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After reading a short history on how Romania treated its minorities in the past 100 years, it is obvious why:“The Romanian forces, having taken Nagyvárad on April 20, 1919, introduced press censorship, a curfew and corporal punishment, banned the operation of political and social organizations, and suspended freedom of assembly and movement everywhere. On January 15, 1919, a delegation headed by Judge Emil Grandpierre met in Nagyszeben with Iuliu Maniu, head of the Governing Council. The Hungarian position – until the final legal settlement emerged from the peace talks – was for public administration in Hungarian-inhabited areas of Transylvania to be Hungarian, in Romanian-inhabited areas Romanian, and in mixed areas mixed. Officials should not be required to take an oath, just give an undertaking, for which the delegation had brought the wording. The proposal was rejected by the Governing Council. Two days later, István Apáthy was arrested and his High Governing Commission for Eastern Hungary wound up forthwith”“Romania also passed separate legislation on citizenship (Act 41/1924), requiring evidence of domicile on December 1, 1918, i. e. four years of residence and evidence of payment of local taxation, as communal registration had not been compulsory before 1918. But “racial Romanians” obtained citizenship with no difficulty through a different procedure. The seriousness of the problem becomes apparent from the fact that the nationality of almost 100,000 heads of family (300,000–400,000 people) was still unsettled in 1939.14″“The constitution of Romania designated Romanian the official language of state. No separate language legislation was passed, the use of Romanian being governed by various regulations from 1921 onwards. The courts were obliged to use Romanian under Order No. 28.819/1921, and minority languages were forbidden in public administration under Order No. 19.654/1922.”“Internal regulations in public offices and in transportation ordering staff to communicate only in Romanian appeared continually in the second half of the 1920s. By the 1930s, adequate knowledge of Romanian was a prime condition for employment in the civil service and education, and members of the minorities were subjected to several language tests, causing over 10,000 Hungarian employees to be dismissed. Language use in local councils was governed not by the 1925 and 1929 acts on public administration but by local executive authorities, which forbade minority representatives to use their native language.”“The language measures in Romania extended beyond the state education system to impede the operation of non-Romanian Church schools. Church schools had hardly been a factor in pre-1918 Romania. Nationalizing Transylvanian schools was seen as a measure of national modernization. There the pre-war Romanian community had had its own denominational school system, while the Hungarians had relied on state schools teaching in Hungarian. With the change of sovereignty, the Romanian state closed more than two thirds of the lower and upper elementary schools teaching in Hungarian, and three quarters of such high schools and teacher-training institutions. The Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic institutions teaching in Romanian (2,600 institutions) were nationalized. All 645 Hungarian kindergartens and 59 day-care centers were closed, as were peoples’ schools for repeating the upper elementary course (3,500), and trade and industrial apprentice schools (almost 200). To compensate, 403 lower elementary schools (319 Reformed, 62 Catholic and 23 Unitarian) had been founded by 1923 by the Churches, as had 33 upper elementary schools, 7 trade schools and 5 teacher-training colleges. […] Despite protests from the minorities and the Churches on the international level, the private education act of 1925 demoted Church schools to the status of private schools and curtailed their right to issue certificates of entitlement to further education, tying it to a permit, which one third of denominational schools failed to obtain. […] The same act set Romanian as the language of instruction for five subjects, and as the exclusive language in schools run by religious orders; Jewish institutions were to teach only in Romanian or Hebrew. The third major measure was the 1925 act on the baccalaureate, whereby high school graduation was awarded not at the school attended, but before a board of teachers from other state schools, who could only be Romanians. Even subjects taught in Hungarian were to be examined in the state language. Thus 73 percent of Hungarian candidates failed their examinations in 1925.”“The Land Ownership Act of July 30, 1921, that applied to the annexed territories of Eastern Hungary and Transylvania differed from the legislation in the Regat in not setting an upper limit to the total area of land to be sequestered, and it gave greater scope for expropriating the land of public institutions (schools and churches) than the legislation in other parts of the country. It also stipulated that land could be seized without compensation from those who had resided abroad other than on public business between December 1, 1918, and publication of the act. This affected thousands of Hungarians who had fled from Transylvania to Hungary for a longer or shorter period (even a few days)“. According to official statistics issued on June 1, 1927, the land reform in Transylvania benefited 212,803 Romanians, 45,628 Hungarians, 15,934 Saxons and Swabians, and 6,314 members of other minority groups. The losses were especially great for the largely Hungarian Churches (the Catholics and Reformed), weakening their ability to contribute to Hungarian education and culture in Romania. The land reform in Romania was also accompanied by colonization campaigns. These brought into being 111 settlements, mainly in Hungarian-inhabited areas of Transylvania, in which almost 5,000 Romanian families were settled on altogether 40,000 ha of land.““Public officials, lawyers and railway employees were made to swear allegiance to the Romanian king, but refused on the grounds that the peace talks had not been completed. This meant loss of the franchise, employment and pensions, and most of them fled to Hungary. In all, about 145,000 persons left Transylvania for Hungary in 1918–1920, mostly from the urban middle class and officialdom. Conditions worsened further as dwellings were requisitioned by the military authorities. In September 1919, Romanian became the language of instruction in state secondary schools.”“Although the minority protection treaties were ratified, not one country in the region codified the rights of its minorities. Instead they declared the equal rights of all citizens in their constitutions, and then enshrined the interests of the state in relation to the minorities through sectorial legislation. None of these countries, not even Hungary, met its obligations to the minorities to the full.1”“The Hungarian People’s Party (Magyar Néppárt) was formed in the summer of 1921 by the “activists” among the Hungarian minority elite,16 and in July, integration went further when the “passivists” united with the People’s Party and joined the Hungarian Association, which was now headed by Baron Sámuel Jósika, the last speaker of the Hungarian Upper House (the House of Lords), and as such, formerly the highest-ranking public figure in Transylvania. The Association (as their self-governing organization) saw itself as the legal embodiment of the Hungarians of Romania. This claim prompted the government to fabricate reasons to suspend its operation in October 1921. For the general elections due in 1922, first the People’s Party in January and then Grandpierre’s Hungarian National Party (Magyar Nemzeti Párt) in February reorganized and agreed on common candidates. They were not helped by the fact that much of the Hungarian community had been left off the electoral rolls and most of the Hungarian candidates were not allowed to stand for various reasons. These and other electoral abuses – designed to ensure a majority for the Liberal Party in the constituent assembly – resulted in a House of Representatives and a Senate with only three Hungarian members each, whereas their proportion of the population would have warranted 25–30. When the operation of the Hungarian Association remained banned in the autumn of 1922, the leaders of the two parties agreed at the end of December to merge as the National Hungarian Party (Országos Magyar Párt), which essentially continued with the program of the Hungarian Association, this way preventing the Romanian political parties from forming organizations to represent the Hungarians.17”“The Hungarian-taught system of education began to shrink in the 1950s. First Hungarian-taught engineering courses ceased, and then a party and government resolution in 1956 called for the Romanianizing of minority elementary and middle schools. […] Finally, in March 1959, Bolyai University was subsumed into Babeş University. The medical school in Tărgu Mureş closed in 1962. By the mid-1960s, the Hungarian-taught options remaining were the Protestant and Roman Catholic theological colleges and the Tărgu Mureş Drama College. Native-language vocational training also ceased and most Hungarian middle schools had a mixture of Hungarian- and Romanian-taught classes.”“But Act 273 of May 13, 1973, discriminated directly against minority elementary schools in stipulating that 25 pupils were necessary to start a fifth-grade class and 36 for a secondary school class, whereas in every place where schools working in languages of “cohabiting national communities” existed, Romanian-taught departments or classes had to be provided irrespective of the number of pupils requiring them. So a rising proportion of Hungarian elementary and secondary students had to study in Romanian”“In the 1980s it became the practice to send newly qualified Hungarian teachers to Romanian-speaking districts. The mid-1980s marked a low point in Hungarian education in Romania. Separate Hungarian middle schools closed and Hungarians hardly won any places in higher education. It seemed that a truncated society was developing, with no intelligentsia of its own”“The Transylvanian Hungarians, with their own system of minority institutions, were affected more than the rest of the population by the economic, cultural and social” changes introduced by the communist authorities. The party denied any need for collective rights and emphasized a polic”y of individual integration. Denominational schools felt victim to the education reform of 1948, ending a parallel system that had given relative autonomy to schools teaching in Hungarian. A total of 468 Catholic, 531 Reformed, 34 Unitarian and 8 Evangelical schools were nationalized with all their assets.7A turning point for minority policy came in 1952, when Romania, on Soviet insistence, created a Hungarian Autonomous Region (RAM)8 in the Székely Land, but at the same time, Hungarians in positions of authority outside the Hungarian Autonomous Region began to be systematically removed. Although the Romanian authorities were forced by Soviet pressure into agreeing in 1952 to set up the Hungarian Autonomous Region, they made good use of it in subsequent years to justify pursuing homogenization in other parts of Transylvania, mainly in the cities, and refusing to recognize the minority’s specific cultural and social heritage and needs. There was a similar intention behind the merger of Hungarian-taught educational institutions after 1956, ostensibly to end segregation, and behind the abolition in 1959 of the National Minority Committee within the Romanian Communist Party Central Committee. Classes taught in Romanian were added to Hungarian educational institutions at lower and higher levels. Mergers of schools in multi-ethnic communities resulted in parallel sections and classes, while Romanian-taught classes were introduced into hitherto Hungarian-taught schools. The direct outcome was a fall in enrolment in Hungarian-taught secondary education”“In 1959, the term “national minority” and the previously frequent references to the “multinational” character of the Romanian state were ousted by a new definition, “the Romanian people and the cohabiting national groups.” According to party ideologists, “national minority” implied forming a separate cultural nation. Nationhood would have given its members equal rank with the state-creating Romanian nation, despite their smaller numbers. The new formulation made it plain that the cohabitants were subordinate to a “master nation.” Also designed to stress the primacy of the Romanian nation was the revived national dogma of Daco-Roman continuity:”“The process of cultural homogenization peaked in the 1980s, when the public thinking and expression of identity of the Hungarian minority were curbed in a number of ways. Any book that promoted Hungarian self-awareness was placed on the forbidden list at the Kriterion publishing house. Internal measures banned publication of apparently innocent works dealing with ethnography, art history, linguistic or literary criticism. Similar moves were made at the Cluj-based Dacia publishing company as well. Hungarian-language TV broadcasting ceased in January 1985, and a single order by telephone was enough to silence the Hungarian regional radio studios in Târgu Mureş and Cluj-Napoca. Central Hungarian-language broadcasts on Bucharest Radio were reduced from 60 to 30 minutes a day.”“With slight adjustments, the three counties of Harghita, Covasna and Mureş resulted from the old Hungarian Autonomous Region.17 There was a strong Hungarian majority in the first two (85 percent in Harghita and 78.4 percent in Covasna, according to the 1977 census), but the proportion in the new Mureş County (the three districts of the Câmpia Transilvaniei – Sărmaş, Târnăveni and Luduş – plus Sighişoara district) was only 44.3 percent. That circumstance allowed central authorities to speed up the homogenization program that had started in the early 1960s in Mureş County, and especially in the city of Târgu Mureş. Cultural and political leadership within the Hungarian community of Transylvania moved from Cluj and Târgu Mureş to smaller Székely cities such as Sfântu Gheorghe and Miercurea-Ciuc.”“The performing arts were constrained heavily in the 1980s, as the Communist Party kept a tight hold on repertoire. Most ethnic Hungarian playwrights and even cont”emporary writers from Hungary were banned. Most new ethnic Hungarian graduates found it hard to get jobs in Transylvania. In 1988, 689 fresh Hungarian graduates were forced to work outside Transylvania, while thousands of Romanian colleagues had been assigned to Hungarian-inhabited counties. Yet Hungarian-taught higher education (and implicitly secondary education as well) was threatened by staff cuts. The state in the 1980s ceased to advertise posts vacated by retirement and the examinations needed for academic advancement were no longer held, preventing ethnic Hungarians from gaining access to academic life and the most prestigious professions.”“The loss of ground by Jewish culture and community life in the communist period hastened emigration, which continued within the limits set by the policy of each state. The Yugoslavs differed from the other communist regimes in not impeding emigration or the activity of international Jewish organizations. Before leaving the country, emigrants had to renounce their citizenship, which meant that their real estate passed to the state.28 In Romania, after a period of isolationism in 1951–1958, another 106,000 Jews had left the country by 1966. Thereafter the Ceauşescu regime demanded and received from Israel a capitation fee averaging US $3,000 for each emigrant. By the end of the 1980s, only 6,000 out of the post-Holocaust community of 80,000 Jews remained in Transylvania.”“But Romania in the last years of the Ceauşescu regime took openly discriminatory measures, declaring a program of “national homogenization.” Hungarians were referred to as ethnic Hungarian or Hungarian-speaking Romanians. Unrealistic population proportions were imposed as a requirement for native-language schooling and pressure was put on Churches to introduce Romanian-language services.”source:ATLANTIC STUDIES ON SOCIETY IN CHANGENO. 138Editor-in-Chief, Ignác RomsicsFounder, Béla K. Király