RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
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RFE/RL NEWSLINE  23 June 1999

EU CONFIRMS CZECH TARDINESS, IMPROVED SLOVAK, POLISH
CHANCES. German State Secretary for Foreign Affairs
Gunther Verheugen told journalists on 22 June after a
meeting of the EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg that
the Czech Republic and Slovakia will join the EU
together, Reuters reported. The agency said this
confirms reports on Czech tardiness in complying with EU
requirements as well as Slovakia's improved chances
following the demise of former Premier Vladimir Meciar.
Verheugen also said that Poland's ambition to join the
EU by 2003 is "not unrealistic." Hungarian Foreign
Minister Janos Martonyi said that his country aims to
enter the EU by 2002 and Slovene Foreign Minster Boris
Frlec said his country intends to join one year later.
Estonian Foreign Minister Toomas Hendrik Ilves said that
while Estonia will be ready to join in early 2003, he
was "not counting" on the EU to accept it then. MS

ETHNIC-HUNGARIAN PARTY THREATENS TO VOTE AGAINST
LANGUAGE BILL. Bela Bugar, chairman of the Hungarian
Coalition Party (SMK), said on 22 June that the SMK will
not vote for the bill on the use of minority languages
in official contacts unless its proposals for amendments
are taken into consideration, CTK reported. Bugar said
the bill would be "more acceptable" if the
recommendations made by OSCE High Commissioner on
National Minorities Max van der Stoel were included in
it. Premier Mikulas Dzurinda earlier on 22 June said
that he was ready to include those recommendation in the
bill. Dzurinda has repeatedly rejected SMK demands for
changes beyond the High Commissioners' recommendations.
Even without SMK's support, the cabinet can pass the
bill, since the three other parties of the coalition
have 78 of the 150 seats in parliament. MS

HUNGARY, ROMANIA DISCUSS MILITARY COOPERATION. Visiting
Romanian Defense Minister Victor Babiuc and his
Hungarian counterpart, Janos Szabo, agreed on 22 June in
Budapest that their countries will analyze the
possibility of allowing military troops to transit each
other's territories without prior parliamentary
approval, Hungarian and Romanian media report. The two
defense ministers also agreed that the planned joint
Hungarian-Romanian peacekeeping battalion will be set up
next year. Meeting with Babiuc, President Arpad Goncz
denied what he called "speculation by extremists,"
(presumably in Romania), according to which Budapest
wishes to re-annex Transylvania to Hungary. MSZ/MS

END NOTE

'BEYOND BORDER MAGYARS' -- IS KOSOVA A MILESTONE?

By Michael Shafir

	As of late, Hungarian leaders display a constant
preoccupation with the fate of the 350,000-strong Magyar
minority in the Serbian province of Vojvodina. Indeed,
hardly a day passes without either Prime Minister Viktor
Orban or Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi raising the
issue at one meeting or another, be it with their new
NATO allies, with visiting Yugoslav opposition leaders,
or in encounters with prominent members of the
province's ethnic Hungarian leadership.
	This insistence has certainly not gone unnoticed in
neighboring Romania and Slovakia, which also have
sizable (1.7 million and 560,000, respectively)
Hungarian minorities and where fears of similar demands
being raised are constantly looming and cut across the
political spectrum. Indeed, Romanian President Emil
Constantinescu's denunciation earlier this month of a
document whose origins are still unclarified, and which
called for Romania's federalization and for autonomy for
the Banat and Transylvania speaks miles of the echoes
that the fragile post-Kosova truce may unwarrantedly
have produced. After all, Constantinescu must have been
aware of the fact that by denouncing the handful of
intellectuals (Hungarian but also Romanian ethnics) who
allegedly authored the document, he was willy-nilly
playing the tune that extremist nationalist forces in
his country had been playing for about a decade. And
yet, the trumpet sounded in Budapest obviously
penetrated the walls of the Banat, a historical province
of the Austrian-Hungarian empire that Yugoslavia and
Romania divided after World War I, producing a stringent
note in Bucharest.
	In neighboring Slovakia, where, as in Romania, the
Hungarian minority is a member of the ruling coalition,
the Vojvodina offensive is not known to have triggered a
reaction at leadership level, but it certainly was not
very helpful to the Hungarian Coalition Party (SMK),
whose drive to translate promises made by its coalition
allies into post-electoral deeds is encountering
considerable difficulty. Indeed, observers are of the
opinion that the Slovak nationalist counteroffensive,
aimed at stopping the minority-language bill from being
passed by submitting the issue to a referendum, is not
without chance of being successful. SMK leader Miklos
Duray had to admit last week that some 60 percent of
Slovaks are, in fact, quite unhappy to see the SMK in
the government.
	Why should Hungary's neighbors fear the Kosova
fallout? To put it in a nutshell, because they perceive
Budapest's "Vojvodina offensive" as being perhaps the
first step towards what many a Romanian or Slovak
nationalist has long been suspecting Budapest of:
destroying the post-Trianon treaty border arrangements.
After all, that 1920 treaty is still widely referred to
in Budapest as a "diktat," whereas the Hitler-imposed
"arbitration" (the Budapest terminology) that briefly
returned part of Transylvania to Romania in the early
1940s is considered a "diktat" in Bucharest. And, to be
sure, those who chose to look at the Vojvodina autonomy
demand through dark glasses seemed to be vindicated by
politicians of the likes of Justice and Life Party
leader Istvan Csurka, who did not wait for the guns to
fall silent before calling for Vojvodina's annexation.
	In other words, Slovakia and Romania fear what
political scientists used to call "the diffusion of
political innovation" when they referred to East
European dissident demands crossing borders and being
emulated from one country to another. The fact that for
the first time after many centuries Hungary finds itself
on the winning side of an alliance after a war (even if
brief) does not much help to alleviate those fears, to
put it mildly. But to what extent is anxiety of such
emulation justified?
	If one examines the ideas promoted by Budapest, one
is bound to be surprised that their origin is, in fact,
not really Hungarian. Or, more exactly stated, its
origins may be Magyar, but not from within Hungary's
present-day borders. The Hungarian Democratic Federation
of Romania (UDMR), has for some time now promoted a
program of a "three-pronged" autonomy for members of the
community in that country and, as one may witness from
the declarations made in Cologne on 10 June by Zsolt
Nemeth, who is in charge of ties with Hungarian
minorities beyond borders, it is precisely this model
that has now been embraced in Budapest. In other words,
yes, there is diffusion, but in the opposite direction.
Of the three components of autonomy for the Vojvodina
Hungarians that Nemeth mentioned at a conference in
Cologne on 10 June, only one really needs explaining,
and that is the concept of "personal autonomy." The
other two--separate representative bodies and an
alliance of settlements with Hungarian ethnic majority--
simply amount to self-rule and territorial autonomy.
"Personal autonomy," in the view of the UDMR, means that
ethnic Hungarians will have a right to participate in
elections to the first structure mentioned above even if
they do not reside in districts where there is a
Hungarian minority. The "specter," as it turns out, is
rather benign and the Foreign Ministry in Budapest has
clearly distanced itself from any Csurka-like demands.
But it is benign only as long as "autonomy" is read to
mean a right that every citizen in a democratic polity
has by definition of its being a democracy. And that
reading, alas, still needs translators into Romanian or
Slovak.

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RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
________________________________________________________
RFE/RL NEWSLINE  24 June 1999

EAST EUROPEANS PUSH FOR NATO EXPANSION. At the end of a
three-day meeting in Budapest, senior officials from the
East European and Baltic countries that were left out of
NATO's first wave of expansion said on 23 June that the
alliance must expand further, Hungarian and
international media reported. Estonian Defense Minister
Juri Luik said that NATO should ignore Russian warnings
against further expansion, and added that "countries
committed to defend common values should join together."
Slovak Foreign Minister Eduard Kukan said that aspiring
NATO candidates "are ready and willing to assume their
share of responsibility in ensuring the continent's
stability." MSZ

HEAVY FLOODS AFFECT LIVES IN EASTERN EUROPE. Fifteen
people died in rainstorms in Romania, while severe
weather also hit Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Moldova.
In Romania, seven villagers died in the eastern province
of Buzau after torrents from surrounding hills flooded
their homes. In the northeastern region of Maramures
three farm laborers were killed by lightning, while in
the northeastern province of Bacau lightning killed one
man. Four others died in separate incidents. Romanian
officials said that some 170 bridges were swept away by
the floods and nearly 1,700 homes were damaged around
the country. In Hungary, roads and railway lines were
closed after rainstorms and gales caused heavy damage
over the last two days. Storms also hit Ukraine and
Moldova, and rivers arose sharply in Poland and
Slovakia, AFP, Reuters, and dpa reported. MS

SLOVAK GOVERNMENT APPROVES MINORITY LANGUAGE DRAFT BILL.
Without the support of the Hungarian Coalition Party
(SMK), the government on 23 June approved the draft bill
on minority-language use in contact with official
authorities, CTK reported. The debate on the bill in the
parliament is to begin on 29 June. The bill includes the
recommendations made by the OSCE but does not meet the
SMK's demands. The SMK want minorities to be allowed to
use their mother tongue in contacts with the authorities
in localities where they make up 10 (not 20, as provided
by the bill) percent of the population and want it to be
extended to education and culture. MS

HUNGARIAN OFFICIAL OUTLINES VOJVODINA PROPOSAL. Foreign
Ministry spokesman Gabor Horvath on 23 June told
reporters that the recent Cologne conference has
accepted Hungary's proposal to include the protection of
Vojvodina Hungarians in a Southeast European Stability
Pact. "The implementation of personal autonomy must take
priority now," Horvath explained, adding that the
establishment of a territorial local government and the
restoration of provincial autonomy for Vojvodina will
constitute the next steps in implementing a three-tiered
autonomy concept in the province. Meanwhile, Istvan
Csurka, chairman of the extremist Hungarian Justice and
Life Party said that "a corridor should be drawn in
Vojvodina in order to prevent Serbs fleeing from Kosova
from invading the largely Hungarian-inhabited towns."
Csurka also called for a referendum in which Vojvodina
Hungarians will decided whether they want the region to
be annexed to Hungary. MSZ/MS

HUNGARIAN OPPOSITION SLAMS FIRST YEAR OF ORBAN RULE. The
opposition Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP), in a
statement released on 23 June, accused Prime Minister
Viktor Orban of "pursuing an arrogant policy that seeks
conflict at any price." The statement said the first
year of the Orban government was characterized by a
"concentration of power, efforts to divide society, lack
of dialogue and interest coordination and renewal of the
media war." MSZP chairman Laszlo Kovacs said that "the
cabinet has no economic policy and there is a great
danger that the country will slip back into the debt
trap." Assessing the performance of his cabinet, Orban
said "I imagined something else, as not even the most
pessimistic person could have envisaged floods on such a
scale or that the Yugoslav conflict would become a
genuine war." MSZ

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                     All rights reserved.
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