Seeing Through the Smoke of Budapest's Black Monday

What started as a day of peaceful, playful and dignified remembrance of the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956 ended in violence and confusion as police and groups of mostly young protesters skirmished throughout downtown Budapest. For good or ill, it will be the lurid if predictable images of yesterday's violence that will be remembered, as the protests against Hungary's Socialist-led government that began a month ago reached the boil once again. Likewise, most of those involved in the action - on both sides of the barricades, and among the traditional news organizations covering it - have either political or commercial interests in one or another aspect of the story. I don't. So for what it's worth, here is what I saw on the streets of the capital yesterday.

To begin at the beginning, October 23 is one of the most significant dates in the Hungarian calendar, as it marks the opening of the brave and spontaneous fight of those who 50 years ago risked their lives to topple, albeit briefly, the country's Soviet oppressors. It is also the date on which, in 1989, Hungary's modern republic was born from the ashes of its communist-era "People's Republic."

Because of this, and the fact that the current governing party is the lineal descendent of the previous regime, it was a given that this year's commemoration would be an emotional, and angry, affair. Not only was yesterday's violence a continuation of the conflict that broke out on September 18, after Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány was caught on tape admitting his party had lied about the state of the country's public finances in advance of this April's general election. It was a pre-packaged incitement to anyone still harboring scars from the long decades of dictatorship, one that allowed even youngsters looking for a thrill to wrap themselves in the heroic cloak of '56.

Yesterday's "troubles" began in the early morning, before I arrived downtown, when police unceremoniously ejected a group of demonstrators from Kossuth tér - the square in front of Hungary's ornate Parliament building - where they had been encamped since last month's riots. Despite this, and a handful of noisy confrontations between demonstrators and police in the area, thousands of families were happily viewing the various '56-related installations and exhibits scattered around the city.

Crowds milled along Andrássy út, the salubrious tree-lined boulevard and former home of the ÁVH secret police headquarters, where "living statues" in period costume, stood - and in the case of a young man "shot" in the head by ÁVH officers, lay - alongside civilian and military vehicles from the era.

Dilapidated Kisfaludy utca in District VII was filled with children frolicking on tanks, artillery and fire trucks. Wreaths were laid at the Corvin cinema, where fighters - including some barely older than the delighted children - ambushed Soviet tanks rolling in from the east.

It was during this ceremony, around midday, that I first noticed the signs of the approaching storm.

Over the sound of speeches and trumpets, the noise of a large crowd could be heard from the direction of Blaha Lujza tér. Such chants have been commonplace on Kossuth tér in recent weeks, but the mixed and peaceful group of around 250 contained only a handful of obvious troublemakers, plus a group of 30 or so noisy but good-natured motorcyclists. It was discordant, but seemed harmless.

After the last scheduled speech was made, a leader of the protests on Kossuth tér took the microphone that had been used for the official program and began addressing the crowd. He demanded truth and justice, and instructed the group to "reclaim" Kossuth tér from the police. Many of the assembled were clearly incensed at what had happened earlier in the day, believing that an agreement had been reached to allow protests to continue during the official commemorations being attended by numerous foreign dignitaries. One protestor claimed that the supplies they had brought with them to Parliament for their vigil had been seized; for their part, the police said they had found a stockpile of weapons on the site.

Around 2:30 p.m., as I walked down Nagymező utca towards Parliament, I heard and then smelled the first rounds of teargas being fired at demonstrators.They - we - were trying to return to Kossuth tér, which had been officially declared off limits, and had been surrounded by riot police earlier in the morning. The march ended in the area around Nyugati (Western) rail station, when the crowd was driven back by the gas, retreating in an orderly fashion down Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út towards Deák tér.

At this stage, and from a distance of roughly 100 meters, it was difficult to see the justification for this response, as there was little or no aggression in the air among the crowd.

So who were the people preparing to cast the first stones along Bajcsy? I'd say "scruffy" would be a good word to describe most of the ones I saw. But for the most part, they were not the hooligans on the front line blamed for last month's attack on the Hungarian television building, or the violence that mars all too many football matches in Hungary.

As the riot police advanced down the boulevard, protestors and observers - including me - were easily able to make their way onto the small streets branching off from Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, and watch in safety. Some in the crowd, however, were apparently not interested in safety, and began to help themselves to cobblestones piled on a skip on the corner of Dessewfy utca and Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út.

Just a few streets away a foreign laptop user was "enjoying the free WiFi" on Király utca, blissfully unaware of the chaos just down the road.

A couple of blocks down on the same street, it was business as usual at the the public playground.

Meanwhile, after an increasingly intense fusillade of gas and water, the front eventually moved to the large downtown area that comprises Erzsébet tér and Deák tér, just 400 meters from the official opposition rally at Astoria, where tens of thousands of people listened to speeches by Fidesz leader (and former premier) Viktor Orbán, among others.

From a position outside the Great Synagogue, I heard both the speakers at the rally to my left and the explosions of tear gas canisters being lobbed at the crowd gathering to my right. Many of those around me seemed to be torn between the seemingly rival events (this is clear from the video above, in which people demand that people turn their backs on the speeches), while others couldn't believe the irony of politicians making labored pre-prepared speeches demanding action against the government while just a few steps away a near-war against the government had actually broken out.

It was at this point, at around 5:00 p.m., that I saw a man who had apparently been shot in the leg with a rubber bullet, near the Pizza Hut restaurant on Károly körút. A group of onlookers "armed" with cameras and cell phones surrounded the prostrate man, but no explanation for the use of police force was given by any of them, other than that he had gone down after a police car had driven up beside him.

Within minutes, an ambulance, a group of police security with shaven heads, commando jackets and combat pants arrived to clear the scene. Some in the crowd applauded the man as he was carried into the ambulance. The oddly-dressed security "team" was then joined by several men even more ominously attired in purely civilian clothing, including one with a purple Újpest football club scarf tied around his face who minutes before my friend had witnessed hurling a journalist's mobile phone onto the concrete while demanding that he remove film from his camera.

It is difficult to say what the relationship between the police and these aggressive hooligans - yes, hooligans - could be, but it seemed to be a close one, and may even support claims made by the opposition that there are "provocateurs" (they were certainly trying to "provoke" something) being used by the government or the Socialists to discredit the protests. Meanwhile, people matching a similar profile - in other words, hooligans - continued to cause trouble across the körút on the recently-refurbished Erzsébet tér.

Meanwhile, in one of the more imaginative initiatives of the protests, the giant letters that made up the word Szabadság (freedom) were removed from the nearby official sign "Budapest, the capital city of freedom" and placed in front of the police cordon.

As in 1956, people watched from vantage points on tanks, although on this occasion, the tanks were placed around the city on show.

But in what for me and those that saw it turned out to be the most unforgettable episode of the day, a man clambering aboard one of the Soviet T-34 tanks, started it, and began driving it at high speed into the center of the crowd, as several masked men rode on the top, waving Hungarian flags. (There is video footage of this incredible incident here on the Riots in Hungary blog, which offers additional coverage of the violence in English.) This was greeted with great cheers by the crowd, which still seemed to be comprised of an unremarkable cross-section of Hungarian society, including the elderly, the young and the curious of both genders, but very few of the kind of people anyone would associate with street violence, not to mention commandeered tanks. Thankfully, the tank, which later reports said had been prepared in advance for the joyride, ran out of petrol within a few moments.

From what I could tell, police were waiting for the nearby opposition rally to end before making their move. Then, without any warning, a volley of teargas grenades was fired into the crowd, the majority of which beat a hasty retreat towards Astoria. But the gas canisters proved largely ineffective, being quickly extinguished under the boots of some of the more daring protesters.

As I retreated with the crowd along Károly körút and down Gerlóczy utca, from where I headed home across Erzsébet Bridge, I felt a degree of mild panic in the air, panic which may have resulted from a sense of bewilderment at the ferocity of a police assault. A charge by mounted officers was followed by a trio of "water tanks" spraying colored fluid at the crowd, most of whom had their backs turned by that stage. The actions of at most a few hundred individuals bent on causing trouble had led the police to conduct a full-scale assault on a crowd of people doing little more than watching on - and who were mere meters from an officially-sanctioned opposition event. From what I later saw on the television, and in photographs, it would have been easy for the police to identify and isolate these troublemakers, rather than plowing into the crowd indiscriminately.

Which leads me - and probably many others who were present - back to the conspiracy theories regarding the violence and who or what has been behind it. There is certainly a proto-anarchist movement of some sort at work (I used the term "movement" loosely here) that desires violence, either for political ends, or simple entertainment. This, however, describes only a handful of those opposed to the government, either in the crowd or in Hungary as a whole. At the same time, the Hungarian public's confidence in the police's ability or willingness to maintain order and behave responsibly is in free-fall, and comparisons to the communist-era security forces are becoming more common and louder every day.

Even giving police the benefit of the doubt, what I saw suggests incompetence and poor training; using teargas to drive a small group of violent protestors into the remnants of an official opposition rally certainly does not seem wise. (Employing teargas in a strong headwind is also counter-productive.) Meanwhile, given my experience I can't help but take seriously the disturbing rumors that individuals arrested in the previous round of rioting have been imprisoned without any proof that they were involved in instigating violence.

For sure, in a democracy - and despite the histrionics of some in the opposition, Hungary is a democracy - there is no room for violence of the sort desired by the small number of those who came out yesterday hoping for exactly what happened. But when the state deploys overwhelming force against a crowd that seeks nothing more than to make itself seen and heard, violence becomes inevitable. In particular, there was no legitimate reason for the government to decide that average Hungarians could not be seen and heard within kilometers of their own Parliament, especially as some of these same people had risked their lives or freedom protecting this same building, or working to return it to the function it was designed for. That's just asking for trouble. - Story and images by Adrian Courage