The Szeklers' Tortured History
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by Angela Kun-Gazda
7 April 2006
One scholar takes issue with a recent TOL report on the Hungarian
community in central Romania.
Razvan Amariei's article "Shelving the Szekler Land" (27 March)
surprised me with its sweeping generalizations about the history of the
Szeklers' pursuit of autonomy and its erroneous assertions about
their origins and life in Transylvania.
I have been an avid reader of Transitions Online and, previously, of
the Central Europe Review. I have enjoyed the wealth of information and
opinion about topics that, as an anthropologist and Eastern
Europeanist, interest me both personally and professionally. I have
followed with particular interest the informative reporting of Razvan
Amariei until his most recent article.
The central issue of contention is not the seemingly minor individual
details, but how these details, put together, frame the way the
Szeklers' aims are presented by the author.
This applies, for example, to Amariei's claim that "the Szeklers
were a Turkish population, brought in around 1200 to guard the
Hungarian kingdom's eastern borders, then along the Carpathian
mountains," an idea that has been challenged by anthropologists and
is now advanced only by interested parties who want to chip away at the
Szeklers' identity and continuity of place.
HISTORICAL CONTINUITY
Szekler Land has existed as a cultural, legal, and administrative
region for more than 800 years with varying levels of autonomy, first
as part of the Kingdom of Hungary, then as part of the Province of
Transylvania, and finally under the Habsburgs until 1867, when its
legal status was abolished.
The article states that an area almost identical to the historical
Szekler Land became autonomous based on ethnic criteria and
"according to the wishes of the Soviet Union."
The Hungarian Autonomous Province, consisting of four Szekler counties,
was established in 1952 for propaganda purposes. After both World War I
and World War II, the national government in Bucharest passed
democratic laws while pursuing a strict anti-minority, centralist
policy and the region was autonomous in name only. Its autonomy was
limited to the use of the Hungarian language alongside Romanian, while
the use of minority languages was restricted in the rest of the
country.
According to the 1956 Romanian census, the total population of the
province was 77 percent Hungarian, 20 percent Romanian, 1.5 percent
Roma, 0.4 percent German and 0.4 percent Jewish.
In December 1960 a decree by the national government tactically
modified the boundaries of the province to exclude some districts and
include others, resulting in the Hungarian majority being reduced to 62
percent. The province was renamed the Mures-Hungarian Autonomous
Region. It was abolished altogether in 1968 and replaced by the county
system in a territorial and administrative restructuring of the
country.
The renewed Szekler movement for territorial autonomy has been gaining
momentum since April 2005, when the Szekler National Council (CNS)
submitted to the Romanian parliament its second legislative proposal
for the legal framework to re-establish the Szeklers' county,
comprising Covasna, Harghita, and a part of Mures counties. In his open
letter to President Traian Basescu in early March 2006, the head of the
CNS, Jozsef Csapo, compared the autonomy of the Szekler region to other
autonomous regions more peaceful than Kosovo, such as South Tyrol,
Catalonia, and the Aland Islands.
A CLIMATE OF FEAR
However, it is not only the CNS and its calls for autonomy that are so
politically provocative in such a climate of fear.
Last fall the debate in Romania's parliament spearheaded by the
moderate, center-right Hungarian Democratic Federation of Romania to
establish a legal framework for the cultural autonomy of ethnic
minorities deteriorated when a deputy from the Social Democratic Party
asserted that Hungarians should "return to Asia." Other politicians
and commentators followed suit, often in the same vein.
The bill had already been watered down and was attacked for simply
hinting at what the Szeklers are articulating.
In this political climate, the Hungarian minority continues to be a
source of self-legitimization for ultranationalists and the rejuvenated
Szekler autonomy movement surely provides more fuel for their fiery
rhetoric. Their status is a valuable political tool.
Amariei writes that the autonomous Szekler territory would have a
population of about 500,000 ethnic Hungarians, 220,000 ethnic
Romanians, and 30,000 inhabitants belonging to other ethnic groups,
notably Roma. Nowhere in the article is it mentioned, however, that
these numbers were artificially created through Communist economic
policy and a policy of ethnic homogenization.
Under the Ceausescu regime, the Szekler Land was subjected to a forced
Romanianization policy with the aim of "diluting" the predominantly
Hungarian enclave via government-planned migration of Romanians into
the area.
From this perspective, the aspirations of the Szekler community are
historically based and to simply call them nationalists akin to the
hateful and highly influential ultranationalist leader of the Greater
Romania Party, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, is an injustice.
It should also be noted that those who are working for the autonomy of
Szekler Land have repeatedly stated that they do not wish to compromise
Romania's territorial integrity or its national sovereignty. Vadim
Tudor, by contrast, has made statements that border on inciting ethnic
civil war.
DEMOGRAPHIC ENGINEERING
Communist economic policy during the second wave of industrialization
between 1958 and 1967 altered the ethnic makeup of many Transylvanian
cities, including Arad, Brasov, Cluj, and Timisoara.
The city of Targu-Mures, in Mures county, was the capital of the
Szekler/Hungarian Autonomous Region until 1959. During its autonomous
period, the Hungarian population of Targu Mures was around 80 percent.
During the 1970s it dropped to 70 percent as a result of the centrally
regulated, artificial settling of labor.
The third wave of industrialization between 1968 and 1989 altered the
ethnic composition of the newly created counties of Covasna, Harghita,
and Mures in Szekler Land. Laborers from Moldova were moved into
Szekler Land to work in the new factories.
A new education policy resulted in the outward migration of educated
Hungarians, a "brain drain," from Szekler Land. Ethnic Hungarian
teachers, doctors, and graduates of technical universities were
assigned to work outside of Targu Mures and the rest of Szekler Land,
in Romanian counties across the Carpathian Mountains.
As a result, by 1989, the Hungarian and Romanian populations of Targu
Mures were equal in size.
Since 1989 documents have surfaced that provide reliable evidence that
the aims of these programs went beyond economic policy in the counties
with a majority Hungarian population.
The article also reiterates misleading information. For example, it
reports that in 1990 "one of these [Hungarian 1848 commemoration]
ceremonies was the departure point for major interethnic clashes in the
city of Targu Mures that lasted several days and left six dead and
about 300 injured."
In fact, street violence erupted on 19 March, when the government bused
in Romanian villagers from the Apuseni Mountains, armed with wooden
clubs, to confront Hungarian demonstrators. The violence lasted until
21 March and provided then-President Ion Iliescu with an excuse to form
the Romanian Information Service (SRI), the successor to the secret
police, formed at the end of the month by decree of the Bureau for
National Unity.
The Iliescu government also deployed violence against its pro-democracy
opposition by organizing four violent miners' riots in Bucharest,
after which the authorities deceitfully claimed that it was the
opposition that had initiated the clashes.
Unsubstantiated inflammatory claims reported recently by Romanian media
assert that the Szeklers have paramilitary structures trained in
Hungary, a claim reminiscent of previous allegations by Vadim Tudor and
Gheorghe Funar, the infamous mayor of the Transylvanian city of Cluj,
that ethnic Hungarians ought to be purged from the army because they
had paramilitary organizations and would be a potential threat to the
state if they were armed.
The idea that minorities pose a danger to national security is the
political bogeyman under the bed. Ultranationalists have begun calling
for the arrest of CNS director Csapo. Ethnic minorities are called a
danger to the Romanian unitary state the moment they begin negotiating
for their rights, especially if those aspirations can be labeled as
radical.
Of course, at its inception the moderate Hungarian Democratic
Federation of Romania was considered radical and dangerous, too.
Extremists have even called the party a "terrorist organization."
In the mid-1990s the SRI identified "the campaign of gathering
signatures aiming at supporting a draft law regarding education for
national minorities" as an act of extremist nationalism!
The article also reports, "The Romanian constitution protects
state-run minority-language education, including, where numbers
warrant, high schools and colleges." The constitution does provide
for minority language education, but this right is by no means
guaranteed.
It has been contested and delayed every step of the way, including the
re-establishment of the historical Hungarian-language university in
Cluj. TOL itself has recently covered the plight of the Csango
Hungarians in Moldova and the dire need for minority-language education
in these communities. ("A Fugitive Tongue," 8 March 2006)
Finally, the article pays no attention to the general debate over
regional autonomy in Romania, which has appeared in the media in bursts
since the 1990s, most notably with the publication of the manifesto
"I've Had Enough of Romania" by Romanian journalist Sabin Gherman
as well as within the pages of the bilingual journal Provincia,
dedicated to exploring regionalism and federalism in depth.
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