The illegally erected concrete crosses have been removed from the military cemetery in úzvölgy, Sándor Birtalan, mayor of Csíkszentmárton, confirmed to MTI.
The mayor of the Harghita County municipality went to the site personally on Thursday to verify the change and confirmed the news afterwards. "We have checked the site, the crosses, the monument and the flag holders have been removed," the mayor told MTI. He said the process had been completed and the final court decision had been implemented.
According to Sándor Birtalan, by the time they arrived, there was no one on the spot, so he could not say for sure that the illegal structures had been removed by the municipality of Darmanesti. He believed that no one else would have dared to intervene, and that there were also traces of machinery, so that the demolition could have taken several hours, and that it could have been them, he said. "If it was Dormánfalva, then it had done what the law says," the RMDSZ leader assessed.
The removal of the illegally erected concrete crosses was also reported by Harghita County Council President Csaba Borboly on his social media page. He said he had been informed about the development by the fire chief of the fire brigade of Kasson. "Finally, the municipality of Dorman village realised that this cannot go on, they have to act according to the final judgment, and today they removed the concrete structures that were illegally erected earlier," Csaba Borboly said in a statement sent to MTI. He also said that he had recently received several threats for trying to settle the situation in Úzvölgy.
The Maszol.ro news portal also published a photo showing the cool place of the crosses and a van with a registration number from the county of Bacău. It is assumed that this was used to transport the highlighted crosses from the site.
A final court decision ordered the Mayor's Office of Dorman village to remove the crosses and restore the graveyard to its original state. In its judgment of 10 February 2023, the Trial Court of Bacău confirmed the judgment of the Court of First Instance in the case, annulled the building permit for the Romanian plot of the cemetery and ordered the demolition of the illegal structure.
On 25 February 2023, another victory was achieved in another case in Uzwölgy: the Bacău County Court finally cancelled the ownership of the Dormánfalva cemetery. It upheld the judgment of the court of first instance, which annulled the decision of the Moldavian town council to declare the military cemetery in Uzwölgy a public property. It then registered the 7979 square metres of the cemetery in its own name.
In March 2019, the municipality of Dormánfalva declared the military cemetery of Úzvölgyi a public property and in April it arbitrarily established a Romanian plot in the graveyard of the depopulated settlement of Úzvölgyi, on the border of Harghita and Bacău counties. Previously, the cemetery had been maintained by the Szekler municipality of Csíkszentmárton, and was regarded by the Hungarian community as a Hungarian military cemetery.
On 6 June 2019, thousands of Romanian commemorators forced their way into the cemetery to attend the Romanian Orthodox consecration of the Romanian plot and monument, after Szeklers tried to prevent this with a live dance. A week after the violence, the Romanian authorities clarified that the 149 Romanian soldiers whose roll call was part of the ceremony after the forced occupation of the cemetery were not buried in the cemetery in Úzvölgy.
After the final judgments in February, the leader of Calea Neamului, which has repeatedly worshipped the concrete crosses at the cemetery in Uzwölgy, Mihai Tarnoveanu, announced that they would "defend them with their bodies" if necessary, and said that the leadership of Dormani Village would challenge the final court decision to remove them in the High Court. On Thursday afternoon, he reacted to the events on his social networking site, saying. The fight is just beginning. Our heroes will not be left without a cross! I am on my way to the Úzvölgy."
On Thursday afternoon, Csaba Borboly appealed to the population of the region on his social networking site not to go to the military cemetery in Úzvölgy on Thursday and in the coming days. "I received a notification that another provocation is about to take place. Let's not give them a reason to circus. Let the authorities do their job. The sentence must be carried out. No one should go to Úzvölgy today," the council president wrote.
The Romanian portal Ziaruldebacau.ro in the county of Bacău reported on Thursday that the removal of the concrete crosses was ordered by Constantin Toma, the mayor of Dormanfalva, after he had lost all his lawsuits. A team sent by the Moldovan magistrate to Úzvölgya started dismantling the concrete crosses at night and finished by Thursday morning. According to the portal, the memorial will be erected in Dorman village and the concrete crosses will be placed in the military cemetery in Bacău.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
MTI | 29 june 2023
Title image: Úz valley military cemetery – 6 June 2019 | photo Toró Attila
