The Eighth Tribe, 1977 (4. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1977-11-01 / 11. szám
November, 1977 THE EIGHTH TRIBE Page 3 THE RUMANIAN HOAX: A NETWORK OF DECEIT The September 1977 issue of the American Rumanian Review (published in Cleveland) displays an article entitled “Hungarian Culture in Romania”. The name of the author is not indicated. The introduction of the article begins with these statements: “Misinformation can lead to miscalculation and, like malicious gossip, to hatred. This is the case of a small but vocal group of self appointed ‘patriotic’ American Hungarians which is spending tens and tens of thousands of dollars on paid advertisements, trying to tell the American public that the Hungarians in Transylvania do not enjoy cultural freedom under the Rumanian rule. There are many things in present day Romania which are not to the liking of most Americans of Rumanian descent. In the matter of the treatment of minorities in Romania, the facts are in favor of the Bucharest regime. All facts about the Hungarian minorities in Transylvania are simple and can be easily checked. One way of finding out the truth is to make a personal visit there...” The rest of the article recites a selection of statistical data as proof of the great cultural freedom Hungarians enjoy in Rumania. It sounds clear, friendly and reasonable. It has only one flaw which is almost impossible to detect if one is not familiar with the subject: it is built on deceit, and not on truth. It is one small part of that huge Rumanian Hoax which was created more than a half century ago, and is being maintained since then with the purpose of acheving as much territorial gain as possible, through deception. The statistics quoted in the article are, of course, the “official figures” of the Socialist Republic of Rumania. The way these figures were attained is no longer a secret. As published in the book, “Documented Facts and Figures on Transylvania” page 57 (Danubian Press, 1977) one of the Rumanian census supervisors testified in person under oath that his orders from the Government were: “To register every household as Rumanian, unless otherwise demanded by the subject. In case subject should desire to be listed as non-Rumanian, we were to convince him of the impracticality of such desire...” There is no need to explain what this means in a police-state. Furthermore, the testimony informs us that “German sounding names had to be registered as Germans, Polish sounding names as Polish ... and names ending in -an, as, u, ea, oa, us or -en as Rumanians, no matter what the subject’s preference of language was.” The Rumanian census recognizes only 1,700,000 Hungarians in Rumania, while according to the figures of the Rumanian professor Satmarescu, as well as those attained by simple computing the yearly population increase data as published in the Demographical Statistics of the Socialist Republic of Rumania, the Hungarian population in that country must be somewhere around the 2,800,000. (See “Documented Facts and Figures on Transylvania”, pages 44 and 45.) Also, contrary to the falsified data in the above mentioned article, Hungarian language instruction is no longer given in 2077 elementary and ^ secondary schools. The law imposed upon the educational system in Rumania clearly defines that at least 25 students are required to set up or keep up a minority language class in any school, while the language must be changed to Rumanian as soon as two Rumanian speaking students are present. With the present day policy of “population exchange through resettlement” practiced by the Rumanian government in order to disperse solid Hungarian blocks, through the transfer of Transylvanian Hungarians into other parts of Rumania and bringing in their place Rumanian settlers, it is easy to see how the entire educational system can be changed in a short period of time from Hungarian to Rumanian. Continuing this line of deception, the American Rumanian Review goes on stating: “The greatest contribution to Transylvanian Hungarian culture is in the book publishing field. Kriterion Publishing House in Bucharest is the largest of its kind, specializing in non-Rumanian literature...” It says “the largest” instead of admitting the truth that it is the only publishing house for Hungarian literature, maintained and controlled by the Government. The article then enumerates ELEVEN titles as the great achievement of the Rumanian State in the field of Hungarian Literature. The innocent reader, ignorant of the many-century-old culture of the Transylvanian Hungarians and their special accomplishments in the field of literature, might be easily impressed by this. But anyone who knows the facts can only frown at this primitive effort of double-talk. The facts are that even in 1939, under the former Rumanian Kingdom, the politically oppressed and economically harassed Hungarian population of Transylvania supported without any Government or
