Magyarok Világszövetsége
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WORLD
FEDERATION OF HUNGARIANS
WELTBUND
DER UNGARN
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H – 1052 Budapest, Semmelweis u. 1-3.
TEL.: [00-36-1 / 06-1] 267-45-10
FAX / TEL.: [00-36-1/06-1] 485-40-60
e-mail:
elnok@mvsz.hu
Adószám:
19672081-2-42
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Ej.2007.0033.b
On the
60th Anniversary of the Treaty of Paris
„The Whole Section was Hissing Like a Snake. . .”
Why was the Treaty of Paris a Second Trianon?
After this, the „Hungarian” Government, which had a
Smallholder majority, but was Communist-ruled, sent a delegation to the peace
negotiations in Paris, whose members – with very few exceptions –
did not understand any of the matters, or else did not wish to protect the
interests of Hungary
[ii]
On
the orders of one of the Communist Foreign Ministry officials, important
documents, which would have shed new light on the role of Hungary in the War, were taken from
one of the rooms of the Foreign Ministry, where they had been kept, to one of
the toilets. There they were torn apart
and, over several months, they were destroyed, without any of their contents
being used to reveal the Hungarian truth.[iii]
The
peace negotiations continued. A
number of Hungarian Marxists lived well in Paris for several months with the
government’s money and they did as much as they could to harm our people. [iv]
On
February 10, 1947, the Allied and Associated Powers imposed a Peace Treaty on
Hungary, which, compared to Trianon, took additional pure Hungarian territories
from the state, and obliged the nation to pay the Soviet Union 200 million USD
and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, 100 million USD each, in war
reparations. The country’s
army was limited to 66,000 head, including the border-guards and the river
forces. [v]
The armies of the Western allies were obliged to leave Hungary, yet the Soviet troops were allowed to
remain there as long as the Soviet troops, stationed in Austria, needed them for supplies
and provisions. The Soviet troops
left Austria in 1955,
whereas they did not leave Hungary
until 1991 because, in the fall of 1956, without a declaration of war, they
considered the country to be a theater of war.
But
let us read between the lines of the text of the Peace Treaty:
- Compared to the other nations, who
took part in World War II., Hungary suffered the largest
losses: 15% of her total population. 480,000 died in action,
300,000 in Soviet captivity and, from Hungary
and Northern Transylvania, altogether
300,000 died in holocaust concentration camps. In Sub-Carpathia, 100,000
Hungarians were killed. In Yugoslavia (formerly Southern Hungary, Délvidék),
40,000 civilians were massacred, 200,000 Hungarians
„disappeared” from Slovakia
(formerly Northern Hungary, Felvidék) and another 270,000 from Transylvania.
Altogether more than 2 million souls! [vi]
- Slovakia, among
the first on Hitler’s side to attack the Soviet Union with weapons,
and in the forefront in accepting the anti-Jewish laws – in whose
parliament, János Esterházy, martyred 50 years ago, was the
only representative to oppose these laws – was allowed to sit among
the victors at the negotiations.(!?)
Capitalizing on this unhoped-for opportunity, particularly in the
light of the anti-Hungarian stance of the Peace Conference, she placed
claims on more Hungarian territory.
After receiving the pure Hungarian territory of
Csallóköz in Versailles as a granary, she now asked for five
other Hungarian settlements below Pozsony, as a bridgehead on the left
bank of the Danube: Rajka, Bezenye, Dunacsúny,
Horvátjárfalu and Oroszvár. The peace-makers actually awarded
her the last three. [vii]
- The Hungarian
Nation received her harshest blow in the face, when the Czechoslovak
delegation made an official request that the Peace Conference rule that
the Holy Crown be taken out of Hungary and placed under the protection of
the United Nations, in a distant state because, while the Crown was in
Hungary, the strength of the nation was invincible. [viii] This request was not incorporated
into the final text of the Peace Treaty because, at that time, the Holy
Crown was already far from the country, in the custody of the American
Army and it remained there for more than forty years.
- Whereas, in
January and February of 1946, during the inhumane and illegal population
exchange, in teeth-chattering cold, several tens of thousands of
Hungarians were expelled from Slovakia (formerly Felvidék, Northern
Hungary) across the frozen Danube. Hungary
used the value of the properties that the Hungarians left behind to pay Czechoslovakia for the war reparations
imposed on Hungary
and, in the Treaty of Paris, accepted the responsibility of reimbursing
the displaced Hungarians. On
February 10, 2007, 60 years had passed and neither the Communists, nor the
„changed regime” of Hungary
– neglecting their constitutional responsibility – had reimbursed
these hundred thousand Hungarians expelled from Slovakia,
whose possessions were used to repay the war reparations, a cost which
should have been imposed on the ten million population of Hungary.
How far the „changed” Hungary
stands from a constitutional state can be well observed in the two ignored
decisions of the Constitutional
Court.
The robed body first declared, in its 37/1996 decision, that the neglect
to pay restitution was a violation of the Constitution, and it gave the
National Assembly a deadline of June 30, 1997 to make up for this
negligence. Seven years later, in
its 45/2003 decision, the Constitutional
Court declared that the violation of the
Constitution had continued and gave a new deadline of June 30, 2004. Without any result to this day! The majority of the people entitled to
reimbursement are probably no longer living.[ix]
- The Treaty of Paris – unlike
the Treaty of Trianon – did not rule on the question of citizenship
of the annexed Hungarians.
Therefore, all those Hungarians who, between 1938 and 1947,
regained their Hungarian citizenship, were allowed to retain it after the
Treaty of Paris. Neither the
January, 1945 ceasefire agreement in Moscow,
nor the Treaty of Paris, and not even the 1948 Hungarian citizenship law
stripped them of their citizenship. However, the Kadár
regime made bi-lateral inter-state agreements with Czechoslovakia in 1961,
later with the Soviet Union and finally, in 1979 with Ceausescu’s
Romania, in which, according to the formulae of Trianon, they automatically
took away the citizenship of anyone who did not resettle in Hungary within
one year. There was, however
one exception. Such an
inter-state agreement did not exist with the former Yugoslavia. Therefore, Hungarians living in
Northern Serbia (formerly Southern Hungary),
in Bácska, Dél-Baranya and Muravidék, are still
Hungarian citizens. Their
latent Hungarian citizenship is a fact which the „Hungarian”
state, 60 years later, still callously denies. [x]
- In the peace
negotiations in Paris,
there was no mention of the genocide committed against Hungarians in the
fall of 1944, a crime against humanity which can never be erased. There was no mention of the
Hungarian Auschwitz in Szolyva, where ground glass was mixed into the food
of the prisoners of the camp.
In this way, 18,000 Hungarian military prisoners of war and
civilians were killed with abominable mercilessness and buried in one
communal grave.[xi] There was no mention of the 40,000
tortured and butchered innocent Hungarian prisoners-of-war, soldiers,
Catholic priests and defenseless citizens in Northern Serbia (formerly Southern Hungary).[xii] There was also no mention of the
executed civilians of Szárazajta, Gyanta, Magyarremete and Kishalmágy in Transylvania, nor of the victims of the
Földvár death camp.
They also ignored the travelers from Dobsina in Slovakia (formerly
Northern Hungary), who were forced to disembark from the railway wagons at
the railway station at Prerov,
where 200 women and children were shot and piled up in a heap and, when
the bullets ran out, children were even strangled or beaten to death with
shovels. [xiii]
There was no mention either, of the ninety adolescents from
Csík, who had not even seen action in the war, on their way home at
the end of the war, who were shot in the back of the neck in Ligetfalu
near Pozsony. [xiv]
The Soviet troops laid siege to Budapest, the capital of rump Hungary,
a siege that lasted four months and, 62 years ago, on February 10, 1945, in the
course of two days, when the Hungarians broke out of Buda Castle,
60,000 defenders of the castle lost their lives. [xv] The occupying Soviet troops destroyed
the symbol of the Hungarian
State, the Heirloom State
Flag that flew in Freedom Square,
and they ravaged the state, raping close to a million Hungarian girls and women.[xvi]
On the evening that the Treaty of Paris was
signed, the Primate of Hungary, József Mindszenty, called the people of Budapest to prayer. He, himself, led the Holy Hour in the
Saint Stephen Basilica. Ten
thousand people repeated after him the following lament, crying and sobbing:
„Omnipotent Creator of all things, O
Great God! Although we had hoped
that we would find worldly truth, human understanding and human feelings, our
hopes were crazy and stupid. That
of which, through anguished days and agonizing nights, we were afraid has taken
place: from the decisions of the nations passing judgment on our country
– even in this merciless moment – a further mutilation of our state
has taken place. Right now, in Paris, they are signing the Hungarian Peace
Treaty, the work of world-peace, the
largest division of crests, lands, souls, houses, cemeteries, schools,
churches -- the thousand year inheritance of Our Lady and Saint Stephen. Those who signed it enjoyed the
historical moment; the signatories will go down in history and the pens will
end up in museums, but we know that these pens with their diamond nibs are more
injurious than iron pens, which write on millions of hearts. Blood spurts out from hearts, tears
spurt out from eyes, and trickle and overflow in their tracks. Sighs rise up,
lives move convulsively.” [xvii]
Meanwhile, „like snakes the Communist
section hissed”, when they were asked not to leave out the mention of the
mutilation of the state. Or, did
they know that Bishop Áron Márton and his colleagues, who chose
prison and martyrdom, had sent their memoirs to the peace negotiations in Paris, asking for a solution that the majority of the
annexed Hungarians be allowed to live in Hungary? [xviii]
In Paris,
the peace was negotiated and the treaty was signed but, sixty years later, it
still has a strong influence on the lives of the Hungarians, like the long
drawn out effects of poison. The
majority of Hungarians living today know that Trianon was an anti-Hungarian
dictate. For many, the Treaty of
Paris appeared to be a peace treaty.
Sixty years later we have to say:
The
Treaty of Paris
was also a Dictate: the Second Trianon
Yet the Trianon „peace” was robbery
and, because of its terrible injustice, the great powers never ratified it, neither
the Soviet Union, nor the United
States.
In the Treaty of Paris, the great powers rubber stamped the mutilation
of Hungary
in the tracks of Trianon.
Budapest, February 17, 2007. The
World Federation of Hungarians
This is a certified true copy:
Patrubány Miklós – President