements during the process that led to the eviction of Abbot Rudolf Anzelm Fejes, while at the same time never taking any meaningful step to protect our sacred property. On top of all this, in the days after the election of Hungary's new prime minister, Péter Magyar, he received Hunor Kelemen, the "boss of the Transylvanians", and in front of the press and Facebook's public, called on him to act, to use his authority in the matter of the Oradea abbey. Hunor nodded, but as soon as he crossed the border at Ártánd, he forgot the whole thing. The story reached its peak when recently they broke through the sacristy wall with a jackhammer — at three in the morning, because industrious people live around here, they even gave a new meaning to working hours in order to get into the area behind the church (the sacristy), which the glorious officials of the municipality then sealed off. According to Demeter, the minister of culture who hasn't even been half ousted, all of this is perfectly fine, there's nothing to see here, and certainly nothing to do with heritage protection. Interesting — so could I break into his living room with a jackhammer tomorrow at four in the morning?

The Ugar editorial board also wants to send a message from here to the RMDSZ of Oradea, of Bihor, and in general: dear colleagues, this isn't over, let's take it into overtime all the way to Bicske — maybe the Boss is waiting for you there, and as a gift you'll get a "handcuffs, handcuffs, bars, bars" poster! Moreover, the more you try to silence those who criticize you, the more of your filthy, corrupt affairs will crawl out of the closet like skeletons, and we will no longer let ourselves be emotionally blackmailed into thinking, oh God, we have to vote for the tulip, otherwise the Romanians will eat us alive — because not even AUR would do such a thing to Hungarians and to the abbey.

Anna Karczag