Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume X, Eastern Europe

179. Paper¹

Washington, June 25, 1988

HUNGARY/ROMANIA: ETHNIC PROBLEM REACHING BOILING POINT

The long-simmering conflict over Romanian treatment of ethnic Hungarians is fast putting Hungary and Romania on a collision course. Recent Romanian moves have outraged Hungarian public opinion, and the resultant diplomatic war could exacerbate tensions to the point of border confrontations.

Massive demonstration planned in Budapest

Tens of thousands of Hungarians are expected to stage a torchlight demonstration past the Romanian, US, and other western embassies on June 27 to draw attention to Romania’s treatment of its ethnic minorities. Although the march is being organized by various opposition groups and is unofficial, Embassy Budapest has learned that it will be allowed to proceed, provided there is no disorder or irredentist slogans chanted.

But the opposition and regime both fear provocation by the substantial Romanian securitate elements that have infiltrated Hungary in the guise of refugees. Over 35,000 Romanian citizens are estimated to have flooded into Hungary since early this year, mostly ethnic Hungarians but also a sizable number of ethnic Romanians.

The last straw

Hungarian-Romanian tension reached a new high with Bucharest’s announcement early this year of two measures with far-reaching implications for the future of Romania’s ethnic Hungarian community, the largest minority in Europe. (Most of the approximately two million ethnic Hungarians and 350,000 Germans live in Transylvania, which was severed from Hungary after World War I.)

First, Ceausescu unveiled in early March his personal project to raze some 54% of Romania’s 13,000 villages by the year 2000 in order to turn the land to agriculture. Critics in Transylvania and Hungary charge that the “rural systematization” plan would be a devastating blow to Transylvania’s ethnic makeup, since the bulk of the 7,000 villages to be bulldozed out of existence involve centuries-old distinctly Hungarian and German settlements. The village population would then be resettled in the country’s predominantly Romanian areas beyond the Carpathian mountains.

Romania then announced in April that Hungarian and German placenames must be printed in their Romanian form in the two minority’s newspapers. Budapest protested that the measure constituted a blatant violation of basic human rights of its minorities, their centuries-old bonds with national culture, and the languages learned along with their mothers’ milk.

Hungarian officials have described the village-eradication project and Romanianization decrees as a drastic attempt to eliminate even the trace of ethnic Hungarian and other minority cultures and have protested against the project at the Vienna CSCE review conference in language unprecedented among Warsaw Pact allies.²

1. Source: Reagan Library, Rudolf Perina Files, Hungary—Substance 1988 (2). Top Secret; Exdis; Codeword.
2. Documentation regarding the U.S. involvement in the CSCE conference in Vienna is scheduling for publication in Foreign Relations 1989–1992, vol. X, European Security Framework 1984–1992.