Ethnic clashes of Târgu Mureș

[2] On 19 March, Romanian villagers, dispatched by coach and train, arrived in the city and attacked the headquarters of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania.

[2] The involvement of the Romanian government in connection with the stimulation of ethnic violence is not completely unfounded (Andreescu 2001, Gallagher, 2005).

[5] According to the correspondent of the Romanian television, in the neighbouring town of Sovata, a statue of Nicolae Bălcescu was knocked down, generating protests of Vatra Românească.

[6] Several teams of cameramen from the Romanian army filmed numerous episodes of an explicitly anti-Romanian turn.

A 2010 article from Jurnalul Național talks about the influx of 10,000 Hungarian "tourists" who were officially coming to commemorate the Revolution of 1848.

There are accounts in the same period of the desecration of the statues of Avram Iancu, Nicolae Bălcescu and some arson attempts on Romanian houses in Sovata.

On 19 March, the headquarters of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR) was attacked by a large group of ethnic Romanians.

A group of approximately 3,000 ethnic Romanians hostile to the Hungarians' demands for autonomy began to gather on one side of the square in the early afternoon.

[8]According to the US State Department Human Rights Report for 1993: The UDMR condemned the Supreme Court's 7 June rejection of an appeal in the case of Pal Cseresznyés, an ethnic Hungarian serving a 10-year sentence for attempted murder as a result of his involvement in the Târgu Mureș incidents of March 1990.

During the penal investigation and the court trials that followed, two ethnic Hungarians (Pál Cseresznyés and Ernő Barabás) and seven others were convicted.

However, that has been disputed: According to a 1990 report by Human Rights Watch, "the authorities... failed to respond in an adequate manner to protect the citizens of Târgu Mureș".

[8] In this sense, the riots can be seen as a symptom of the fact that police, and the law enforcement agencies in general were weak and morally compromised at the time because of how the communist regime had fallen.

That opinion is reinforced by the similar pattern in some subsequent events (Piața Universității and the miners' invasion of Bucharest).

[19] Western media, picking up the story from the documentary, presented the Mihăilă Cofariu footage in the same way: as a Hungarian being beaten by Romanians.