The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1983 (10. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1983-04-01 / 4. szám
1 THE ESSENCE OF THE TRANSYLVANIAN PROBLEM. It is a proven fact today that the government of the Socialist Republic of Rumania, known as the “Ceausescu Regime”, Marxist in theory and Nazist in practice, is ruthlessly embarked upon the total annihilation of the three-million-strong native Hungarian population of Transylvania. According to available documented records, since 1944 more than 200,000 Hungarians have been exterminated by the Rumanians in death-camps, prisons, police stations, village squares, streets, highways and railroad stations. Among them close to 800 clergymen, 687 educators, and more than 10,000 other intellectuals. During the years of 1981 and 1982 alone, we know of 198 cases where Hungarian educators, clergymen and simple workers, men and women, young and old, were beaten to death by the SECURITATE - political police - during the “interrogations” or became victims of “accidents”, again by the hand of the Securitate. Old Hungarian institutions of higher education, some of them dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries, were all taken over and Rumanized. More than three-fourths of the Hungarian grade- and middle- schools operating in 1945 are closed down today. The use of the Hungarian language is forbidden in all public places, including schools, playgrounds and food markets, and even the children who are overheard talking among themselves in their mother tongue, are severely beaten and punished. During the last three years this Quarterly has published many of such atrocities, and lately the international media is beginning to pay increasing attention to what is happening to Hungarians in Rumania. It is clear that the Ceausescu regime is engaged in an effort to solve the minority problem of this multi-national country by stamping out the very root of the problem: the minorities themselves. While Rumania, as a nation and a country, was established only one hundred years ago on the North-Eastern corner of the Balkan, between the Black Sea, the lower Danube river and the South-Eastern slopes of the Carpathian mountains (known also as the Transylvanian Alps), Transylvania was an integer part of the Hungarian Kingdom for one thousand years, recognized by historians as the “citadel of western Christian culture and the bastion of western civilization.” During the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries Vlach immigrants began to seep in from the Balkan II as migrant workers. Under the liberal laws of the Hungarian Kingdom they were allowed, even aided, in building their own villages, churches, schools and to maintain and develop their culture. Not having to serve in the Hungarian armies during the many wars fought in the defense of the West against the Tatars and the Turks, and later against the Habsburgs in defense of the freedom of religion, the Vlachs prospered and increased in numbers. Today, calling themselves Rumanians - a name invented for political purposes a century ago - they form a majority in many parts of Transylvania. Due to this “partial majority” Transylvania was cut off from the mother country and handed over to newly established Rumania as its share of the spoils of World War I. Within the Rumanian Kingdom between the two World Wars, the rights of the Hungarians were more or less recognized and respected. Thus, within twenty years of Rumanian occupation the Transylvanian Hungarian culture blossomed into World recognition through its writers, artists, inventors and educators. However, after World War II, though the peace treaties clearly stipulated administrative and cultural autonomy for the Transylvanian Hungarians, Communist Rumania soon began to set aside the provisions of the treaties, and embarked upon a course to destroy, first the Hungarian cultural heritage, then the Hungarians themselves. Based on a politically motivated and completely false new history, the government of Communist Rumania declared Transylvania “the motherland of the Rumanian nation”, claiming to be the descendants of the Daks and the Roman Legionaires stationed in the province of Dacia between 107 and 271 A.D. when Emperor Aurelianus withdrew the last remaining Legions from that province under strict order to destroy all buildings, supplies, and evacuate the land before the oncoming Goths. It is historically documented however, that the fierce Dak people were completely exterminated by the Legions between 107 and 117 A.D., and that the Legions occupying the province were the so-called “Legions of the Barbarians”, meaning army units recruited from the North-Western territories of the Roman Empire, inhabited by Germanic tribes. The Daco-Roman theory is therefore false and absurd. As research has proved, the Vlachs - who call themselves today Rumanians or even “Romanians” for the last half century - are the descendants of a large settlement of people brought over from the Italian peninsula by THE TRANSYLVANIAN QUARTERLY
