On November 20 of this year, Progressive Slovakia MPs issued a declaration in Komárno calling on the government to acknowledge that Czechoslovak authorities violated humanitarian principles and committed other injustices against the Hungarian community in the postwar period. They also urged the government to follow the principle that the decrees of a President of the Czechoslovak Republic are, as part of Slovak law, defunct, and cannot serve as a basis for new legal decisions in property disputes related to postwar confiscations. In their pursuit of Hungarian voters, Progressive Slovakia has reopened the question of the Beneš Decrees. So let us look at the issue clearly.
Immediately after the war in 1945, President Edvard Beneš and, in almost identical form, the Slovak National Council issued decrees that stripped Germans and Hungarians who had accepted German or Hungarian citizenship during the war – which was nearly all of them – of Czechoslovak citizenship and, in practical terms, of their property. In Slovakia, the first step was the so-called voluntary population exchange: Hungarians from Slovakia were transferred to Hungary, and Slovaks from Hungary were moved to Slovakia. People could take movable property with them; for real estate they usually received compensation in the form of comparable property in the destination country. Disputes arose over the details, of course. In the early 1970s, when I began working as a trainee attorney in Bratislava, my mentor, Zsolt Sárkány, handled cross-border legal cases with his counterpart in Budapest whenever someone challenged the fairness of the settlement. Roughly 75,000 people were relocated on each side. We should not romanticize the “voluntary” nature of the exchange, especially in the case of Hungarians from Slovakia, but in the tense postwar climate it was near the upper limit of a peaceful solution between a victorious state and the population of the defeated. Later came the involuntary relocation of Hungarians who remained in Slovakia into vacant homes in the Sudetenland after the expulsion of Germans. Hungarians moved to the Sudeten region were later able to return to Slovakia in 1948. By that point both Hungary and Czechoslovakia were inside the Soviet sphere of influence, and Moscow did not want ethnic disputes complicating the start of the Cold War. Importantly, Slovakia has no documented cases of Hungarians being killed in postwar retaliation. Perhaps isolated incidents occurred, but none gained public significance. This stands in contrast to many other postwar ethnic adjustments in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechia, and Yugoslavia.
Edvard Beneš with his wife (1934).
No longer a legal basis
There were serious reasons for grievances on the Slovak side. The Vienna Award of November 2, 1938, imposed by Germany and Italy, tore away Slovakia’s southern region. Slovak teachers, police officers, notaries, and other public servants had only hours to pack their belongings, load them onto cars or wagons, and were left at the new border to fend for themselves. My father, then a senior official at the autonomous Ministry of Education in Bratislava, spent nights taking calls from female teachers who had been driven to border crossings by Hungarian authorities and were begging for help. Slovak schools needed new positions for them. His solution was to immediately dismiss married Slovak female teachers – who had another household provider – and fill their posts with the teachers expelled from the occupied territory. My mother and the sister of future president Jozef Tiso both lost their teaching jobs this way. Hungarian authorities acted even more harshly in some cases. In Šurany on Christmas Eve 1938, Hungarian policemen fired on Slovaks standing in front of a church for singing the Slovak anthem, killing seventeen-year-old Mária Kokošová. After such events – and there were many more in the Czech lands – the Beneš Decrees were issued. The decrees remain part of Slovak and Czech law, but since at least Slovakia’s entry into the Council of Europe in November 1993, they can no longer be used as a legal basis for any new decisions, claims, or property actions. By joining the Council of Europe and later the European Union, Slovakia accepted the European Convention on Human Rights, which cannot coexist with application of the decrees in practice.
With Ambassador Vladimír Hurban at a meeting with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1943).
The refusal to admit any wrongdoing
After November ’89, with new federal and republican governments and a partially renewed parliament, Slovakia entered an idealistic phase in which we sought friendship with everyone. The Slovak parliament apologized to Jews for injustices under the wartime Slovak state and to Germans for postwar injustices. We intended to apologize to Hungarians as well. But we expected reciprocity: we wanted the Hungarian parliament to acknowledge injustices committed against Slovaks in Hungary during the war. Here we met firm resistance. Hungary insisted it had done nothing wrong and would issue no such declaration. Several rounds of negotiations followed. The last major discussion came in 1994 when National Council Speaker Pavol Hrušovský met with Hungarian Parliament Speaker Katalin Szili, who repeated the same position. A Slovak-born Hungarian intellectual drafted a proposal for a joint declaration, but it went nowhere. To recall an earlier anniversary: in January 1998, at a Visegrád Four presidential meeting in Levoča, we were told Hungarian president Árpád Göncz planned to stop in Černová to lay a wreath at the memorial to residents shot by Hungarian police in 1907. The visit was cancelled. The Hungarian side would not take responsibility for the tragedy. Likewise, in November 1997, on the 90th anniversary of the Černová massacre, I suggested to Béla Bugár that the Hungarian parties in Slovakia express regret for the shootings. They refused. In 1907, Hungarian policemen killed fifteen residents and seriously wounded twelve more for insisting that their new church be consecrated by Andrej Hlinka – who had been convicted on charges of “anti-Hungarian agitation.”
Edvard Beneš in London (1928).
A threat to purely civil matters
Progressive Slovakia claims the Beneš Decrees are defunct and wants the government to declare them so. But no law school teaches such a concept of legal norms “expiring.” A simple analogy: English common law contains customs from centuries ago. A student once insisted a professor offer him beer at an exam because an old custom required it. The professor refused, noting that the same custom required the student to appear with a sword, which he did not. The professor could hardly argue that the part of the old custom that suited him had somehow “expired” while the part that inconvenienced the student still applied. In legal terms, PS is essentially asking the government to declare the Beneš Decrees invalid from the very start. This is exactly what German revisionist groups linked to the Federation of Expellees have long demanded. The Czech government rejects this because such invalidation would retroactively undermine Czechoslovakia’s status as a victor over Germany, diminish the sacrifice of Czech and Slovak soldiers – around 2,100 died at the Dukla Pass; 21,000 Soviet soldiers died there as well – and create far more problems than it solved. It would open basic civil matters to attack: wills, purchase contracts, adoptions, and more. As a lawyer, I know how wide an array of arguments is employed in court. Slovak courts already hear cases where one side raises the question of whether a Beneš Decree applies. Courts decide according to the law, and parties can appeal all the way to the European Court. Given PS’s seemingly limited understanding, granting their request would create a dangerous precedent for the Czech Republic. For Slovakia, the decrees are not a fundamental issue – but for the Czech Republic, they come close to being one. The decrees affected more than three million people in the Czech lands. If Slovakia declared them invalid from the beginning, it would give German revisionist groups a powerful argument: “Slovakia has already admitted what we demand.” The grandparents of PS leader Michal Šimečka were Moravians and my friends; his grandfather and I operated side-by-side in the Slovak dissident movement. Is this really what Šimečka’s party intends to imply about people like them?
A chain reaction of demands
The postwar resettlement of German minorities was decided by the Potsdam Conference, but the full implementation of the Beneš Decrees was politically possible only with Soviet support. The West, preparing Operation Unthinkable with the intent to use captured German soldiers, could not simultaneously support measures against German exclaves in the East. Measures against the Hungarian minority followed the same logic in the decrees. Progressive Slovakia’s reopening of the decrees reflects both indifference to Slovakia’s interests and immersion in ideological currents from Brussels aimed against the East. In 1993, as vice-chairman of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, I led a delegation to Belgrade to meet Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević. An unnamed CDU Bundestag member who was part of the delegation told me over dinner that Hungarians from Vojvodina had approached him with demands that went beyond official German policy. He refused, referred them to Yugoslav authorities, and told me: if they achieved their goals with German backing, certain organizations in Germany would seize on it immediately. And the cycle of demands that once helped push Europe toward World War II would start all over again. Sometimes raising tensions in Central Europe requires no malice – only foolishness.
Ján Čarnogurský
THE AUTHOR
Ján Čarnogurský (born January 1, 1944, in Bratislava) is a former Czechoslovak and Slovak politician.
He graduated in law from Charles University Prague and got his PhD in 1971 from Comenius University Bratislava.
He worked as an attorney, representing a number of religious activists and political dissidents, which got him disbarred in 1981.
In August 1989, he was arrested and charged with sedition.
After the Velvet Revolution, he was the fIrst deputy prime minister of the federal government. Čarnogurský then went on to become the first deputy prime minister of the CSFR and first deputy prime minister of the SR, he founded the Christian‘ Democratic Movement (KDH) and became its chairman.
Between 1998 and 2002, he was the Slovak minister of justice, and briefly also the prime minister.
In the year 2000, he left his position as chairman of the KDH and started his own law firm. Three years later, he helped found the Paneuropean University (formerly the University of Law Bratislava).
He is very open about his Russophilia and is the chairman of the Slovak-Russian Society, established in 2006. He ran for president in 2014 but didn‘t make it into the 2nd round.
He has four children with his wife Marta.
reklama
