Word: transylvania
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...wooden clubs, rival groups of Romanians and ethnic Hungarians closed in on each other on a balmy spring evening last week. For a while only taunts and epithets were hurled. Then weapons flashed, and blood stained the Square of the Roses in downtown Tirgu Mures, an industrial city in Transylvania. By the time the army intervened, three people were dead and scores wounded...
Like what? A neo-Stalinist backlash in the U.S.S.R. restarts the cold war and threatens a hot one? Or a secessionist warlord in Belorussia grabs some nuclear weapons from Soviet stockpiles and brandishes them? Or Hungary presses revanchist claims to Transylvania? Astonishing developments might not always be as welcome as they were last year. The Administration's warning is deliberately vague. It invites listeners to fill in the blank with their own worst fears. The American manifesto for the '90s is that a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of "unpredictability" and "instability." Those were the words that Bush used...
Neighboring Rumania is emerging from the Ceausescu tyranny with two ethnic traumas. In the west, almost half the country consists of the disputed region of Transylvania, where most of Rumania's ethnic Hungarians live. Ceausescu regularly accused them of sabotage and planned to destroy their villages and force them into housing complexes. Delighted at Ceausescu's fall, the Hungarians still wonder if the new government will treat them fairly. Case in point: the handling of Laszlo Tokes, the dissident Hungarian clergyman in the town of Timisoara whose harassment by Ceausescu's forces in December helped spark the revolt that eventually...
...cause aroused Tokes's wrath more than the plight of his fellow 1.7 million ethnic Hungarians, who make up 8% of the Rumanian population and are concentrated in Transylvania, the country's westernmost region. Long a center of ethnic turbulence, Transylvania passed from Hungary to Rumania in 1918, after World War I. The region reverted to Hungary in 1940, and was ceded back to Rumania in 1944. Ethnic Hungarian leaders charge Bucharest with attempting "cultural genocide" by shutting ethnic schools, dissolving Hungarian communities and seizing historical archives. Some 18,000 ethnic Hungarians fled Rumania last year...
...Bucharest, Ceausescu appeared before a contrived propaganda rally outside the presidential palace. Thousands of workers had been assembled to applaud and wave flags on cue as he called for unity and tried to blame the riots on Hungarian "revanchists" bent on recapturing Transylvania. His rasping voice was rising to a shout when the crowd suddenly drowned him out with boos, jeers and demands for the truth about Timisoara. Visibly astonished by this face-to- face encounter with rebellion, Ceausescu froze. He quickly ended the rally and darted into the palace...