A man wipes his tears during a protest against the Slovakia's language law afflicting the Hungarian minority in Slovakia, in September 2009. (Photo by Balint Porneczi/AFP/Getty Images.)

KOMARNO, Slovakia – Hungarian-speaking visitors to this southern Slovakia river port have never had much trouble communicating with the locals. In a town where 70 percent of residents are Hungarian themselves, even local Slovaks tend to speak the language with surprising proficiency.

Indeed, Hungarian culture is in evidence most everywhere on the flat Danube plains of southern Slovakia. There are Hungarian newspapers and magazines on sale at kiosks, Hungarian names emblazoned on bilingual street signs, and a Hungarian language college at one end of the main shopping street. A statue of the nationalist Hungarian poet Mor Jokai presides over the entrance to the town museum. Another, of Hungary’s medieval king Saint Stephen, stands in a park near the bridge to Hungary, just across the wide Danube River.

But these days, Slovakia’s half million ethnic Hungarians are feeling anything but secure. The country’s governing coalition includes extreme nationalists, whose leader has described Hungarians as “a cancer on the Slovak nation” that must be removed. With their backing, a controversial new law went into effect Jan. 1, curtailing the use of Hungarian in many public.

“This law is about engendering fear,” says Peter Varga, editor of Szabad Ujsag, a Hungarian language newspaper facing fines for its Hungarian-only billboard ads. “People are now afraid to talk in their mother language because they don’t know when it is allowed and when it isn’t.”

The new statute’s professed aim is to protect and bolster the state language, the mother tongue of nearly 90 percent of Slovakia’s five million inhabitants. Prompted by allegations that Slovak speakers were facing communication difficulties in Hungarian-majority towns like Komarno, the law mandates the use of Slovak in a wide range of public settings, from government and post offices to fire departments, railroads, and even private shop signs, advertisements, and businesses.

The law is ambiguous in identifying the circumstances to which it applies, with vaguely defined parameters like “in official communications” and “at cultural events.” In most cases, other languages may be used in addition to Slovak, usually with the state language being used first or printed in larger fonts. Violators could face fines of 100 to 5,000 Euros if they fail to comply with a written warning.

The government says critics are wrongly publicizing the worst possible interpretations of the law, assuming it would require firefighters to use Slovak first when clearing a burning building.

“It is pure demagoguery,” says Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Peter Stano. “Opponents are looking at it to see how the state could misuse the law, but from the Slovak state’s point of view, we look at it positively, not for ways to misuse it but to avoid discrimination against people who speak the state language.”

Those skeptical of the government’s intentions fear the worst.

“These very ambiguous provisions on what can be sanctioned make it very threatening for minority citizens,” says Kalman Petocz of the Bratislava-based civic group, the Roundtable of Hungarians in Slovakia. “The government’s attitude is that this is the state of Slovaks, and that we should just admit that we are second class citizens. It’s simply humiliating.”

“In essence it’s criminalizing the use of the Hungarian language,” says Laszlo Hamos, president of the New York-based Hungarian Human Rights Foundation, which advocates on behalf of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia and areas of Romania, Serbia and other countries that belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of World War I. “It’s not necessarily the letter of the law, but that’s certainly the spirit of it.”

Since 2006, Slovakia has been ruled by a coalition that includes the autocratic Movement for a Democratic Slovakia and the extremist Slovak National Party, led by Jan Slota. Slota, whose party was backed by 10 percent of voters, has described Hungarians as a cancer, threatened to lead tanks to “go and flatten Budapest,” and warned as recently as January that Hungary was preparing to invade Slovakia to annex the South.

Slota’s anti-minority comments haven’t been limited to Hungarians. He has also said gypsies should be handled with “a long whip in a small yard,” describing Jozef Tiso, the Nazi-era leader who oversaw the deportation of over 60,000 Jews, as “one of the greatest sons of the Slovak Nation.”

With such forces in the government, one has to question the motivation behind the language law, argues Michael Gahler, a German member of the European Parliament who has been outspoken on the issue, in part because of his own country’s Nazi past. “Never again,” he says flatly. “It should never happen again, because we know at the end where these things can end up.”

Gahler contends that the European Union, which Slovakia joined in 2004, hasn’t taken the issue seriously enough. “I regret that when a country is on the way into the E.U. we apply the highest standards of minority and human rights, but once they are in, a certain esprit de corps comes among governments, not to interfere in one another’s domestic issues,” says Gahler.

Even if its members wished to act, the E.U. has only limited ability to sanction members, says Andrew Clapham, director of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. “The E.U. is not set up constitutionally or politically to control the human rights of its member states.”

Only once has it tried, after Jorg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party joined an Austrian coalition government in 2000. Austria’s diplomatic contacts were briefly limited and its candidates for Europe-wide offices shunned.

In the meantime, the High Commissioner for Minorities at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (of which Slovakia is also a member) has reviewed the law. Commissioner Knut Vollebaek has found that its wording does not necessarily violate Slovakia’s treaty obligations, but he is monitoring how the law is implemented to ensure that “the balance between strengthening the state language and protecting minority rights is achieved.”

The law has further undermined Slovak relations with Hungary, already strained by an incident in Komarno last summer. On August 21, Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom was to visit for the unveiling of the Saint Stephen statue. Although there are no border controls between the countries, Slovakia refused Solyom entry, dispatching police to turn him back at the international bridge, citing security concerns.

Petocz, a Komarno native, was in town at the time and claims the situation was peaceful, despite the presence of some Slovak National Party protestors. “There was absolutely no potential for any kind of conflict that day,” he says.

But Stano, the Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson, says the danger was real. He adds that President Solyom was irresponsible to visit on that particular date, which coincides with both the “Hungarian National Day” (actually Saint Stephen’s Day, August 20) and the anniversary of the 1968 Soviet suppression of Czechoslovakia’s democratization movement, an invasion supported by Hungarian troops.

“We were facing a situation where Mr. Solyom might have been harmed or injured, or where Slovak police might have to take measures against Slovak citizens in Komarno, creating very bad images for the Slovak public,” he says.

Warning against a “Hungarian threat” can be an effective electoral strategy in Slovakia, which was ruled for centuries by Hungary, which in the late 19th century attempted to assimilate Slovaks by closing schools and cultural institutions. Hungarian nationalists, for their part, speak of renegotiating the post-World War I treaty that created Slovakia, in an effort to have the Hungarian-dominated South returned to Hungary.

“Playing the Hungarian card can be very effective in any kind of political campaigning here,” says Petocz, adding that some mainstream parties use it cynically to win elections. “But the Slovak National Party mean it seriously. Many opinion leaders here are very reluctant to admit that that party’s real goal is to eliminate Hungarians from the ethnic map of Slovakia over the long run.”
 

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