Calvin Synod Herald, 1977 (77. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1977-11-01 / 11-12. szám
REFORMÁTUSOK LANA 5 THE GROWING PLIGHT OF HUNGARIANS IN TRANSYLVANIA There is growing concern in Budapest about the fate of the large Hungarian minority in Trasylvania. For the first time since the ceding of the territory to Romania after the Second World War, an authoritative Budapest newspaper voiced “the mother country’s” fear for the survival of Transylvanian Hungarians exposed to “the warping and deforming effects” of an enforced assimilation. The delicacy and timidity with which official Budapest has until now handled the Transylvanian issue, which has bedevilled its relations with Romania since the First World War underline the significance of the warning that Hungary cannot remain indifferent in the race of the threat to the survival of its kith and kin. In an article entitled “Nationality problem — a world problem” the Budapest daily Magyar Nemzet has blamed the attitude of the United States, Britain, Czechoslovakia and Romania at the Paris peace conference of 1947, responsible for the postwar settlement in Eastern Europe, for the plight of ethnic minorities in the region. (The Soviet Union’s role was, strangely enough, not mentioned.) “After long years of deadly silence the issue of ethnic minorities, buried deeply in the postwar period, is now cropping up with stubborn persistence; the little issue (of the time) has now become a huge issue and grown from a European problem into a world problem.” Magyar Nemzet stated. A follow-up article last month in the newspaper, the organ of the communist-led Patriotic People’s Front, came to the point: “We confess that we fear for the Hungarianspeakers living under foreign host-nations because they are facing the threat of assimilation and the wraping and deforming effects of being engulfed by the state-organizing nations.” It then proceeded to make it plain that Hungary “cannot accept that forcing upon (the Hungarian minority) of a single language, in the process of which the tongue of the state-organizing nation first eclipses, then forcibly dissipates and, it the end, ousts the old mother-tongue of the indigenous people. It is the duty of the mother-nation to guard over speakers of (Hungarian) mother-tongue no matter where they should be living.” In a clear warning to its neighbours who are trying to assimilate the Hungarian minorities by force, the newspaper remarked that “while the Basques of France and Spain have no mother-nation, the Transylvanian Hungarians do have one.” Until recently the strains created by the plight of the Transylvanian Hungarians were, at official level, never discussed. But earlier this summer, Mr. Janos Kadar, the Hungarian party leader, and President Ceausescu of Romanian held two suprise meetings — one in the Transylvanian city of Nagyvarad (Oradea), the other in Debrecen, in Hungary — when they discussed the Transylvanian problem, according to usually reliable sources. The meeting took place after a 27-page document describing the oppression of Transylvania’s two million Hungarians reached the outside world. It wans signed by György Lazar, the pseudonym of a well-known Transylvanian intellectual who dared not use his own name for fear of arrest. The facts contained in the document reveal the outlines of a well thought out nationalist policy aimed at turning Romania into state without minorities. After its first phase — characterized by random arrests, forced expulsions, systematic harassment and cultural isolation of “the carriers of national consciousness” — the policy was revamped. It now employs more effective means, like the granting and withdrawing of residence permits the dispersal of Hungarian communities, and the application of a numerus clausus in every sphere of life. Restriction on instruction in Hungarian is another powerful lever which, combined with job discrimination, is calculated to force out the Hungarians from their Transylvanian towns and villages into Romania proper. The leaderless, dispersed Hungarian minority thus faces total absorption. In awarding jobs, the authorities insist on a mechanical interpretation of the law ostensibly drawn up to assure “fair ethnic balance” in employment. In the old Hungarian cities with mixed population — Arad, Varad, Kolozsvár — Hungarans can get no work or residence permits, because “this would upset the ethnic balance.” This interpretation of the law results in the anomaly that in purely Hungarian towns only 10 per cent of the labour force may be Hungarian, while in the purely Romanian cities outside Transylvania, where there have never been Hungarians, 10 per cent of the jobs go abegging. Meanwhile Romanian workers from outside Transylvania are brought in to fill in new jobs created by the quickening pace of Romania’s industrialization. “Thus under the conditions of forced industrialization,” the document noted, “the exploitation of the Hungarian minority is relatively greater than that of the Romanians’ for they are denied the advantages (of employment). They feel and know that the industrialization is directed against them. “The very basis of their existence is drawn from under them, while discrimination against them is constant and all-embracing, for there is hardly any sphere of life where the Numerus clausus is not being applied.” The same interpretation of the law makes instruction in Hungarian well-nigh impossible. The presence of two Romanian children in any school in the predominantly Hungarian regions is sufficient to have the language of instruction ohanged in the school to Romanian. The denial of residence permits and job opportunities to Hungarians in the Hungarian towns has resulted in a mass influx of Hungarians into the neighbouring Saxon towns of Brasov, Medias and Sighisoara, whose population has been encouraged to emigrate to West Germany. But since these are designated as “Saxon towns,” no Hungarian schools are allowed to operate, the document adds.
