EUROPE: Not the Language to Speak

• by Pavol Stracansky (bratislava)
• Sunday, July 19, 2009
• Inter Press Service

The legislation, which was passed in parliament at the end of last month, governs the use of Slovak language at public events, in state and local authority institutions as well as public media.

Under the law state institutions are obliged to actively 'protect' the Slovak language, ethnic minority schools must put all documents in Slovak as well as the minority language, and foreign language inscriptions on memorials and other public objects must have a Slovak translation in letters as large, if not larger, than the original foreign language text. The Slovak text must be approved by the Culture Ministry.

Local authorities must also ensure that any street names in towns written in a minority language have their Slovak equivalent.

A special department to control implementation of the law and use of Slovak, which has been dubbed the 'language police' by critics, will be established, and fines of up to 5,000 euros can be handed out if the laws are broken.

'The law puts the Slovak language first in all spheres of public language use,' Kalman Petocz, analyst with the independent Forum Minority Research Institute in Slovakia told IPS. 'It could be seen as an expression of the superiority of Slovaks over all other nationalities in Slovakia. Hungarians do not want this.

'It serves to only worsen relations between Slovaks and the Hungarian ethnic minority in Slovakia. Mutual trust and everyday contact among the two communities is getting worse, and there has already been research showing that many young Slovak schoolchildren have prejudiced attitudes towards their Hungarian counterparts.'

Minority rights groups and political experts have earlier said that the coalition government, which includes the far right Slovak National Party (SNS), is following an anti-Hungarian political agenda. They say there has been growing anti-Hungarian rhetoric from senior government figures and that politicians now freely fuel anti-Hungarian sentiment among the population.

'Some politicians in the government are clearly nationalist and anti- Hungarian. But much of the government is just populist, which means they will find any 'enemy' to pick on and use that to win votes,' Petocz told IPS.

Almost a tenth of Slovakia's 5.4 million population is ethnic Hungarian. Many members of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia complain of prejudice among both political parties and Slovak society.

The most vocally anti-Hungarian party is the far-right SNS. It became part of a three-party coalition, along with Smer and the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) after the 2006 general elections.

It has since seen its popularity among voters soar, and in one voter support poll published in Slovak media in May, it was the third most popular party with 9.7 percent voter support.

Its coalition partner the centre-right HZDS has in the past been vociferously anti-Hungarian, and while in power in the 1990s was responsible for introducing a series of nationalistic laws, including legislation on official state languages, widely seen as discriminatory against the Hungarian minority.

The Smer party, overwhelmingly the most popular in the country, has also since coming to power in 2006 adopted increasingly anti-Hungarian political rhetoric - its leader and the Prime Minister, Robert Fico, recently told Slovak media there was growing 'irredentism' in Hungary - and a series of diplomatic conflicts with Hungary has left relations between the two states severely strained.

Ethnic Hungarian politicians in Slovakia, MPs in Budapest and members of the European Parliament in Brussels have condemned the law, and threatened legal action over it.

Michael Gahler, German MEP and outgoing deputy head of the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, told Slovak media last week that the new law discriminated against the country's minorities, and was reminiscent of legislation used by Slovakia's former communist regime.

In Slovakia the opposition Hungarian Coalition Party (SMK) said the law was a form of 'linguistic imperialism', and they would be talking to European Parliament officials, the Council of Europe and could challenge it in the Slovak Constitutional Court. They say the fines will deter the use of minority languages and limit minorities' legitimate activities.

Politicians in Hungary said that the legislation not only breached international agreements on human and minority rights but also institutionalised surveillance of Hungarians in Slovakia. Hungarian MEP Kinga Gal told Hungarian media she would consider legal action in the European Court of Justice if it was used against minorities.

Hungarian Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai said the new law breached agreements between the two countries. He cancelled a planned meeting for this month with his Slovak counterpart after the law was passed, saying he saw no point in meeting his opposite number when there appeared little prospect of solutions to Slovak-Hungarian problems. It is unclear when a meeting between the two will go ahead.

The Slovak government has defended its legislation.

Culture Minister Marek Madaric from the Smer party, who proposed the law, told Slovak media: 'What is fundamental is that Slovaks are not discriminated against and that they do not have to, when seeking public information, learn or speak a minority language.'

Critics have already pointed to incidents involving implementation of the new law which they say shows how easy it will be to use it to discriminate against the ethnic Hungarian community.

Just days after the law went into effect the Hungarian-language Uj-Szo newspaper which is distributed among the ethnic Hungarian community was told by Culture Ministry officials that it must now use Slovak, and not Hungarian, names for towns and cities in Slovakia.

The ministry later explained that the demand had been a misinterpretation of the law by ministry staff.

But some experts believe the legislation is deliberately vague so that it can be interpreted in similar ways to discriminate against minorities.

'Many parts of this law have been formulated very ambiguously for a purpose - to give as much power as possible to bureaucrats, so that they alone can decide when to apply the law and when not to,' political analyst Laszlo Ollos from the Forum Minority Research Institute told IPS.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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