Krónika, 1945 (2. évfolyam, 2-11. szám)
1945-07-15 / 7. szám
VOLUME II. ÉVFOLYAM 1945 JULIUS 15. NO. 7. SZÁM; AMERICAN HUNGARIAN MONTHLY- 10c A COPY AMERIKAI MAGYAR HAVILAP 600.000 Hungarians to be denorted from Czechoslovakia MASS DEPORTATION CONSTITUTE GRAVE DANGER TO PEACE IN THE DANUBIAN VALLEY. AN APPEAL TO THE BIG THREE. Six hundred thousand Hungarians are expelled from their homes and are deprived from their livelihood by an order of the Czechoslovak Government. Mass deportations are not new on the European continent. They were conceived and carried out ruthlessly by Hitler in countries where the ethnographic character of thfe population did not suit his purposes. It is hard to believe that Czechoslovakia, one of the first victims of Hitler, should adopt policies, patterned by the Nazis. Yet, the announcement of Dr. Vlado dementis, undersecretary of Foreign Af fairs in the Czechoslovak Government, leaves no doubts to the aims of the Benes regime. > Twentysix years ago, after the first World War, Czechoslovakia came into the possession of the northern part of old Hungary, with a large Hungarian population. The borderlines of the succession states of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy were drawn arbitrarily, with complete disregard to the Wilsonian principles of people’s self-determination. The dangers inherent in unjust boundaries were early repog nized by some of the greatest Allied statesmen. General Smuts, the well known South African statesman and one of the foremost members of Prime Minister Churchill’s present war cabinet, was com missioned by the Supreme Council of the Allies in April 1919 to iron out with President Thomas G. Masaryk of Czechoslovakia the problema raised by Czech claims to territories populated by Hungarians. General Smuts in a report to the Supreme Council of the Allies on his conversation with President Mássaryk on April 7, 1919, wrote the following: “In my conversation with President Masaryk, the future frontiers of the Czechoslovak State were referred to. Under the Armistice terms, the Czechs were to occupy the Northern bank of the Danube from Pressburg to Komarom. The object, no doubt, in bringing the Czech occupation so far South, was to give the future state a Danube frontier, but in order to do so, it will have to include a very large, purely Magyar population, which lives North of the Danube. I pointed out to President Masaryk, the grave undesirability of this. He agreed and said that he would prefer to waive all claims to this Magyar territory and withdraw the Czech frontier to the North, so as to leave pll this ethnologically Magyar territory to Hungary. But on one condition: that in exchange Czechoslovakia should get a small strip of Hungarian territory South of the Danube, at Pressburg, towards Parndorf.” In his note dated April 9, 1919 General Smuts further wrote the following: “With some millions of Germans already included in Bohemia in fhe North, the further inclusion of some four or five hundred thousand Magyars in the South would be a very serious matter for the young ptate, beside the grave violation of the principle of nationality involved. I would therefore press very strongly for effect being given to this exchange.” On General Smuts’ recommendation the British delegation to the Peace Conference prepared a resolution to the effect that the “Grosse Schutt” (Csallóköz) should be excluded from Czechoslovakia, but this resolution was abandoned when Mr. Eduard Benes stated <that he had referred the matter to President Masaryk, who had replied that General Smuts had seriously misunderstood what he had said. General Smuts’ report was written shortly after Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Great Britain during the first World War and one of the Big Four of the Paris Peace conference in a memorandum to the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference stated the following: “There will never be peace in South Eastern Europe if every little state now coming into being is to have a large Magyar Irredenta within its borders.” Rejecting a plebiscite in 1919, the Czechs were unwilling to submit their controversy with the Hungarians to a vote in 1938 either, and^ chose arbitration. The Trianon Treaty sliced off 23.797 square mile» from Hungary in favor of Czechoslovakia, but the Hungarians after the Munich pact claimed only 5.700 square miles. The Hungarians claimed only such territories where the majority of the population is Hungarian. The delegates of the Sirovy Government, whose members were appointed by President Edward Benes, before he resigned the Presidency in October 1938, offered 4.200 square miles, which would have kept a number of old Hungarian cities in Czechoslovakia. When the negotiations resulted in a deadlock, the Czechoslovak Government requested a decision by the four powers who signed the Munich pact. (Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy) The British and the French governments left the decisions to the Germans and the Italians. Thus came the first Vienna award, which restored 4.604 square miles to Hungary. After Hitler started the second World War, President Benes insisted that at the end of this war the pre-Munich frontiers of Czechoslovakia must be restored. In May 1943 he stated that the .pre-Munich frontiers of Czechoslovakia will be restored. To eliminate minority problems for the future which kept the Czechoslovak state in a constant turmoil during the turbulent years between the two World Wars, Mr. Benes proposed population “transfers”, on the pattern set by the League of Nations in the Turkish Greek dispute. World public opinion, strirred up by the cruel mass deportations of Hitler, did not react favorably to Mr. Benes’ plans and for a while we heard nothing further of such plans. American Hungarians as well as all Hungarian abroad, free to speak their minds, were the first to aknowledge the Munich settlements null and void, but they believed that the ultimate fate of the disputed territories will be settled in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter, in other words, by the vote of the people. President Benes, who rejected a plebiscite in 1919 and again m 1938, evidently decided to avoid the “threat” of a plebiscite in tbc future too, by the simple process of ejecting the Hungarians from the the disputed territories. Evidently he feared the result of a plebiscite in Ruthenia too, but in this case as Ruthenia was coveted by the powerful Soviet Rus-NO! NO! NEVER!
