Calvin Synod Herald, 1990 (90. évfolyam, 2-6. szám)

1990-03-01 / 2. szám

CALVIN SYNOD HERALD - REFORMÁTUSOK LAPJA-5 -MAGYAR EGYHÁZ - MAGYAR CHURCH------- INTERVIEW--------‘Father of Romania’s Revolution’

The banishment of Pastor László Tőkés was the spark that set the nation afire with protest

The path is tortuous. Horses laden with hay climb a gravel-strewn dirt road over the hills. Chickens clatter. Geese honk.

Here, in this isolated village of Mineu, one finds Eastern Europe’s latest hero in the fight for freedom, Protestant Pastor László Tőkés. More than any other individual, the once-obscure Mr. Tőkés has earned the title of the “father of Romania’s revolution”.

Romanians had a lot of reasons to revolt, including shortages of everyday things like food and fuel. But the immediate cause was the Securitate (security police) persecution of Tőkés.

For years, this solitary clergyman spoke his mind when almost all others kept quiet. He lashed out against persecution of his fellow 1.7 million ethnic Hungarians living in Transylvania. He even accused leaders of the Hungarian Reformed Church of collaborating with the tyrannical Communist authorities.

When police deported him to this small village from his home in Timisoara, a peaceful vigil outside his church erupted into an anti-regime riot. The demonstrations soon spread throughout the country, finally toppling dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

“The revolution couldn’t be stopped on a frontier,” Tőkés told the Monitor. “It had to come in our country.”

Tőkés’s story mixes three crucial ingredients: a powerful personality, religious freedom, and national identity. He is a large man with a booming voice and strong handshake. But a sense of inner calm and outer gentleness surrounds him.

According to his brother István, this internal force helped him survive his severe test and become a model for others.

“In today’s Romania, to be a professor or a minister, someone dealing with a community of people, offers the possibility to influence people,” István Tőkés Jr. said.

“You have a community of people who are listening to you because nobody else was more trustworthy in that country,” he continued. “That is his potential possibility, plus if you have the special qualities which I believe my brother has, then this combination is just wonderful.”

László Tőkés was born 37 years ago in the Transylvanian city of Cluj. His father, a vice bishop and a prominent professor of theology at the local university, was

stripped of his posts after criticizing the authorities. László is one of eight children.

“I am proud that my children are not puppets,” István Tőkés Sr. said. “In my way of thinking, it is not just László. It is all of them.”

In recent years, many Romanians have been turning to religion for comfort. The state worked hard to control the church hierarchy. But individual pastors often became rallying points for resistance. As soon as Tőkés arrived in 1986 in Timisoara, he became that sort of pastor. A delegation of his parishioners from Timisoara traveled many miles to meet him here.

“They shut down our schools, our universities, our cultural institutes,” recalled István Tolnay, the group’s leader. “Pastor Tőkés was the only one who stood up and said ‘no’ and spoke the truth.”

More than anything else, what aroused Tőkés’s anger was this discrimination against his fellow ethnic Hungarians. With its mixed population, Transylvania long has been a center of turbulence. When Hungary ruled it in the 19th century and during World War II, Romanians recall being forced to attend Hungarian language schools and bow before Hungarian authorities.

In 1918, following World War I, the region passed from Hungary to Romania and the Hungarians faced persecution. Over the past two decades, Tőkés and other ethnic Hungarian leaders charge Bucharest with attempting “cultural genocide,” shutting Hungarian language schools, seizing Hungarian historical archives, and forcing Hungarians to move away from Transylvania to obtain jobs.

Particularly menacing, in Tőkés’s view, was a so-called “systematization” plan announced last March to raze up to 8,000 mostly Hungarian villages and replace them with multi-story housing blocks.

“In the autumn of last year, I raised my voice together with my colleagues from the Timisoara district against the systematization of the villages,” Tőkés said. “This was my heaviest sin in their vision, and this began the more brutal oppression of me.”

The authorities determined to move him away from Timisoara. He was denied a ration card to buy food. Parishioners who tried to bring him provisions were stopped'by police. His telephone was shut off. It would come on only late at night, permitting menacing calls.

Tőkés sent his three-year-old son away to live with relatives for protection. The harassment escalated. Last November, four masked thugs broke into his apartment and stabbed him.

“I was lucky to escape,” he recalled. “If two friends had not been visiting and helped me fight back, I think they would have killed me.”

Tőkés still lives in fear of retaliation from supporters of the old regime. Army troops protect him here, and he will wait a while before returning to Timisoara.

“They are protecting me in an extraordinary mood and way,” he said. “The Army will not stop the revolution. Not the Army. If anybody will stop it,” he says, it will be members of the Communist Securitate.

In Tőkés’s view, one cause for optimism is the way the revolution has joined together Romanians and Hungarians, at least temporarily, against a hated despot. Members of both groups stood firm in the vigil outside of his church in Timisoara.

“Here is the last possibility to catch the reconciliation between Romanians and minorities,” he said. “All the Romanian people can see clearly that Ceausescu was a monster man.”

As the symbol of the revolution, Tőkés has become a national hero. Many believe he soon will be named a bishop. The new government in Bucharest has appointed him vice president of the National Council of Minorities, and he is thinking of running for parliament in elections scheduled for this April. But as a Hungarian, no one expects him to become Romania’s leader.

“As a Hungarian minority representative, I don’t think he has much role to play in Romanian politics,” his brother István explained.

“But he has a unique position as a representative of the minority,” he said, “and also as a person of great respect, as an eminence who can be consulted anytime by the Romanian government.”

Pastor Tőkés seems at easy these days in Mineu, preaching in a pulpit in the village’s small, 18th-century church. His wife is pregnant with their second child. For now, it seems enough for Romania’s hero to spend some quiet days with his family and his fellow parishioners.

(Reprint from The Christian Science Monitor)