Amerikai Magyar Szó, 2000. január-június (54. évfolyam, 1-26. szám)
2000-06-01 / 22. szám
Thursday, June 1, 2000 Amerikai Magyar Szó 3. The Lessons Of An 80 Year Old Tragedy (Tracing the Balkan’s Tragedy to Trianon) The Kingdom of Hungary was dismembered by the Treaty of Trianon "Every nation’s homeland is sacred. If you destroy one, you mutilate the entire human race", said Father Grat- ry on the pulpit of the Notre Dame Catherdral in 1920. He was talking about the Trianon Treaty, which on the 4th of June, 1920 dismembered the 1000 years old kingdom of Hungary. Just as the Jews could not forget the loss of their homeland, nor did the Hungarians and never will. Just as Nazism was not born in Germany but in Versailles, so the tragedy of the Balkans originated in Trianon, where, from the fragments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the successor states of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and greater Romania were created. These artificial formations forced Croats, Serbs and Muslims to live together and compelled Czechs to live with Slovaks. It takes time for historic events to reveal their consequences. It took nearly 80 years for these creations of Trianon (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), to self-destruct and atf'ä result, to de-stabi- lize the Balkans. In that process, Kosovo is not yet the final act! Trianon cut mercilessly into the flesh of compact Hungarian populations. Hundreds of towns were separated from their suburbs, villages were split in two; communities were deprived of their parish churches and cemeteries; townships were cut off from their railroad stations and their water supplies. A 1000-year-old European country was made into an invalid. In the process, 35 percent of all Hungarians were turned into foreigners within the towns built by their forefathers. Hungarians became Europe’s largest minority and in the "free for all” that followed the kingdom's dismemberment, even Austria helped herself to parts of Hungary, (see map). The new borders were not drawn on the basis of plebiscites and did not follow ethnographic borders. The dismemberment of the 48 million Austro-Hungarian Empire resulted in the creation of 16 million ethnic minorities. These minorities were not emigrants who voluntarily left their old country, but people who never moved from their hometowns and became foreigners only because the borders were redrawn around them. President Wilson would have preferred if the Danu- bian Confederation was to replace the Monarchy and wanted to draw the new borders of the confederation’s member states on the basis of self-determination through plebiscites, but his views were disregarded. On March 13, 1919, he called the proposed dismemberment of Hungary absurd, but was overruled by the French. As a result, the United States Congress refused to approve the Treaty of Trianon, but it was implemented anyway. When the Wends and Slovenes of the Muraköz protested their separation from Hungary, when the Ru thenians expressed their desire to remain part of the kingdom, which they shared for a thousand years, when the Swabians of the Banat protested their annexation into Romania, their requests been all denied. There was only a single instance where self-determinationprevailed. The city of Sopron was allowed to hold a plebiscite and voted to remain as part of Hungary. In any society, the acid test of civilization is the respect of minority rights. The successor states, which were created, validated the words of Tacitus: "We hate whom we hurt." They attempted to solve their minority problems, through denationalization, ethnic cleansing, deportation, expulsion, transfer, dispersion and other forms of uprooting. Hungarians had to choose between their nationality and their property. Because of intimidation and coercion, 350,000 Hungarians decided to leave all their possessions and flee to rump Hungary. The collective possessions of Hungarian communities were also targeted. In Romania alone, Hungarians lost 1,665 schools and universities, including the world famous János Bolyay University, which has still not been returned. After 1956, when 2,700 Hungarians died in fighting the Soviet tanks, and the heroic children of Budapest succeeded in unmasking and mortally wounding Communism, the rulers of the successor states used the revolution as a pretext to speed the forced assimilation ot their Hungarian minorities. While 287 were hanged in Hungary and 300,000 escaped from Hungary, things got even worse for Europe’s largest minority. It was after the Hungarian Revolution, when the remaining autonomous Hungarian regions of Transylvania in Romania and Vojvodina in Yugoslavia were abolished. Although autonomy has been guaranteed by the Great Powers in 1920, again in 1945, and once more by the European Parliament, in 1993 (in Article 11 of Decision 1201), today, the over 3 million Hungarian minorities have no autonomy at all. After 1989, there was a short period of hope. The Hungarian bishop, László Tőkés (who led the successful revolution against Ceau- cescu and was later nominated for the Noble Peace Prize) was temporarily heralded as an all-Romanian national hero and Miklós Duray, the Hungarian leader of Charter 77, was also released from jail in Slovakia. Unfortunately, this period of hope did not last. By 1991, the formely Communist leaders of the successor states (Milosevits in Yugoslavia, Iliescu in Romania, Mechiar in Slovakia) once again turned to anti- Hungarian propaganda to distract the public’s attention from the real problems and things got even worse for the Hunagrian minorities. Of the above mentioned "leaders", only Milosevits survives today. Even he was forced to give autonomy to Kosovo’s Albanians, but not to the Hungarians of Vojvodina where the forced assimilation and ethnic cleansing is still continuing. One wonders if there is a limit to the patience of this largest group of European minorities and what will happen when the limit is reached? Problems do not solve themselves accidentally and NATO’s bombs don’t solve problems either. Those who want a better future must first have a plan, a concept of that future. For the stability and prosperity of Central Europe, that plan must start with cultural autonomy and local self-government for ALL the minorities in the region and should eventually end with the formation of a voluntary federation. The Central European nations should not only join NATO and the EU, but should also form a federation which is economically self-sufficient, politically stable and geographically large enough to fill the power vacuum, which neither Western Europe, not the United States or the UN can fill permanently. The UN’s or NATO’s troops can not be stationed in the Balkans forever! History teaches us, that the Balkans always became unstable whenever a power vacuum evolved in the Da- nubian Basin. Right now there is a power vacuum. History also teaches us, that peace and prosperity resulted, not only fro the region but for all of Europe, when there was local power in the Carpathian Basin. Wise men learn from their mistakes of the past, instead of repeating them. Only mindless bureaucrats worship the status quo. The rest of us know that if something is broke, it should be fixed. What is needed in Central Europe is to build a strong Danubian or Visegrad Federation, one that can be crystallized around the nucleus of Hungary, Slovakia, Vojvodina, Slovenia and Croatia. A Federation that later could expand to include Romania, Bosnia, Sub-Car- pathia or even Poland, the Czezh Republic and Austria. It would be fitting, if on the 80th anniversary of the dismemberment of the Hungarian Kingdom, after the terrible suffering of three generations of innocent ethnic minorities, we would start the process of rebuilding, not that of a nation state, but that of the Federation of Central Europe. This Federation, similarly to that of the Benelux states, could take care of its own affairs, could guarantee the human rights of all minorities while also being a vital part of an integrated Europe. This is what we should learn from this 80 years old tragedy. Béla Lipták dr é'É fl
