The Unsettled Szeklers

It may have no chance of success, but the call for a Hungarian autonomous region reveals how deep the rifts now are between Romania’s Hungarians as well as with Romanians. 26 January 2004 BUCHAREST, Romania--The Szekler National Council, a small Hungarian minority organization, has announced that it will hand in a legislative initiative that would, in the unlikely event that it is approved, create an autonomous Hungarian region in the center of the country.

Named Szekler Land, the region would merge three counties, Covasna (whose ethnic structure is 74 percent Hungarian and 23 percent Romanian), Harghita (85 percent Hungarian and 14 percent Romanian) and Mures (53 percent Romanian and 39 percent Hungarian). It would have its own president and government, its own police forces and its own educational system, which would include in the curriculum disciplines such as Hungary's history and geography.

The document appears not to have the slightest chance of becoming a bill, let alone law, as the majority of even Democratic Alliance of Hungarians from Romania (UDMR) parliamentarians have clearly stated that they do not back the idea. The proposal will be sent to the Romanian parliament in early February.

Some believe the initiators of the idea, which would effectively recreate a short-lived autonomous region created at Stalin’s personal request, should be pursued through the courts. Others believe this is simply a means of attracting Hungarians' votes in this summer’s local elections.

Electoral or not, the proposal indicates just how persistent the issue of Hungarian rights is, despite the signing, in late 2003, of a treaty between Hungary and Romania that gives educational and cultural privileges to Hungarian minorities abroad (most significantly in Romania and Slovakia). And it reveals an increasingly fundamental division with the Hungarian community itself.

A NATIONAL CRISIS?

Cristian Parvulescu, the president of the ProDemocratia Association, thinks that "the radical Hungarian movement is using Szekler Land as a strategy for the local elections, in order to de-legitimize UDMR, which for the past 14 years has been practically the Hungarian minority's only political organization."

Some voices in the governing Social Democratic Party (PSD) have called for the Szekler National Council (CNS) to be declared illegal, while the leader of the Greater Romania Party, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, has announced that he will file a complaint with the state prosecutor and with the police.

The seemingly doomed initiative even prompted an extraordinary meeting on 21 January of the National Council for Defending the Country (CSAT), an institution that brings together the president, the government, the defense and security forces and the secret services. The CSAT normally meets only during a major crisis.

"The CNS project is unconstitutional," the CSAT concluded. "Respecting minorities' rights and developing territorial autonomy as a general constitutional principle is one thing but that is totally different from what this ethnic autonomy presupposes," President Ion Iliescu declared.

However, he did not object to the project being handed in to parliament. "That’s the initiators’ right,” he said. “Parliament will judge it and others will judge it too," Iliescu continued, refusing to clarify whether "others" might also mean the judiciary.

TIME FOR AUTONOMY?

Territorial autonomy for the Hungarian minority has, in the past year, become one of the most disputed issues in Romanian society. And the demands seem to be becoming more and more radical with each passing day.

The origins of the call for autonomy date back to the fall of the communist regime, when some community leaders thought that this might be a good moment to seek greater political elbow room. In March 1990, violent street clashes between Romanians and Hungarians in the Transylvanian city of Targu Mures buried the dream of a clear, but peaceful upgrading of Hungarians' rights.

The struggle then took political form, in the shape of the UDMR. Seated on the opposition benches in the first two democratic legislatures, the UDMR won few battles. So, since 1996, it has supported the winners, obtaining in exchange more and more rights for Hungarians. They can say now that they have almost everything they asked for, except for autonomy.

That idea has been never abandoned, but, until last spring, it surfaced only in occasional statements by some radical leaders. These elicited only the usual negative reactions, mostly from radical Romanian nationalists.

But in April last year, some Hungarian intellectuals and politicians, led by the Protestant cleric and ex-UDMR leader Laszlo Tokes, established a National Council of Transylvanian Hungarians (CNMT), whose main goal was to win cultural and territorial autonomy for the Hungarian minority.

Prime Minister Adrian Nastase immediately ordered investigations to ascertain whether the CNMT was in any way breaching the law. The committee’s conclusions are still awaited.

Until now, the CNMT's most important effect has been to show that some Hungarians, mainly in central Romania, no longer feel that the UDMR is representing their interests. Indeed, over the past six months factions and alternative organizations have mushroomed.

Ten UDMR councilors from Sfantu Gheorghe, the capital of Covasna county, 200 kilometers north of Bucharest, created a separate faction in the town council, while in July 2003 some officials from Harghita county founded the Hungarian Civic Alliance to run against the UDMR in this year's local elections.

And in over 50 towns and villages in the same area, so-called Szekler Councils have begun to emerge. Some see these as running in parallel to the local UDMR-dominated administrations.

The political effervescence in Covasna, Harghita, and Mures counties led to the creation of a new organization, the Szekler National Council, last October. The CNS brought together almost all supporters of autonomy in the three counties, be they UDMR members, its ex-members, or simply independent organizations and individuals.

AN AUTONOMOUS PAST, AN AUTONOMOUS FUTURE?

Szekler is another name for the East Transylvanian Hungarians. Originally, the Szeklers were a Turkish group, brought in by Hungary's kings around 1200 to guard Transylvania's eastern borders.

Over the centuries, they lost their language and almost all their traditions. Even their names are now pure Hungarian. But, to this day, they carry their separate origin as a badge of pride.

The CNS's demands have been damned as "a dangerous attack against the national integrity" or as "unconstitutional, anti-national and anti-European." And this has not just been from parties traditionally backed by ethnic Romanians.

One of the strongest reactions has come from the UDMR's leaders. "Anyone creating alternative political organizations undermines the UDMR's unity and serves the Romanian nationalists' interests", it said in a statement released soon after the CNS's foundation.

Hungarian President Ferenc Madl, who has in recent days been on a private visit to Romania, also clearly indicated that he does not support the initiative, turning down an invitation to meet the CNS’s leaders.

Despite this almost unanimous bad reception, the CNS's initiators didn't seem to be discouraged. They have won the support of Hungary’s former prime minister, Viktor Orban, and his conservative Fidesz party, and reports suggest that they are winning more supporters each day among Romania’s Hungarian population.

According to the 2002 census, there are 1,434,377 ethnic Hungarians in Romania (6.6 percent of the population). This makes them the country’s largest ethnic minority according to official figures. Almost 99 percent of them live in the western reaches and center of the country, in Transylvania, and the regions of Crisana, Maramures, and Banat.

Other sizeable minorities are the Roma (officially 535,250, although most estimates are at least twice that figure), Ukrainians (61,091), and Germans (60,080).

Hungarians are the majority population in two of Romania’s 41 counties, more than a third of the population in another two, and in another two account for over 20 percent.

Between 1952 and 1968, when Romania was, in keeping with the Soviet model, divided in regions and smaller rayons, there was an area almost identical to the Szekler Land proposed by the CNS. The area enjoyed autonomy, thanks to a demand made personally by Stalin himself.

The Mures Hungarian Autonomous region, as it was called, disappeared after administrative reforms introduced by Nicolae Ceausescu.

Today's Romanian constitution stipulates that ethnic minorities should have state-backed education in their own language, including colleges and (depending on numbers) universities. They also can use their language in official contacts and in the courts, and they can run public or private theaters, newspapers, and radio and television stations.

However, the constitution clearly states that Romania is a "national, unitary and indivisible state." Even if a movement demanding autonomy were seen as acceptable by the politicians, complicated constitutional revisions would be required and those would require the support of the people.

The Hungarian minority’s representatives are therefore almost certainly arguing in vain when they invoke examples of autonomy in Italy, Finland, and Spain.

To succeed, any such project would need a clear change in attitudes, above all among the ethnic-Romanian majority. And that seems highly improbable, at least in the near future.

--by Razvan Amariei