Getting Better, Getting Worse: Minorities in East Central Europe
Liebich, André
Wby won't the minority issue in East Central Europe go away? By 1914 more than half the people in the area belonged to minorities. By the interwar period the proportion had gone down to...
...German minority leaders dream of obtaining some form of autonomy for Silesia, perhaps with a view to creating a Euroregion transcending Poland's borders...
...An underlying source of conflict is the question of territoriality...
...At least one-sixth and possibly one-quarter of Bulgaria's nine million inhabitants belong to minorities...
...The Hungarian Constitution speaks of a "responsibility for what happens to Hungarians living abroad" and former prime ministerAntall sent a chill down his neighbors' spines by declaring himself the spiritual prime minister of fifteen million Hungarians (the population of Hungary is only ten million...
...Recent memories of antiAlbanian policies, which included bans on land purchase and on conferring Albanian nationalist names on children, have revived with the ongoing refusal of Skopje to allow an Albanian-language university...
...Less visible but even more numerous than the Roma are the Czech Republic's three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand Slovaks...
...To compensate for its reluctance to accommodate the Hungarians, Romania has attempted to integrate a dozen numerically insignificant and docile minorities...
...Skeptics, however, question both the significance and the motivation of these policies...
...So far, however, all such expectations have been dashed...
...For a time, this party enjoyed the balance of power in Parliament but even then it was unable to carry through its program because the mainstream parties, divided on most other matters, would come together to block it...
...What one can hope for is that the East Central European countries will continue to learn through their own experience with the understanding encouragement of the outside world and in a favorable international climate...
...The aggressively populist Meeiar government, with the support of both nationalists and communists, has made Slovak the sole official language...
...today they demand independence...
...However, the limits of repression have been reached in Kosovo where almost two million Albanians confront one-tenth that many Serbs...
...After its split with Slovakia, the new Czech Republic established a citizenship law that effectively excluded many individuals from citizenship...
...Like Tolstoy's families, in East Central Europe each minority is unhappy in its own way...
...Minority political activists have circumvented restrictions by setting up the Movement for Rights and Freedom (MRF) which is formally nonethnic but commonly dubbed the "Turkish Party...
...Local curfews for Roma have been overturned by Parliament but the government itself caused a stir when its minister of health declared that it would try to ensure that more "white children" than Romanies were born...
...With great difficulty it succeeded in introducing Turkish as an optional subject, before or after school hours, in some schools...
...Budapest does not conceal the fact that it expects reciprocity for its generous treatment of minorities...
...In Macedonia as elsewhere, the future allegiance of other minorities— Roma, Turkish, Vlach, Muslim—may well determine the balance of power...
...Ten years ago Kosovars demanded equal status with other Yugoslav republics...
...Their number, with estimates ranging from one hundred thousand to a million, is difficult to establish, in part because the Polish and German governments disagree on who qualifies as a German...
...The minority issue in East Central Europe today is neither as benign as it seemed a few years ago nor as catastrophic as it is now often described...
...Throughout most of East Central Europe there is at least some commitment to due process and to the rule of law...
...Several East Central European countries that are clearly not monoethnic would love to be so...
...They resurfaced when Polish authorities took down Germanlanguage road signs in German minority areas, although these were later restored in accordance with Council of Europe norms...
...It underscores the steamrolling effect that a nationalistic and numerically dominant society exercises on its weak and disorganized minorities...
...In the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, minorities number less than 10 percent of the population...
...Even more disturbing than the citizenship law or the many recorded cases of petty discrimination against Roma, however, is the general consensus within Czech public opinion that the outside world simply cannot understand what most Czechs consider a problem of public order...
...This law overrides earlier Czechoslovak-era legislation allowing official use of a minority language in areas where 20 percent of the population speak it (although officials in these areas were never required to understand it...
...The mainstream parties have refused SUMMER • 1996 • 87 East Central Europe to do so and Roma leaders have been ineffective...
...Even ethnically homogeneous Slovenia has been summoned by the OSCE to devise a system of minority representation and it finds its accession to some international organizations blocked by a dispute involving a minuscule Italian minority...
...The Hungarians, considering this council no substitute for the ministry of nationalities they had been demanding, soon pulled out...
...Ukrainians are more politically conscious and can make common cause over the issue of restitution for their expulsion from Poland's southeast corner after the war...
...Minorities are at the heart of theYugoslav conflict inasmuch as it was fueled throughout by the refusal of all concerned to live as minorities within a state dominated by others...
...It is feared, not only in Belgrade but in Brussels and Washington, that tomorrow they will seek unification with Albania, thus setting off a regional redistribution of power and borders with immeasurable consequences...
...Those who stayed in spite of these threats were hounded out by Muslim thugs...
...It has allotted them parliamentary seats and has set up a consultative minority council, in response to a private American proposal...
...Finally, Slovakia has witnessed the (re)birth of a new minority, the Ruthenians or Rusyns...
...Croatia has "solved" its minority problem by overrunning the Serb autonomous areas whose refusal to accept a diminished constitutional role in an independent Croatia triggered war in 1991...
...At present, however, the Hungarianspeaking municipal councils are—technically at least—illegal...
...With the tragic exception of the former Yugoslavia, minority disputes no longer provoke armed conflict among states here nor do they cause bloodshed on any significant scale...
...A measure of the disaster that has occurred is that minority spokesmen in the successor republics now refer to the minority regime of Tito's oppressive and authoritarian Yugoslavia as an enviable arrangement...
...The Slovak Constitution forbids affirmative action on behalf of ethnic minorities...
...After over a year of negotiation Romania has not yet signed a treaty...
...The prime contenders for mobilizing Roma are the other minority parties and their task is facilitated by the often fluid ethnic identity of Roma...
...a CIA estimate of two hundred and seventy thousand is considered high but not outrageously so...
...As for the unhappy state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, all speculation on the future of minorities must be suspended until the dust of war settles...
...Above all, the minority question is a major irritant in Greek-Albanian relations...
...The extermination of Polish Jewry, the loss of prewar Poland's Ukrainian and Belorussian Eastern borderlands, and the expulsion of Germans from territories attributed to Poland after World War II have reduced the minority population from more than 30 percent to less than 4 percent...
...In the last years of the communist regime Bulgaria sought to expel or assimilate its Turkish and Pomak or Bulgarian-speaking Muslim population (up to a million and three hundred thousand members respectively) and to ignore the existence of a Roma minority (between four hundred and fifty thousand and eight hundred thousand...
...Even in these countries, however, the weight of minorities exceeds their number...
...Challenged openly by Greece and tacitly by Bulgaria, it requires internal consensus for survival...
...Nevertheless, there are encouraging signs...
...They are further strained by the presence of several hundred thousand illegal Albanian workers in Greece and by Albania's occasional harassment of Greek minority activists, including clergymen...
...The issue is important, however, because treatment of minorities is the touchstone of democratic progress...
...Romania too has a "Hungarian problem...
...Mediar has promised to introduce a new minority language bill, even before being called to do so by the OSCE Minority Rights Commissioner...
...For the moment, the only reassuring note is that the Kosovo underground government of Ibrahim Rugova, acting as a national liberation movement, is committed to exclusively pacific means of struggle...
...Traditional minorities have disappeared or diminished but they have been partially replaced by new ones, most notably Roma who, withAlbanians, are the only growing population in the area...
...Official minorities are small...
...Even independence has not succeeded in overcoming Slovak fears and resentment of their onetime overlords, the now six-hundred-thousandstrong Hungarian minority...
...However, politicians who succeed in mobilizing Roma numerical strength will enjoy a powerful advantage...
...The fact that there are fewer than twelve thousand pupils in minority schools throughout the country no longer reflects official prejudice or fears of persecution...
...The extent to which such separation has imposed itself was demonstrated in the recent evacuation of Serb suburbs of Sarajevo...
...84 • DISSENT East Central Europe At present they function as an interest group, occasionally protesting that they are not recognized as a national minority...
...An even more unwelcome reminder of the past is a minute German minority...
...Tensions rose when local German minority leaders appealed directly to Bonn to open a consulate in Katowice, without consulting Warsaw...
...This is easy enough in the case of three hundred thousand Hungarians who constitute a minority within the formerly autonomous province of Voivodina...
...Even benevolent attitudes provide no guarantee of tolerance...
...At this point, Western policy makers, now prodded by a horde of recycled security specialists, began to give credence to the most alarmist pronouncements...
...The Dayton Accords conceded the principle of ethnic separation as a lesser evil to continued bloodshed...
...Given the minorities' present quiescence, it may be of little political importance whether Albania's Roma, South Slays, and Vlachs (a nomadic sheepherding people), really number one hundred thousand each in a country of three million...
...And the homogenizing effects of modern communications and technology would suggest that the future belongs to the forces of assimilation...
...Moreover, the party has split, the dissident faction embarking on a policy of confrontation...
...q SUMMER • 1996 • 89...
...Albania's minority statistics are even less reliable than others...
...Minority demands are increasingly dealt with like other political issues...
...These relations are already bedeviled by a barely buried territorial disagreement over Albanian Southern Epirus, provocatively referred to as Northern Epirus by Greece...
...Progress has been real but slow, in spite of the powerful Hungarian Democratic Federation, which constitutes the third-largest party in Parliament...
...Although the percentage of Hungarians in Romania is smaller than in Slovakia (8 percent versus 12 percent of the total population) Romania's almost two million Hungarians constitute Europe's larg86 • DISSENT East Central Europe est minority (as Hungarian sources tirelessly point out...
...Germans constitute the most prominent Polish minority...
...It has shied away, however, from granting Albanians their key symbolic demand: restoration of their former constitutional status as a constitutive nation of the state...
...No one should expect a "solution" for the minority issue...
...This still encompasses over a million people...
...at that time there remained no exclusively Hungarian schools and only a dwindling number of bilingual ones...
...Above all, the Romanian government is terrified at the prospect of being forced to grant some sort of territorial autonomy to Hungarians...
...However, Slovenia's most serious encounter with minority issues may lie in the future when up to one hundred and fifty thousand Bosnians living there before independence, now joined by as many as one hundred thousand refugees, begin to organize politically...
...On the face of it, some East European states should have no minority problem at all...
...Setting aside a minority bill proposed by the short-lived Panid government, Belgrade 88 • DISSENT East Central Europe instinctively resorts to ad hoc repression...
...Minorities make up over one third of the population of rump Yugoslavia...
...they echo in matters as tangential as the recent dismissal of a German conductor from the Prague Symphony...
...It is feasible too with regard to the three hundred thousand Muslims of the Sandjak, which straddles Serbia and Montenegro...
...Skopje has introduced affirmative action programs to raise the number of Albanians and other minorities in the public service...
...Recognizing this, regional organizations, notably the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), have attempted to devise minority protection principles...
...Suspicion of Hungarian policies is founded on the Hungarian attitude toward its own minorities abroad...
...The new Bulgarian Constitution recognizes no ethnic minorities but only citizens for whom "Bulgarian is not the mother tongue...
...At present, Roma are depoliticized and disorganized...
...The difficulties these efforts have encountered derive from the discrepancy between the European organizations' will to uniformity and the overwhelming heterogeneity of local minority situations...
...Albania's peaceful behavior is also dictated by the fact that the Greek dispute is but one of several confrontations into which this nation, almost half of whose conationals live abroad, could be drawn...
...In fact, Slovakia and Romania have been making common cause at international forums in a reenactment of the interwar "Little Entente" directed against Hungarian revisionism...
...They are guaranteed the right to study their language "in parallel with the obligatory study of Bulgarian" (but the study of other subjects in the mother tongue is not guaranteed...
...Both government and minority representatives have claimed the support of the OSCE Minority Rights Commissioner with regard to their confrontation over a new education law...
...Their organizations control some local councils but have no impact on the national level, in part because their area is among Poland's poorest and least-developed...
...Those Serbs who refused to move were threatened by Bosnian Serb gangs...
...Hungarian institutions have had to be built from the ground up since 1989...
...Figures vary from the official fifty-nine thousand to almost ten times that number...
...In this case, well-intentioned international efforts to set norms for minority protection may have exacerbated problems...
...Hungary, also a recently homogeneous state, stands out for its generous treatment of minorities...
...Moreover, the burden of history weighs heavily on Romania's Hungarians, longtime suzerains of the principality of Transylvania and, more recently, prime victims of Ceausescu's pathological national communism...
...In all these countries the importance of minorities still exceeds what their numbers warrant...
...Perhaps fearing such a development, Slovakia has resisted proposals from its Ruthenians and Ukrainians to set up a Carpathian Euroregion...
...government...
...Few observers would conclude, however, that majority/minority relations are on an even keel...
...The dilemma of the Romanian government is that it wants to be seen as meeting international minority protection standards, but it is reluctant to meet them...
...Belorussians are concentrated around the area of Bialystok in Eastern Poland...
...With democratization, outright repression has ceased and almost half the three hundred thousand Turks expelled have returned...
...What conclusions can one draw from this very mixed picture of minority issues in East Central Europe...
...Former Yugoslavia is the tragic refutation of optimism on the minority issue...
...If Serbia and Montenegro hoped to become ethnically homogeneous by shedding their sister republics, they have failed...
...Territorial autonomy for minorities remains an absolute taboo, especially in the wake of the recent collapse of federal states in the area, but governments acknowledge that the Western countries they admire and envy are pluralistic...
...A stronger guarantee of future tranquillity lies in the pressure exerted on Greece by its European Union partners and in Albania's utter economic dependence on the West...
...In the light of these acute tensions it is encouraging that Albania and Greece have just decided to sign a friendship treaty, although precedents suggest that this will not be the end of their differences...
...Collective minority rights, cultural autonomy, preservation of ethnic identity, affirmative action, and subsidies to minority organizations are official policies...
...German minority organizations, concentrated in Silesia, have done well, even winning five parliamentary seats, and they have consistently enjoyed Bonn's support...
...The resulting discrepancy between the political ethos of Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania and the ethnic reality of these countries is an unabating source of tension...
...Slovakia's Hungarian minority has successfully waged elections (winning 17 out of 150 parliamentary seats), defended separate Hungarianlanguage schools (rather than bilingual schools), resisted gerrymandering assaults on its ethnically compact districts, and enlisted Budapest's diplomatic support in European organizations...
...Its strength makes one overlook the more precarious situation of Slovakia's other minorities...
...The Constitution contains a ban on affirmative action and on political activity by ethnic minority organizations as well as an express prohibition of autonomous territorial units...
...Although the principal Albanian political party, the Party of Democratic Prosperity, is a member of the government coalition it has petitioned the Council of Europe not to admit Macedonia into the Council...
...Above all, hostility is exacerbated by Athens' fears of Muslim and Slav encirclement, manipulated for domestic political reasons, as well as by Tirana's rough disregard of political and diplomatic norms...
...Above all, Roma, whose number may reach a million, barely appear in statistics because a large majority speaks only or mainly Hungarian...
...These Greek Catholic Carpathians had been considered part of Slovakia's Ukrainian minority for half a century until a Toronto professor informed the world through the medium of an American scholarly journal that a new Slavic language, Rusyn, had been born, with offshoots in five countries...
...There is still an undetermined number of largely "invisible" Serbs in Zagreb and elsewhere but the once six-hundred-thousand-strong Serb community of Croatia has been decimated and cowed...
...Amendments to the citizenship law carried out under international pressure have been judged inadequate by the Council of Europe and the U.S...
...It acted without any consultation, thus displaying contempt not only for its Roma population, whose numbers run to several hundred thousand, but also for its own minority institutions...
...This pitiful remnant of Bohemia's history highlights the fact that the Czech-German past has not been buried...
...Macedonia, the one republic that left Yugoslavia peacefully, is buckling under the strains of independence...
...By the interwar period the proportion had gone down to one-quarter...
...Instead, the abyss is growing between the Slavic majority, which constitutes 60 percent of the 2.2 million inhabitants, and the Albanians who make up most of the minority population...
...With international financing it has set up broadcasting services in minority languages...
...Their numerous parties quarrel among themselves and play no serious role...
...Slovaks, South Slays, Germans, and Romanians together may number just over one hundred thousand or about 1 percent of the population...
...The future of this treaty (as well as the still awaited Romanian one) is compromised, however, by differing readings of the Council of Europe's recommendation 1201, to which the treaties refer and which Hungarians interpret as a guarantee of territorially based rights and autonomy...
...Since 1945 minorities have never accounted for more than 10 percent of the population, even according to the most extravagant figures...
...Given the similarity of language and culture, Slovaks are prime candidates for assimilation...
...This is not only because of a tendency to define political demands in ethnic terms or because of international interest in minority protection...
...Jews, more numerous in Hungary than anywhere else in East Central Europe (figures go up to one hundred thousand), are divided among themselves as to whether they wish to be considered a national minority...
...Hungarian diplomatic efforts to establish a network of bilateral agreements with countries containing Hungarian minorities have not borne fruit, with the exception of Ukraine, whose Hungarian community numbers only one hundred and fifty thousand...
...In light of the alternatives, past and present, muddling through may be good enough...
...In Bulgaria, as in other East Central European countries (with the exception of Poland where the number of Roma is insignificant), the political allegiance of Roma is the key to future minority politics...
...Roma, possibly numbering as many as seven hundred thousand, have been the object of local discrimination...
...Rusyns thus have the potential of becoming the Kurds of East Central Europe...
...This step provoked school boycotts by Bulgarian nationalists, and the Socialist majority government has vowed not to make any more concessions to the Turks...
...Romania has signed the Council of Europe's Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and it was the first state to sign the Council's Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities...
...Disputes over restitution— for Czech suffering during World War II and for the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia afterward—bedevil relations between Bonn and Prague...
...Such thoughts are anathema to Poland's leaders who, like their counterparts in the region, are viscerally attached to a unitary state...
...Such considerations, reinforced by communists' assurances that their regimes had "solved the national question," lulled Western policy makers into believing that minority issues belonged to the past...
...To everyone's surprise and relief, Warsaw's relations with independent Ukraine are harmonious...
...they are geographically scattered, however, which reduces their effectiveness...
...Two of the most prominent minorities, the Jews and the Germans, have virtually disappeared...
...The role of the council and parliamentary representatives as "window dressing" was further underscored when the government decreed a change of name for Roma, henceforth to be known as Tigani ("Roma" sounding too much like "Romanian...
...Poland has become an overwhelmingly monoethnic state for the first time in its history...
...In the case of Bulgaria, for example, Roma are often referred to or sometimes even refer to themselves as Turks, thus putting themselves into the hands of the MRF...
...The Greek minority has founded its own party, Omonia, initially banned as unconstitutional but relegalized under international pressure and under a neutral name...
...Poles are curious about their minorities, whether on a trivial level, as in a fashion for kosher restaurants, or, more ominously, in attitudes of suspicion that gave an ugly anti-Semitic undertone to the first postcommunist presidential elections...
...Ukrainian and Belorussian minorities, each numbering between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand, share a history of subordination in Poland...
...After long delays, bitter wrangling, and considerable international pressure Slovakia has signed and ratified it...
...This was patently untrue, but not until the revolutions of 1989, with the freeing of the press and the opening of borders, did the minority issue come to the fore...
...For instance, the first mainly Hungarian radio station, promised since 1990, opened only in mid-1995...
...At one blow, Croatia has also freed itself from the constraints of its own charter of ethnic communities, adopted in return for international recognition, inasmuch as the charter applies only to communities exceeding 8 percent of the population...
...It is also because most states of the area still see the presence of minorities as a challenge to their identity...
...In particular it affected ten thousand to twenty-five thousand Roma (popularly called Gypsies), thus bringing to international attention the existence of a minority, socially deprived but nationally defined, whose number may be as high as two hundred thousand or 2 percent of the population...
...On the other hand, the strength of the Greek minority is one of Albania's most pressing international concerns...
...The outlook is grim...
...The self-governing minority institutions, created on the basis of a law that took two years to prepare, have aroused SUMMER • 1996 • 85 East Central Europe so little interest that barely 2 percent of those eligible to vote for them have done so...
...Although there are at least seven Roma political parties and numerous social organizations, they are ineffective...
...Moreover, President Tudjman has given notice that he will not tolerate any minority or regional platforms, as in the case of Istria, where a local law empowering minorities was struck down as unconstitutional...
Vol. 43 • July 1996 • No. 3
