Supporting the Great Szekler March – a protest against the assimilation of Hungarians in Romania

The close to 1.5 million Hungarians now living in Romania – they were more than 3 million in 1920 when the Treaty of Trianon gave their land to Romania – are the largest ethnic minority in Europe. They live mainly in the region called Transylvania, whose most Eastern part is Szeklerland. This is where more than 700,000 Hungarian speaking Szeklers live in a nearly homogeneous block, on ancestral lands going back almost 1,000 years. They have endured continued discrimination for decades, and Romania is now planning to embark on a Territorial and Administrative reorganization of the whole country that would affect very harshly Szeklerland in particular by subdividing it into smaller regions and incorporating them into newly created administrative regions with a Romanian majority.

Vastly outnumbered, the Szeklers’ traditional way of life and culture would slowly be eroded. This, in turn would diminish their ability for self-governance on the local level in the areas of education, culture and economy, ultimately leading to forced assimilation by the Romanian majority. Their centuries-old identity and special Hungarian dialect would be lost forever.

Incidentally, this would break numerous bilateral agreements and international treaties that Romania has signed, for example the Proclamation from Alba Iulia/Gyulafehérvár on December 1st 1918, where equal rights and equality were promised to all nationalities within Romania (Section III.1):

“Comprehensive national liberty for all cohabitant nationalities. Each nationality will learn, administer and judge using its own language by its own individuals, and each nationality will have the right to represent itself in the legislative bodies and in the government of the country, in proportions corresponding to their own population.”

Sadly, these promises have not been kept for over 90 years, and the proposed legislative changes move reality even further from them.

On October 27, 2013, over 120,000 Szeklers and Hungarians formed a 53 km long human chain (The Great Szekler March) in Szeklerland to protest against the planned territorial and administrative reorganization of Romania, which would lead to the accelerated assimilation of Hungarians in Transylvania. On the same day, thousands of people organized solidarity demonstrations in cities throughout the world, including Ottawa and Toronto

In Ottawa, more than 70 people gathered in front of the Romanian Embassy and after a speech by the Hon. David Kilgour, a former Cabinet Minister and one of the longest serving MPs in the Canadian Parliament (1979-2006), a petition was handed to the Second Secretary of the Romanian embassy. The petition was prepared and signed by the National Alliance of Hungarians in Canada (NAHC), an umbrella organization founded by 65 Canadian-Hungarian organizations in 2012. After this, the demonstrators marched to Parliament Hill, where they peacefully ended their protest.

The petition handed to the Romanian Embassy – according to Embassy spokesman it has already been forwarded to the Department of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest – can be downloaded here.