Around 500 people, more than half of the residents of Miskolc’s Numbered Streets, mostly people with Roma background, have escaped from persecutions by Hungarian authorities either to Canada, or to the shanties surrounding the city. The number of people granted refugee status in Canada has risen sharply in 2015, mostly due to forced evictions in Hungary. Meanwhile, unidentified authorities at European airports often inhibit Hungarian relatives wishing to visit their family from boarding planes bound to Canada. The treatment of vulnerable groups has gotten so dismal in Hungary throughout the past couple of years that no refugees are sent here from the rest of Europe, for humanitarian reasons. 

 

 

“It is tremendous pain for a parent to lose his child,” says Oszi, my interviewee, with whom we are talking about the evictions that have been going on since 2014, and the uncertainty and dread following in their wake. “Many feared that the mass evictions would result in the state taking their children away, and placing them in state care.” Oszi has left his family’s home in the Numbered Streets voluntarily, due to unfortunate circumstances. Their house, just like most of the others in the area, was built in 1909, for the poorest laborers of the nearby, long-abandoned iron foundry. 

 

For the tenants of the houses hiding behind huge trees and rose bushes, the fall of Communism did not mean a new beginning, similarly to the rest of the region. The collapsing heavy industry buried, among many other things, the chance for peaceful coexistence between Roma communities and the majority, non-Roma population. For a brief moment, the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to represent an end to the military and economic opposition between East and West, but the subsequent closure of factories have brought about the lasting, mass unemployment of Eastern-European Roma people -  a community that was the most exploited and most vulnerable from the very beginning. At the same time, they have increasingly become an object of hate for the majority population: currently, for instance, because of societal envy for their supposedly high welfare support. Another possible reason might be that in a society facing existential insecurity after the regime change, it was a reassuring thought that the only losers would be the Roma people. The newly-found freedom, however, meant endless and exploitable opportunities for many. The political elite and the overwhelming majority of Hungarian intellectuals believed that the different circumstances would prove fruitful for the whole of the population in the long-run, and the shift to free markets would eventually solve the problems of even the most vulnerable citizens.

 

 

In parallel to that, most of society have become more and more embittered by greater or lesser failures hindering their chances for happiness, and the many opportunities that turned out to be mere make-believe. Under the Socialist regime, it was easy to blame the modest circumstances and limited opportunities on occupying Soviet forces and representatives of the party. With the regime collapsing, however, this “consensus” quickly evaporated, as the elites proposed solutions that were increasingly less reassuring and harder even to decipher. These conflicts and the resulting social tension were there for the extreme-right, and later the current government, for the taking – and step by step, these forces consciously railed up public opinion against the most vulnerable members of society. The current regime has been slowly adapting first the issues, then the rhetoric of the far-right, to the extent that extremism have become the cornerstone of governance in Hungary by now. The continuous state propaganda campaigns, based on the lowest, innermost instincts for hate and prejudice and coming, of course, with the price tag for billions of forints, do not only serve the sole purpose of staying in power. They are also a great way to hold together the voting base; to divert attention away from the crippling, unparalleled corruption, the unspeakably low quality of our education system, the fatuous destruction of our environment, and the near-catastrophic state of the healthcare system. 

 

 

„It’s no good taking photos here,” says the man who approaches me when he sees the camera in my hand. “People are desperate here, very desperate. They have no hope whatsoever.” Before I could open my mouth to answer, he disappears through the gate of a well-kept garden. It would be quite hard to argue with him. Neither these gardens, nor the people tending to them were rescued, not by a visit by the worried US ambassador at the time, or the OSCE - ODIHR investigation released in 2016, not even the many court decisions condemning the city of Miskolc. 

 

The fate of those getting in the way of policies put forth by the power-hungry government, or the adjunct oligarchs who wish to get wealthier and wealthier by sapping the state budget, serves as an illustrative example for the incredibly complicated social crisis that consumes the future of millions – of Roma and non-Roma people equally. This moral and intellectual crisis, deeply rooted in decade- and century-old, unprocessed traumas was accelerated nearly to the breaking point by a government determined to stay in power, regardless of the cost. While this volume was being edited, the European Parliament finally gave an answer to these policies and challenged the Hungarian government by accepting, with a two-thirds majority, the condemning Sargentini Report. The Report details, with precision, all the human right infringements that the residents of Miskolc’s Numbered Streets had to endure.  

 

 

Meanwhile, the parking spaces for the newly-renovated football stadium with installed under-soil heating have replaced the demolished houses of the Numbered Streets – at long last.

 

 

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Budapest, October, 2018