Witnesses to Cultural Genocide

INTRODUCTION
By George Schopflin

The essence of the problem is this: Whereas the territory of Old Rumania, the Regat, has a largely ethnic Rumanian population, Transylvania has, and has had for centurites, an ethnically mixed population. After the Hungarians entered the Danube basin after the Ninth Century and founded the Kingdom of Hungary in 1000, they attached Transylvania to the Kingdom and settled it. From then on, Transylvania remained part of the Kingdom of the Crownlands of St. Stephen even during the 150 years of Ottoman occupation, when the Kingdom of Hungary was divided into three. Transylvania was at times an autonomous principality, and signed the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War, in that capacity in 1648; nevertheless its princes emphasized the role of the province as guaranteeing the legal continuity of the Hungarian state. When Transylvania became part of Rumania after the First World War in 1918-1920, the annexatien of Transylvania represented the fulfillment of a powerful Rumanian nationalist aspiration.

It was beyond doubt that Transylvania had a majority Rumanian population but it was also the homeland of substantial Hungarian and German minorities. These groups found that in satisfying Rumanian national aspirations their own suffered.

The newly enlarged Rumanian state regarded the Hungarian minority as a potential or actual threat to its security and introduced a variety of discriminatory measures against it. Underlying this move was a fear that just as Rumania had obtained Transylvania on the basis of its Rumanian population, so the Hungarians might do the same on the basis of its Hungarian population. These fears were realised in 1940 when the northern two-fifths of Transylvanla was temporarily reattached to Hungary.

After the war there were hopes that the new communist regime would pursue a more equitable policy toward the Hungarians, but these hopes were soon confounded. In MODERN CULTURAL GENOCIDE AND ITS REMEDY, which appears as the first document in this volume, the daily life of the minority, with all the petty humiliations that members of the minority have to endure, are faithfully and passionately chronicled by Ferenc Kunszabo, a Hungarian writer who lives in Budapest. His account is a harsh indictment of the behaviour of the Rumanian majority. The document signed "Anonymous Napocensis" is the work of a Hungarian intellectual who left Rumania in the late 1970's; it appeared in the West and it contains some important details of official Rumanian policy towards the Hungarian minority in the post-war era. In particular, it reveals some gruesome, hitherto unknown details about the "Rumanianization" of schools and cultural institutions started in the mid 1950's and accelerated after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. To some extent, the same ground is covered by the very lengthy and very thorough document by Gyorgy Lazar (a pseudonym), who gives a faithful account of the twists and turns of these different phases up to the mid 1970's. Lazar offers a very thoughtful analysis and ends his document on a note of hope that cooperation between the majority and the minority should be possible.

At this point, the story is taken up by Karoly Kiraly, whose three letters of protest were sent to various high-ranking officials of the Rumanian power elite. These letters published here in English for the first time provide a full and thorough account of the gradual but inexorable pressures on Hungarian institutions. They constitute a major indictment of the Rumanian government's human rights violations. The memorandum prepared by Lajos Takacs is an attempt to find a way out. It provides remedies for Hungarian grievances and does so within the framework of existing Rumanian laws, institutions and ideologies.

Zoltan Zsuffa's open letter is a spine-chilling account of what it can mean to be a Hungarian with an education at the lower levels of society and of how the Rumanian authorities deal with Hungarians at the day to day level. The final document was written in Rumania and sent to leading Rumanian officials and intellectuals. It is an open letter, signedby 62 intellectuals, leading members of the Hungarian minority, and it essentially consists of a call for mutual understanding. It expresses the hope that enough goodwill can be found which can make coexistence between Hungarians and Rumanians possible and that the Rumanians will be ready to make the minimum effort to create the basis for such an understanding.

These documents provide the Western reader, for whom Transylvania is mostly associated with Dracula and vampires, with an incontrovertible account of the growing crisis in nationality relations between the Rumanian state and the Hungarian minority. Reading them, it is not difficult to reach the conclusion that Transylvania may come to form the core of a major crisis of confidence in Rumania in the 1980's. Should a crisis of that nature come about, the circle will be closed and it will provide an opportunity for the Soviet Union to play one nation off against the other, thereby repeating the tactics used by Nazi-Germany and Fascist Italy before and during the Second World War. That eventuality would serve the interests of neither the Rumanian majority nor of the Hungarian minority. It is conceivable, of course, that the Rumanian authorities might conclude that their interests would be better served by a reversal of their present policies towards the Hungarian minority, but the evidence of the documents in this volume does not provide much ground for optimism.

INDEX OF PLACE-NAMES IN THE TEXT

Witnesses to Cultural Genocide