RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
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RFE/RL NEWSLINE 8 September 1999
HUNGARIAN DAILY'S STAFF COMPLAIN ABOUT POLICE QUESTIONING.
Andras Banki, chief editor of "Vilaggazdasag," and two of his
staff members have filed a complaint with the Prosecutor-
General's Office after police questioned them for several
hours on 7 September on suspicion of disclosing banking
secrets. Last week, the newspaper published a list of
Postabank's "'VIP account holders" (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 3
September 1999). The three journalists told police that the
list was mailed by an unidentified person. MSZ
SERBIAN OPPOSITION LEADER IN ROMANIA. Serbian Democratic
Party leader Djindjic and Petre Roman, leader of Romania's
Democratic Party, have signed a cooperation agreement between
their respective parties, RFE/RL's Bucharest bureau reported
on 7 September. Djindjic agreed with President Emil
Constantinescu to "establish permanent contacts" between the
Serbian opposition and "Romanian authorities." Prime Minister
Radu Vasile told Djindjic that Romania would "welcome a
process of coagulation--not necessarily unification--to
increase the efficiency" of the Serbian opposition and that
the "first condition for solving Yugoslavia's problem is the
change of the Milosevic regime." Vasile also said that
Romania is "worried by certain [Hungarian] declarations about
the situation of the Magyar minority in Vojvodina." He said
Romania "can by no means agree to modifications of borders."
MS
TRANSYLVANIA'S 'COSI FAN TUTTE'
By Michael Shafir
Parliamentary and presidential elections in Romania are
not due until the fall of 2000, but the electoral campaign
has already begun. Democratic Party Chairman Petre Roman
announced his candidacy for the presidency in mid-August in
the Transylvanian town of Targu Mures, and his party
simultaneously launched its "Message to Transylvania."
Introducing that manifesto, Roman called for
cooperation between the region's ethnic minorities and the
Romanian majority, which he said is now possible because "no
one questions Romania's territorial integrity today." But
visiting the headquarters of the Targu Mures garrison, Roman
professed that the officer corps' concern about an alleged
attempt to bring about "Transylvania's destabilization" had
made a big impression on him. Those familiar with the
Democratic Party chairman's double-talk were hardly
surprised.
The specter of the "destabilization attempt" was raised
by Adrian Nastase, first deputy chairman of the opposition
Party of Social Democracy in Romania (PDSR). In mid-July,
Nastase told journalists in Cluj, Transylvania's capital,
that an "explosive situation" might develop in Transylvania
this fall against the background of the country's "increasing
economic, political and social vulnerability." He claimed to
have "information" on the plans of the "Magyar revisionists"
to create such a situation. Later, he called on the Romanian
Intelligence Service to investigate and make public the plots
allegedly under way.
But Roman and Nastase were not the only ones ready to
play the Romanian nationalist card in Transylvania. In early
June, President Emil Constantinescu--the likely presidential
candidate of the ruling National Peasant Party Christian
Democratic (PNTCD) and the Democratic Convention of Romania
(CDR--rushed to respond to a document of unclear origin in
which a handful of "Transylvanian intellectuals" demanded
autonomy for the region. As "guarantor of the constitution",
Constantinescu said, he would never agree to "separatist
ideas." The fact that this statement was also made in Targu
Mures is no coincidence. Transylvania has become the main
testing ground for the arsenal likely to be used by political
competitors in election year 2000.
There are several reasons for this development. First,
the PDSR is well aware that it lost the 1996 elections to a
great extent owing to its unpopularity in Transylvania. The
CDR won almost the entire western and central parts of
Romania in 1996. Now leading in opinion polls, the main
opposition party would strengthen its position overall if it
were able to turn the tables on its main competitors--
particularly the PNTCD--in what was their bastion.
Second, the PNTCD has made it easier for the PDSR to do
just that by showing signs of disintegration at the local
level. Former Prime Minister Victor Ciorbea, himself a
Transylvanian, split the party in April, when he set up the
National Christian Democratic Alliance (ANCD). The Boila
brothers, two pillars of the Transylvanian PNTCD, who for
many years dominated the important Cluj branch of the party,
joined Ciorbea in the ANCD, while Ciorbea recently announced
he will run for president in 2000.
Third, the PDSR is also trying to pick up where the
Party of Romanian National Unity (PUNR) left off. Polls
indicate that the PUNR, whose strength in the Romanian
parliament fell from 7.7 percent in 1992 to 4.4 percent in
1996, may fail to pass the electoral hurdle in 2000. Once the
darling of Romanian nationalists in Transylvania, the PUNR is
a regional party par excellence.
Even more than the PNTCD, however, the PUNR has suffered
from political schisms. Following his dismissal as PUNR
leader in February 1997, Cluj extreme nationalist Mayor
Gheorghe Funar in April 1998 set up a rival Party of Romanian
Unity Alliance (PAUR), only to join the Greater Romania Party
(PRM) as its secretary-general in November. Those members of
the PAUR who did not follow Funar into the PRM recently
joined the PDSR. More important, Vatra romaneasca (Romanian
cradle) leaders also joined that party, securing for
themselves a place on the PDSR lists for the 2000
parliamentary elections. Vatra romaneasca, which, claims to
be a "cultural organization," played a major role in
provoking the inter-ethnic clashes in Targu Mures in March
1990.
Mihaila Cofariu, the Romanian "hero" of those clashes,
who was badly beaten by ethnic Hungarians and was later
recruited into the PRM, attended a recent PDSR meeting in
Bucharest as guest of honor. PRM leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor
immediately protested the PDSR's co-opting Cofariu, which he
dubbed an "Abduction from the Seraglio." Threatening to
retaliate, Tudor said that many PDSR sympathizers are
knocking on his party's door.
It is not an "abduction" that is being staged in
Transylvania, however. Rather, with most Romanian parties
trying to court nationalism, it is "Cosi fan tutte." The
Romanian National Party (PNR), which took the name of a 19th
century forerunner of the PNTCD in Transylvania, is obviously
targeting the same nationalist-inclined Romanian electorate
as are other parties. Former Romanian Intelligence Service
chief Virgil Magureanu, the party's acting chairman and a
Romanian Transylvanian, is believed to have masterminded the
Targu Mures riots.
Headed by former Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu--
whose diplomatic career often put him at the center of
Romanian-Hungarian disputes both under communist leader
Nicolae Ceausescu and his successor, Ion Iliescu--the
Alliance for Romania is also attempting to score points using
anti-Hungarian rhetoric taken from the nationalists' verbal
arsenal. That this arsenal is old-fashioned speaks volumes
about the paucity of political discourse in Romania 10 years
after the country began its "transition."
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RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
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RFE/RL NEWSLINE 9 September 1999
WAS DESECRATION OF SLOVAK MONUMENT 'PROVOCATION'? Party of
Hungarian Coalition (SMK) chairman Bela Bugar on 8 September
told journalists that last week's defacement of the monument
to General Milan Rastislav Stefanik was "a clear political
provocation" aimed at fomenting anti-Hungarian sentiment in
Slovakia. Bugar said that the SMK has managed to discover the
offenders and has informed the police of who vandalized the
monument as well as the car number plates of the
perpetrators. Bugar said that the monument was defaced by
former police officers, one of whom is now employed as a
bodyguard to an opposition politician, and that they were
paid 50,000 crowns ($1,200) to do so, SITA and CTK reported.
JEWISH FEDERATION OBJECTS HUNGARY'S AUSCHWITZ EXHIBITION. The
Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary (MAZSIHISZ)
complained on 8 September that an exhibit that Prime Minister
Viktor Orban is to open in Auschwitz next May "barely
conceals anti-Semitic undertones." MAZSIHISZ said in a
statement that the exhibit "distorts the facts" of Hungary's
treatment of Jews since "it makes no mention of anti-Semitism
before 1914 and places all responsibility on Germans for what
happened in the 1930s and 1940s." "It cannot be the Hungarian
government's intention to open an exhibition in Auschwitz
that condones the deeds of [Hungarian wartime leader Miklos]
Horthy," the statement said. MSZ
HUNGARY RULES OUT VOJVODINA AUTONOMY UNDER MILOSEVIC. Foreign
Minister Janos Martonyi told Hungarian media on 7 September
that he rules out any chance of reaching an agreement with
President Slobodan Milosevic on the autonomy of Vojvodina.
Such autonomy, he said, "must gradually be implemented and
must be incorporated into the process of democratization in
Yugoslavia." Hungary supports the autonomy plan proposed by
the province's Hungarian community, but the Hungarian
government "should never play the decisive part" in the
process of implementing it, he concluded. MSZ
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