Next Wednesday is March 15th, which is a big day here, and this year promises to be a bigger day than normal. March 15th is the national day of Hungary ( I think, though I’ve also heard it referred to as the national day of Hungarians living outside Hungary.) Anyway, it’s marked on all the calendars, and for many here it’s an official holiday. It’s a bit nationalistic, but then all national days are a bit nationalistic, and so in essence it’s not greatly different from December 1st.
This year, however, some Hungarian nationalists have taken it upon themselves to make trouble. They have organised a rally in Udvarhely (Oderheiu Secuiesc) to proclaim the independence of the Szekely region and launch some kind of autonomous entity that presumably will exist only in their heads. This event (as I understand it) has been championed by the Mayor of Udvarhely, who has just been described to me as a Hungarian version of Vadim Tudor (leader of the extremist Romanian nationalist party). [Udvarhely, by the way, is the most Hungarian city in all of Romania, being 98% Hungarian].
Now, frankly, the best way to deal with this kind of provocative rubbish is to ignore it. A few hundred blokes gather in a field, proclaim independence and drink palinka, and go home feeling proud of themselves while the world pays them no attention or at best laughs at their delusions of grandeur. But this, sadly, will not happen next week. Because of course, never shy of taking an opportunity to make himself look important, and full of hysterical rhetoric, Vadim Tudor has sent out a call for action from proud Romanians everywhere, and asked for 100,000 people to descend on Udvarhely to stage a counter demonstration. (Romania has a less than proud tradition of violent outsiders being bussed in to start fights and suppress dissent – In the early months of the post-Ceausescu regime, a group of miners were bussed in by Iliescu (allegedly) to violently bust up a student protest; and in 1990 in Targu Mures a Romanian nationalist group stirred up anti Hungarian feeling in the villages and bussed in an angry mob to attack a group of Hungarian students demonstrating for a Hungarian language faculty, resulting in riots and deaths)
And thus, the situation could become tense, and, in the worst case scenario, violent. And once again the fact that broadly speaking Hungarians and Romanians live together fairly successfully and without rancour, will be obscured by a bunch of nationalist scum – Vadim Tudor will get his publicity, as will the Szekely Autonomists, and everyone on the extremes is happy. Everyone caught in the middle gets screwed. Of course the media will be complicit in the whole affair and will send camera crews to whip the thing up even further. And while it won't start a civil war, it will put the cause of equality and understanding back a good decade. Nationalists, eh? Wankers, all of them.
Wih luck it will be a completely freezing day - two days ago here it was -24 again, only to be back up to zero again the following day, which is an insane temperature swing - and everyobody will stay home and the camera crews can just film the normal people of Udvarhely celebrating their national day with no politics attached.
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7 comments:
Oh Lord, let's hope you're right and the subzero temps keep the hooliganism down.
Just as a note tho, there's no "allegedly" about Iliescu calling in the miners to break up the protests. He admitted it last year and some papers here did a great job of covering it.
Pax
There's no way I'm going to Udvarhely - the more people that go the more legitimacy the whole this has. Here there'll be the regular March 15th events, which I probably will go along and see, but that's just people in traditional costume doing folk things I think.
Ironically, CVT's over the top reaction plays right into the Hungarian nationalists hands. If there's trouble and it's reported beyond the borders of Romania and Hungary, public opinion will automatically be with the minority, whatever the actual arguments. And hence any violence or big flare-up plays into the hands of the Hungarian nationalists. I don't suppose CVT cares much, though, since his audience is very much a Romanian one, and he couldn't give a shit what foreigners think.
"And in today's climate, I unfortunately don't see that happening."
I reckon this "proclamation" thing does nothing to alleviate today's climate. No one will get autonomy as long as it is perceived as something that is taken from the Romanians.
If this is to happen someday it must be something that all agree upon, something that is viewed to be in everybody's best interest.
Instead, the approach taken by the Hungarian radicals seems to be of the type: let's make trouble and create conflict situations and maybe Europe will think there are some serious problems over here that can only be solved through a Kosovo-like resolution. (They did make allusions to Kosovo in several statements.)
UDMR (the Hungarian party in the government coalition) does not demand territorial autonomy on ethnic basis. Instead they ask for cultural autonomy on ethnic basis and territorial autonomy on non-ethnic basis (as in territorial autonomy for all regions/counties).
Instead, the approach taken by the Hungarian radicals seems to be of the type: let's make trouble and create conflict situations and maybe Europe will think there are some serious problems over here that can only be solved through a Kosovo-like resolution.
And PRM falls right into the trap. Like I said, if you ignore this kind of thing and deal instead with the diplomatic/politcal approach advocated by UDMR and others (not that I have a huge amount of time for the UDMR's politics in general, but I think they balance the ethnic question quite well), you can have a reasonable debate. Vadim Tudor is trying to stir up his core constituency and will probably succeed in doing so, but if he really does show up to make trouble with his "100,000" there's only one winner in international terms.
(Of course that will also bolster the PRM, as they can complain about outside interference, but it will only hasten the things he professes to despise.)
Well no minority ethnic group living in a democracy needs autonomy, but the Szekely are no different in this regard to the Welsh, Scots, Catalans or Basques, to give a few examples. They have their own region,within which they are the overwhelming majority, but the fact their region is not recognised as any different to any other region by Bucharest, means that in one sense their specific issues go unheard. (Even though they can and do send representatives to parliament). Some (small) measure of self-rule would help to alleviate that sense.
Thanks Romesperi.
I also wonder about the possibility of a local police force (there is something like this in the Basque region). One of the major issues regarding the Szekely and the Hungarian minority in general is a lack of representation in the police force (and the army too, but that's less of an issue internally). A large number of the isolated incidents of abuse and repression of Hungarians in Romania come from the police (most of whom are assigned here from other parts of Romania, and who are pissed off living in the frozen mountains with a bunch of people who are different and who distrust them). If there were some form of autonomy, either there may be more incentive for Magyars to join the police - as long as they could be assigned to this region. I reckon it would solve a lot of problems.
well, the various city governments and the county council are of course locally controlled, but they don't have a lot of powers. They basically can only do what Bucharest tells them to.
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