5
that
"Slovaks are afraid of Hungarian demands for revision, Hungarians are afraid of Slovak nationalistic attitudes and
this has gone so far that both sides are afraid of pogroms. The first fight, the first drop of blood will stir up emotions
that can only lead to a new Nagorno-Karabakh."
8
The situation of the Hungarian minority was further worsened by the nationalist stance of the
Romanian and Slovak governments as well as by the nationalist legislation that the majority
passed in the first years of the 1990s. Hungarians were highly critical of the Romanian and
Slovak constitutions which they saw as legalizing an ethnicised view of the state that failed to
secure minorities’ fundamental rights. They furthermore opposed laws that curtailed the use of
the Hungarian language, the right of education in the mother tongue and the ability of Hungarian
communities to have a say in local government. In 1993, after the Romanian government
appointed ethnic Romanian prefects in the overwhelmingly Hungarian counties of Harghita and
Covasna, Marko Bela, a prominent Hungarian leader, evaluated such decisions as “a process of
ethnic cleansing,” decrying the systematic removal of ethnic Hungarian officials from
educational and other state institutions.
9
Commenting on the 1995 Education Law, Marko Bela
noted that such law “puts our permanence in danger. The Education Law leads to our
assimilation and national extinction.”
10
In Slovakia, the ethnic Hungarian politician, Miklós
Duray, likened the 1995 draft of the Slovak language bill with “cultural fascism” and the
conditions of Hungarians in Slovakia to “those in Nazi death camps.”
11
Moreover, as scholars of Romanian and Slovak politics have abundantly described,
nationalism marred both countries’ incipient democracies.
12
The post-communist Romanian
regime led by president Ion Iliescu and his National Salvation Front (FSN) and the Slovak
regime led by prime minister Vladimir Meciar and his Movement for a Democratic Slovakia
(HZDS) embraced nationalism as a powerful political instrument able to provide influence,
weaken the opposition and mobilize the masses. They furthermore formed coalitions with
extremist nationalist parties such as the Greater Romania Party (PRM in Romanian), the
Romanian Party of National Unity (PUNR in Romanian) or in Slovakia, the Slovak National
Party (SNS in Slovak), whose discourse revolved around hatred directed at the “other,” ethnic
Hungarians in particular, ethnocratic principles and xenophobia.
It is this fair to conclude therefore that in light of existing theories of ethnic conflict,
Romania and Slovakia constitute puzzling cases that remained peaceful despite displaying many
of the traits theoretically conducive to violence. To make matters worse, none of the solutions
Convention