Toward a New Central Europe

THE HUNGARIAN MINORITY PROBLEM IN RUMANIA

International Commission of Jurists

FROM the eleventh century until 1918, Transylvania,' a region of some 23,300 square miles, or some 40,700 if the larger area including Maramures, Crisana and the Banat is included, came in one way or another under Hungarian rule. In 1918, it was ceded to Rumania as a region then consisting of some five and a quarter million, of whom half a million were German, one and a half million Magyar and the remainder Rumanian. There is a bitter and bloody history of national tensions. The region now comprises one of the most important national and linguistic minorities in Eastern Europe and provides an absorbing case study on the treatment of minorities in a Communist People's Republic. The total Hungarian population of Rumania, according to the 1956 census, was approximately 9.1%.

The detection of discrimination in most countries is a difficult process which does not appear from the ipsissima verba of legislation and it is difficult to pin down administrative practice as discriminatory unless the group discriminated against is expressly designated. It is usually a simpler process to examine legislation and practice to see what is missing from the point of view of the rights of a group in question. In a Communist State the denial of freedom to any particular group must be examined in the context of the entire social and political outlook of the State, since many rights and freedoms as understood in liberal democracies are denied to the whole population. If it be that a particular group resists the process of socialization more vigorously than another, it is not easy to see the line between discrimination against that group and the employment of greater force to deal with greater resistance. These facets of a Communist State have been much in evidence in the past and it is against this background that the minority question in Transylvania has to be considered. The experience of the Chinese People's Republic, with the peculiar blend of Communism and chauvinism on the part of the ethnic majority, viz., the Great Hans, towards the Tibetans was for example, admitted by the Chinese themselves. Again, discrimination exists in the Communist ideology itself, but is part of the general

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doctrine that social progress is to be achieved through the strengthening of the proletariat, which requires for its accomplishment the strengthening of class-consciousness among the people. This has nothing to do with discrimination against a national, ethnic, religious or linguistic group.

A further obstacle to a fully documented study of minority problems in Transylvania is the absence of sufficient reliable data. In a Communist society the public ventilation of grievances at the political level is severely restricted and silence extends also to minorities with a grievance.

The Peace Treaty and the Constitution of 1952

The Peace Treaty concluded between the Allied Powers and Rumania in 1947, stipulates in Part II (Political Clauses), Section I, Art. 3 that

1 ) Rumania shall take the steps necessary to secure to all persons under Rumanian jurisdiction, without distinction es to race, sex, language or religion, the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression, of press and publication, of religious worship, of political opinion and of public meeting.

2.) Rumania further undertakes that the laws in force in Rumania shall not, either in their content or in their application, discriminate or entail any discrimination between persons of Rumanian nationality on the ground of their race, sex, language or religion, whether in reference to their persons, property, business, professional or financial interests, status, political or civil rights or any other matter.

Thus, the wording of the Peace Treaty clearly excludes discrimination against minorities and it is of little consequence whether the Hungarians in Transylvania are to be regarded as an ethnic, i.e., racial group, since their language alone is sufficient to bring them within this protection.

Particularly striking, both with reference to the Peace Treaty and in comparison with the Constitutions of most other People's Democracies, are the provisions of Article 82 of the Rumanian Constitution of 1952. This Article provides that all the national groups in the territory of the Rumanian People's Republic are entitled to use their respective languages and to have at all levels establishments of public education in which instruction is given in their mother tongue and further provides that the spoken and written language used by administrative and judicial authorities in districts where a national group other than Rumanian is in the majority should be the language of this national group; civil servants in such areas should be appointed from among members of this majority group, or if from other groups, it is necessary

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that they speak the language of the majority. Article 84 follows the lines of the Soviet Constitution in recognizing not only the separation of Church and State but also the exclusion of the Church from education. No religious community may have its own educational establishments, but theological schools may train people to carry out their part in religious services. In two other Articles the Constitution deals with the rights of national minorities. In Article 17, which lists the duties of the Rumanian State, there is a duty owed by the state to protect national minorities and especially their culture, which ought to be socialistic in its content and national in its form. Article 81 goes into the realm of enforceable legal sanctions protecting minorities and within the general framework of provisions concerning equality before the law it is provided that any kind of chauvinistic persecution of non-Rumanian national minorities or any kind of propaganda calculated to bring about such persecution is a criminal offense.

It should be noted that only the cultural rights of minorities are mentioned and Article 17 designates the Rumanian State as unitary, independent and sovereign, thus excluding any form of federation, such as, e.g., the Soviet Union or the United States. In this respect, restricting minority rights to cultural matters and protection from persecution shows little advance from the position of national minorities in the former Kingdom of Rumania between the two World Wars. How far the cultural rights of the large Hungarian minority in Transylvania are respected will now be considered.

Administrative Measures

Foremost among these is the redemarcation of regions and cities, thereby fragmenting the Hungarian population in such a way as either to reduce their majority or to convert it into a minority. The Hungarian Autonomous Province was created in 1952 by Articles 19 and 20 of the Constitution of that year. The total population of this Province was, according to the 1956 census, composed of 77.3% Hungarians, 20.1% Rumanians, 0.4% Germans, 0.4% Jews and 1.5% Gypsies. In December 1960 a governmental decree modified the boundaries of the Hungarian Autonomous Province. Its whole southern part, which was predominantly Hungarian, was attached to Stalin Province, which has now of course been renamed and is known as Brasova. In place of this, several districts with an overwhelming Rumanian majority were joined to it from the southwest. This boundary adjustment reduced the Hungarian population by approximately 82,000 and increased the Rumanian population by approximately 131,000 out of a total population of just over half a million. The official reasons were to facilitate communications and administration, but the new name given to the freshly demarcated province echoes the real fact of the situation, viz., the substantial dilution of

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its Hungarian character. The Province was no longer called the Hungarian Autonomous Province but the Mures-Hungarian Autonomous Province, after the River Mures.

The process of dilution was carried still further, though by less obvious methods, by the drive towards industrialization. The region adjacent to Hungary already had the highest rate of industrialization in the country but the program aimed at an overall stepping up, for the border regions of Transylvania as well as for the rest of the country. In a Socialist economy not only does industrialization mean the growth of the urban proletariat, but it also means the creation of a large industrial bureaucracy. In the process of stepping up the industrialization of industrial Transylvania, large numbers of civil servants, administrative staff, industrial bureaucrats and workers of Rumanian nationality swelled the Rumanian population in the regions neighboring Hungary. In this case it is difficult to speak of a failure to respect the rights of the Hungarian minority. Industrialization with its consequent internal migration is a common enough feature of many societies. Where, however, there is an influx of a minority group and an exodus of a majority group the consequences for the culture of the majority group are important enough if the matter stops there. Many young Hungarians are obliged to leave Transylvania in search of work in the territories to the south and south-east of Transylvania, which are known as Old Rumania. And, it should be observed, the matter does not remain there, as will be shown later in this article.

There is another technique which frequently conceals de facto discrimination beneath a facade of general applicability. Whether or not the famous Law No. 261 of April 4, 1945, and Decree No. 12 of August 13, 1945, did in fact discriminate against Hungarians, its provisions certainly weighed very heavily on Hungarians who had Rurnanian citizenship. This Law provided that all persons who served in military or para-military organizations of a state having been at war with Rumania lost their Rumanian citizenship. Decree No. 12 fixed the operative date for such service as after August 22,1944. For practical purposes this meant that the Hungarian minority would lose their Rumanian citizenship. The circumstances were that Rumania joined the Allies against the Axis Powers in 1944, whilst Hungary was under German occupation and on the Axis side until the end of the war in May 1945. The northern and predominantly Hungarian part of Transylvania was given back to Hungary in 1940 by the Germans and Italians and under the Hungarian regime of Horthy all adult males were obliged to enlist for military service and youth were required to join young people's para-military organizations. Through these circumstances few Hungarians escaped the threat of losing their nationality. It was provided that joining the Communist Party would save them from losing it.

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Discrimination in the Cultural Field

The steps taken by the Rumanian authorities to weaken Hungarian culture are again in some cases mixed with what might be merely part of general Communist policy. Thus, for example, both Catholic and Protestant churches were deprived of their schools; this in itself was merely part of the normal materialistic and secular policy of a Communist State and as such, although it struck a particularly severe blow at Hungarian culture, it was not discriminatory. But there was also a widescale destruction of centuries-old Hungarian private or public archives and libraries, and the devastation of old Hungarian castles to provide stone material for new buildings. Vital links with the past were thereby wiped out.

Until 1958, a large-scale educational system, from the primary to the university level, flourished in Hungarian. Since then, however, the situation has changed rapidly. The number of Hungarian primary schools is steadily dwindling and a decree now in force authorizes only the eldest of a family's children to study in a Hungarian-language school. At the level of higher education the Rumanian authorities introduced a system of "parallel sections',. This meant that in such an institution a parallel Rumanian curriculum with Chairs held by Rumanians was introduced. When this cuckoo in the nest was big enough it took over the whole nest and the Hungarian section disappeared. Another method which helped in cutting down instruction in the Hungarian language was for the student body and the teaching staff of the institutions concerned to announce that for practical considerations and in accordance with their desire to perfect themselves in "the beloved Rumanian mother-tongue,' they had decided to combine with a Rumanian-language institution, or in the case of a bi-lingual institution to go over entirely to Rumanian. This process was carried so far that even student hostels felt its impact. Those for Hungarians became for mixed nationalities and Hungarian students asked to share a room v.>ith a Rumanian in order to perfect their knowledge of Rumanian. At the present time the Medical School in the capital of the Mures-Hungarian Autonomous Province is undergoing ìparallelization". For Hungarian academic establishments there is now a limited admissions quota. In 1958, the Hungarian University in Cluj, Bolyai University, fused with the Rumanian University of Babes. The fusion was marked by the suicide of three of the professors at Bolyai University.

Odd facets of this process could in isolation be laudable. For example, it is an excellent language training to share a room with someone speaking a different language, but the whole pattern of cutting down Hungarian-language instruction in an area which is or was so Hungarian that it was part of Hungary for almost 900 years cannot be reconciled with respect to the constitutional rights of the

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Hungarian minority and is by no means explicable as part of the normal process of shaping a Communist society. For centuries Hungarian culture and tradition have taken deep root and survived the vicissitudes of fortune, both kindly and outrageous. It is difficult to conceive that a people so deeply rooted in its culture would itself clamour for the destruction of that culture by absorption into the Rumanian mainstream.

A further instrument for the dilution of the Hungarian majority in Transylvania is the resettlement of Rumania refugees coming from Bessarabia. Their reintegration into Rumanian economic and social life has taken place mainly in Transylvania, where they constitute a large part of the labor force in the industrial development from the western belt neighboring Hungary to the heart of the MuresHungarian Autonomous Province, and they are settled mostly in cities where the proportion of the Hungarian population is still high, e.g., in Cluj, the capital of Transylvania.

The Rumanian National Statistical Office carried out a census in 1956 and it was emphasized that the civil servants carrying out the census were obliged to call attention in each case to the basic difference between nationality, i.e., ethnic origin, and mother-tongue. All persons registered had to state to which national ethnic group they belonged. The distinction between national group and mother-tongue and the obligation to state before officials one's national group drive a wedge between a people and its culture and this indeed is reflected in the figures given by the census. For every thousand people of declared Hungarian origin there were one thousand and forty-two giving Hungarian as their mother-tongue. It is difficult to believe that Hungarian, difficult and almost unrelated to other languages, is the mother-tongue of any but Hungarians, and yet 4.2%o of the Hungarian minority group shrank from stating that they were Hungarian. The reasonable conclusion to be drawn from this is that in their eyes it was better not to declare oneself to be Hungarian. The more innocent explanation of gross inefficiency in the compilation of the census would seem to be negatived by the deliberate distinction drawn by officialdom where no real distinction exists.

Too many individual items which could be capable of other explanations than discrimination if taken singly point unmistakably when viewed as a whole towards a pattern of conduct. In short. as far as the Hungarian people in Rumania are concerned, they appear in the give and take of living together to lose on both the swings and the roundabouts. When this happens to a minority group it is difficult to resist the conclusion that they are being subjected to discrimination.

(Bulletin of the International Commission of Jurists, No. 17,

December 1963, p. 35-41.)

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Toward a New Central Europe