Henri Pozzi, 1935

Pan-Slavism - I. The Vultures << Contents >> Pan-Slavism - III. The Shadow of Pan-Slavism

If I have concentrated mainly upon the affairs of Yugoslavia it is merely because my own country, France, is more closely tied to her than to the others--to Roumania and to Czechoslovakia. It does not mean that Yugoslavia is the main culprit in Central Europe, nor does it mean that the oppression of minorities and the brutality of the minions of the tyranny is absent from the other lands of which I have spoken less.

What happens in Yugoslavia happens also in Czechoslovakia, where the Czechs, like the Serbs in Yugoslavia, are a minority, being less than forty-five per cent of the nation. There, as in Yugoslavia, an insignificant minority of politicians and "carpet-baggers" oppresses the unwilling members of a jerry-built state whose foundations are set in the quicksands of artificiality.

For the French to have made a Czechoslovakian alliance one of the bases of their foreign policy is, under such conditions, an act of inconceivable stupidity. At Geneva, perhaps, where the vote of Nicaragua is equal with the vote of Japan, this might be understandable, but in a European conflict Czechoslovakia would not render us an alliance equal to that which Roumania gave us during the last war.

I say this, not because I support the belief that "right is on the side of the big battalions," but because it is clear that there are no ulterior considerations which render France's alliance with Czechoslovakia of such importance that even our realists could argue that it justifies her in turning a blind eye to the plaint of the oppressed Hungarian majority.

The truth is that there is not a more artificial state in Europe than Czechoslovakia. It reposes entirely on violence and deceit. On violence, because it contains nearly four million Germano-Hungarians torn from their country in defiance of the rights of peoples in the spirit of which the Allies made the treaties of peace. It rests on deceit because two million and a half Slovaks and Ruthenes are Czechoslovaks against their will, and the Czechs have renounced their solemn engagements imposed by the treaties in respect of these minorities.

The intellectual and moral superiority of the annexed Hungarians over the odious regime which they endure has impregnated their minds with an irremediable hostility for all that is Czech. The Ruthenes, and the Slovaks, to whom the peace had guaranteed autonomy, and whose countries the Czechs have merely used for exploitation, dream of liberating themselves from the detested Czech yoke. They accept the hegemony of Prague only because it is backed by the almighty power of prisons and bayonets.

Slovakia had been the economic and political dependent of Hungary for nearly a thousand years, and her attachment to Czech Bohemia in order to create the Czechoslovak state was decided in 1919 by the Allies, as a result of three documents which purported to register the determination of the Slovaks to incorporate themselves with the Czechs. The first of these documents was the agreement concluded at Cleveland, in the United States, May 26th, 1915, between the Slovak associations of America and the delegates of the provisional Czech Government. The second was the convention signed at Pittsburgh, May 30th, 1918, by the Slovak delegates and Dr. Mazaryk who was already president of the Czechoslovak Government, recognised and existing de facto. The third document was the resolution voted November 11th, 1918, at Geneva, by the first Czechoslovak Government, officially recognised as such by all the Allies.

Let us see what these documents were worth. The convention of Pittsburgh (which included the terms of the Cleveland agreements) was as follows:

In the Federated State of Czechoslovakia, the complete State autonomy of Slovakia will be guaranteed .... Slovakia will have her own administration, her own Parliament, her own courts. Slovak will be the official language of the schools, of the administration, of all public life.

The third document was the resolution voted by the members of the Czechoslovakian Government at Geneva and read as follows:

"The Government of Czechoslovakia considers any convention passed by Mr. Mazaryk during the revolutionary period as valid."

All the conventions, verbal or written, passed by Mr. Mazaryk during or after the War, have been respected by Czechoslovakia with a single exception--the convention concluded at Pittsburgh, May 30th, 1918, with the Slovaks.

Slovakia had consented to unite with the Czechs only on the condition that she would conserve her entire autonomy, that she would remain in the future a "federated State," a nation responsible for her acts. Unification she did not desire at any price, and it had been formally specified at Pittsburgh that there would never be a question of it.

Having become masters of Slovakia by the decisions of the Allies, whose chiefs were persuaded that the engagements made at Pittsburgh would be respected, the Czechs simply annexed her. The idea of a federated State was ignored.

In reply to the Slovaks, revolted by this betrayal, President Mazaryk responded by a subterfuge, declaring that the Pittsburgh agreement had been concluded on a holiday, in violation of the American law and was thus null and void.

The fate suffered by the Croats in Yugoslavia has been the fate of the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, where the country has been centralised and has become the exclusive property of the Czechs. The Czechs alone administrate, order and direct, just as do the Serbs in Croatia. Masters of the army, of the police, of the courts, of all the control-levers of the State, they have transformed Slovakia into a Czech province. They have installed there their employees and their colonists by the thousand. At Kassa, for example, where there was not one Czech before the War, official statistics to-day show 12,000 Czech families! They have opened Czech schools and universities there, their language is used exclusively for all administrative and civil business ruined the Slovak industry to the profit of their own, and they have instituted military occupation of the country as the Serbs occupy Macedonia and Croatia.

The Slovaks have protested. They, like the Croats in Yugoslavia, wished to defend their liberties and their rights by legal means. Their demands were suppressed, and by the same methods of violence as those employed by the Serbs against their minorities.

The battle has not ceased for fourteen years, and it is just as full of threats to the peace of Europe as is the Croat struggle against Pan-Serbia. Its episodes would fill volumes. I will give only a few, for the preceding pages have revealed the type of thing that goes on.

In October 1929 at the Court of Bratislava, Dr. Tuka, chief of the Slovak autonomists stood trial for high treason. During the course of this trial the fraudulent manoeuvre was revealed which permitted the Czech delegates to the Peace Conference to take the purely Hungarian district of Kassa from Hungary. This manoeuvre, revealed by Joseph Hanzalik, who was a witness for the prosecution, was as follows:

The Peace Conference resolved that a neutral commission should go to Kassa to report if the ethnic situation really corresponded to that shown by the documents submitted to it by Dr. Benes. Being a good actor, the chief of the Czech delegation eagerly agreed to this decision, and with the aid of certain influential members of the Conference, obtained as "neutral commissioners", two Americans who were both recently naturalised Czechs!

That was a good start! The rest is still better. The two commissioners, Robert Kamev and Karmezin arrived at Kassa and were allotted a guide chosen by the Czech prefect of the city, Sekoc. This guide, Joseph Hanzalik, exposed the manner in which the "neutral commissioners" performed their mission. Leaving Kassa for a while, ostensibly for the frontier, the two "Americans" returned without even approaching it, whereafter in collaboration with Hanzalik, they drew up the official report in a room at the Hotel Salk, Kassa. In this report they affirmed that they had made all the necessary enquiries and found that the documents presented by Mr. Benes corresponded exactly with the facts.

The Popular Party, under the leadership of Dr. Hlinka, is the active organisation for focussing the Slovak demands that the engagements made by Mr. Mazaryk at Pittsburgh be respected.

"Would you really find an advantage in separating from the Czechs?" I asked one of Dr. Hlinka's assistants. "Would you be better off? Was your situation; from the moral and economic point of view, preferable under the Hungarians?"

My interlocutor hesitated.

"Yes!" he said at last, "under the Hungarian regime, taking all things into account, we were better off. The Czechs have acted abominably with us. They are literally supported by us, yet they have suppressed our liberty, and do their best to ruin us materially and morally. The Czech schools and universities, under the pretext of freeing youth from 'religious obscurantism' transform our country into a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps you think I exaggerate? You are evidently not acquainted with the abominable materialism and impiety of the Czechs. Mr. Joseph Holecek, a friend of Dr. Benes, even wrote in his book Prvetrilteti Csl Republiky, published at Prague in 1922: 'In 1919 our soldiers in Slovakia used crosses for targets and fired on Jesus crucified.' Protest! We have tried it; we still try it, but an army of gendarmes, police and officials of all sorts has fallen upon Slovakia and they see to it that her 'liberated' people do not question the benefits of their 'liberation'.

"Ten years ago, in its Appeal to the Civilised World, our party declared: 'There is not an honest man in Slovakia who has not had to suffer economic oppression, political persecution and imprisonment. Terror, fear and the threat of the prison reign in Slovakia. This state of things is a disgrace to civilised humanity.'

"What we wrote then holds true for to-day. Instead of abating, the evil is growing worse. It has become insupportable."

"This means that if the Great Powers were to demand a plebiscite the Slovaks would vote for the Hungarians and against the Czechs?"

"But a plebiscite in the present state of Europe would be out of the question."

So much for the Slovaks.

The attachment of the Ruthenians to the Czechs makes geographical nonsense, since the two countries are separated by the Carpathian mountains. The treaty of Trianon had guaranteed the Ruthenians absolute autonomy, and this autonomy was the sine qua non of the incorporation of Ruthenia into the "federated" state of Czechoslovakia.

The Czechs, however, not only have never given this autonomy to the Ruthenians, but they have imposed upon them a tyranny which recalls that of the Serbs in Macedonia.

"In Ruthenia," the Ukrainian journal Svoboda wrote in 1928, "the hatred against the Czechs is general and unlimited." Day after day, since then, this hatred has grown. A single fact will indicate to what violent conduct the Czechs have resorted in their struggle against their weaker brothers."

Being profoundly religious, the Ruthenians have been exposed to the most violent persecution since the annexation. The Czech legionaries, who terrorise Ruthenia as the tchnetniki of the White Hand terrorise Macedonia and Croatia, have gone so far as to carve the Catholic cross on the breasts of villagers as a joke; and they have beaten the priests to death and pillaged the churches.

Among all the Ruthenians I questioned I encountered the same determination to free themselves from the atrocious oppression of which they have been the victims, the same execration of the Czechs, and the same regret for the past.

They also, as the Macedonians and Croats, only await the right moment. And this less than fourteen years after the peace!

In their supreme contempt of France's ignorance of the truth, the Czechs dare to claim French protection against the eventuality of a revision of a treaty which they themselves, in all its parts, have so cynically violated. In their impudence they dare speak of the force, the unity, the "National will" of Czechoslovakia, in which more than a half of the population aspires to autonomy or secession.

If the Serbs and the Czechs have not respected any of their obligations towards their ethnic minorities--what can be said for the Roumanians?

The Germano-Hungarian masses of Transylvania enjoyed in 1914 an extraordinary material prosperity and cultural development. The Roumanian immigrants were "occidentalised by their contact to such a point that in the course of centuries they had lost almost all trace of their original Balkanism. Art, the sciences, literature and economic progress were as developed in Transylvania as in Hungary.

The Roumanian domination has passed over all this like a plague of locusts. The Government of Bucharest refused to sign those clauses of the Peace Treaty which guaranteed the annexed populations their rights and property. Only after a veritable ultimatum from France were they signed. Roumania, forced to sign, did it with her tongue in her cheek. She has never respected it.

Under the inspiration of the Roumanian Orthodox clergy, avid to appropriate the greatest possible part of the riches of the Catholic or Protestant communities, religious persecutions have attained such a degree of savagery in Transylvania that the commission sent there by the United Free Church of Scotland in 1927 was able to write: "If nothing is done to safeguard the liberty and integrity of the confessional minorities there will be no Reformed Church in Transylvania in a few years' time."

Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics have been imprisoned by hundreds; expelled and robbed of all their property. Some of them, such as the Calvinist pastor Megyaszey, or the Catholic Bishop of Csanad, have been abominably outraged and tortured. Hundreds of churches, chapels and convents have been seized and given to the Orthodox Roumanian clergy. From all the corners of Old Roumania ecclesiastics fell upon the booty.

The greater part of the Catholic and private schools in Transylvania have been confiscated or closed, in violation of the clauses which guaranteed their maintenance. The teaching of Hungarian to little Transylvanians has been rendered practically impossible by the substitution of the former teachers by teachers speaking only Roumanian. The treaties specifically forbade the exclusion of the annexed populations from public office and from the liberal professions, but nothing prevented the Roumanian authorities from requiring that candidates have a perfect command of the Roumanian language which most of them had never spoken! Nine-tenths of the Transylvanians find themselves deprived in the most, "legal" fashion of their rights and their livelihood.

In Transylvania, as in Yugoslavia, the most fertile and best cultivated land was taken from its Hungarian owners and given to those who were more favoured by the Government of Bucharest. The result has been as in Serbian Banat: that the land has been abandoned by its new owners who used it only as a means of raising a mortgage. The greater part, to-day, has fallen in weeds, whilst its rightful owners, dispossessed of their all, have been reduced to the most frightful misery. Thousands have had to go into exile.

The conduct of the Pan-Serb administrators towards the Macedonians and the Croats, the brutal methods of denationalisation, and mass spoliation, the contempt for the most sacred rights, the most elementary liberty of ethnic minorities, has been copied in Transylvania by the Roumanians.

Differences of intellectual and moral culture, as profound as those which separate the Serbs from the Croats and Slovenes, separate the Transylvanians from the populations of Old Roumania. Day after day the brutal violences, the disgraceful exploitation to which they are subjected, the crushing charges and material ruin which annexation has procured for them, the incapacity and the venality of administrators imposed upon them by Bucharest, have augmented their exasperation and their regrets.

Five million people to-day in Transylvania have only one thought: to rid themselves of these "locusts from Bucharest" (actually they employ a much more expressive word) who tyrannise over them.

Pan-Slavism - I. The Vultures << Contents >> Pan-Slavism - III. The Shadow of Pan-Slavism