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Minority Cultures: The Szeklers' Tortured History
April 12, 2006
Transitions Online (www.tol.cz), 7 April 2006
by Angela Kun-Gazda
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One scholar takes issue with a recent TOL report on the Hungarian community in central Romania.
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.
Angela Kun-Gazda is an anthropologist specializing in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
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