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RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
________________________________________________________
RFE/RL NEWSLINE 14 July 1999
CONSTANTINESCU ACCUSES WEST OF UNFAIR TREATMENT.
President Emil Constantinescu told a 13 July meeting
of the U.S.-Romania Action Committee that the West is
treating his country unfairly, despite Romania's
support for NATO during the Kosova crisis. "Every day
an individual from NATO or the EU comes to Bucharest
to congratulate us for the way we acted...but we have
neither the security nor the advantages of NATO
countries." The reward for such support, he said, is
that Romania is suffering the consequences of the
ongoing embargo on oil exports to Yugoslavia. In
related news, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen, in
an interview with the Hungarian daily "Nepszabadsag"
on 13 July, said the process of NATO expansion "will
not be accelerated," despite the help extended to the
organization by Romania and Bulgaria during the Kosova
crisis. MS/MSZ
ROMANIAN OPPOSITION LEADER WARNS AGAINST HUNGARIAN
'REVISIONISM'... PDSR first deputy chairman Adrian
Nastase on 13 July told journalists in Cluj that an
"explosive situation" might develop in Transylvania in
the fall against the background of the country's
"increasing economic, political, and social
vulnerability." Nastase said he has "information" on
the "strategy" planned by "Magyar revisionists" to
create such a situation, but he declined to elaborate,
Mediafax reported. MS
...AS HUNGARIAN ETHNIC LEADER PROTESTS SURVEILLANCE.
Hungarian Democratic Federation of Romania chairman
Bela Marko on 12 July demanded an urgent investigation
of an incident in Odorheiul Secuiesc two days earlier
in which participants leaving a meeting in the town's
city hall discovered they were being filmed from a van
belonging to the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI).
The driver was surrounded by some 30-50 ethnic
Hungarians and prevented from driving off. The local
SRI head, who was summoned to the scene by the driver,
admitted that the van belonged to his organization but
refused to open up a locked compartment, claiming it
contained military secrets. SRI director Mircea
Gheordunescu July denied that the ethnic Hungarians
were being filmed and said the van was there on
another mission. MS
SLOVAK AUTHORITIES SUSPECT 'PLOT' BEHIND ROMANY EXODUS
TO FINLAND
by Jolyon Naegele
Last week, Finland began requiring all visitors
from Slovakia to have visas. The move came in response
to the growing number of Roma asylum seekers from
Slovakia who have been arriving in Finland since March,
particularly over the past several weeks. They now
number more than 1,100.
Slovak President Rudolf Schuster has welcomed the
Finnish move. He said in Prague on 7 July that he has
suggested to Czech President Vaclav Havel "a common
conceptual proposal for resolving the Roma question in
the Czech and Slovak Republics".
Schuster said that despite a visit by Slovak
Foreign Ministry State Secretary Jan Figel to Helsinki
in a bid to stave off the imposition of visa
restrictions on Slovakia, the Finns "did not wait for
days but rather just hours" before deciding to impose
visas. He added that Helsinki made the right decision,
noting that "time will confirm how these Roma were
organized, in what manner, and why they were chosen."
On returning to Bratislava, Figel said that the
Finnish move is temporary and that other signatory
states to the Schengen Agreement are not considering
requiring Slovak citizens to have visas. He said the
exodus was "organized and had a speculative background".
Schuster has also said he does not believe that the
sudden exodus was spontaneous.
Similarly, Bela Bugar, the deputy speaker of the
Slovak parliament and head of the ethnic Hungarians in
the ruling coalition, says he suspects "anti-state
activities" are behind the Roma exodus in a bid to harm
Slovakia's chances of being belatedly invited to open
membership talks with the EU. Moreover, he said the
exodus is "an example of the total failure" of the
Slovak Intelligence Service (SIS).
The deputy chairwoman of former Prime Minister
Vladimir Meciar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia
(HZDS), Olga Keltosova, said the SIS failed because it
was too busy "constructing accusations against
representatives of the previous government." She
remarked that she fully expects the government to claim
that "dark forces of the former coalition and the former
secret police leadership are behind the Roma exodus."
The Slovak government's designated official for
resolving the problems of the Roma minority, Vincent
Danihel, visited Slovak Roma asylum seekers in Finland
last week. He said their uniform explanations for why
they left bore striking similarities to comments by two
deputies from Meciar's HZDS during a 6 July
parliamentary debate on the Roma exodus. According to
Danihel, "it is not possible that this occurred by
chance."
The independent Bratislava daily "Sme" quotes the
head of passport control at Helsinki airport, Olli
Kunnala, as saying many of the recent arrivals had
previously unused passports issued six months ago with
very similar identification numbers. He says the last
batch of Slovak Roma to arrive was a group of 63 asylum
seekers who flew in from Budapest on 6 July, seven hours
before the visa requirement took effect.
Deputy Prime Minister for Minorities Pal Csaky also
suspects a plot. He noted that the cabinet last week
discussed materials provided by the Interior Ministry
concerning specific individuals and two Kosice travel
agencies that helped arrange the departure of the Roma.
He rejected the possibility of an economic motive for
the Roma's decision to go to Finland.
After the first meeting in Bratislava of the
Coordination Committee for Resolving the Departure of
Roma Abroad, Csaky announced last week that a group of
Slovak civil servants will travel to Finland to meet
with the asylum seekers. The deputy premier said the
Slovak government is willing to provide them with new
passports and charter flights home.
Csaky added that the Interior Ministry is
investigating the Roma Intelligentsia for Common
Identity group, which appears to be behind the exodus
and has defended it publicly. He accuses the group's
chairman, Alexander Patkolo, of deceiving the news media
and the public.
Patkolo told reporters last week that Roma are
leaving Slovakia owing to what he alleged is the
country's poor economic and political situation, which,
he argued, does not offer equal opportunities to all its
citizens. He accused the government of Prime Minister
Mikulas Dzurinda of failing to resolve the build-up of
problems involving the Roma community.
Csaky denies Patkolo's claims, saying that never
has so much attention been devoted to the Roma question
as over the last eight months. "I approached Roma
leaders, held round-table meetings," he said. "We are
implementing a pilot program in the Spis region, we have
put into effect a project costing 1.8 million euros."
This is by no means the first outflow of Slovak
Roma in the post-communist era. Two years ago, more than
1,000 Slovak and Czech Roma applied for asylum in Canada
before that country reimposed visas. In the fall of
1997, Slovak and Czech Roma began applying for asylum in
Great Britain, which responded by imposing visas for
Slovak citizens. In March of last year, members of the
Czech Roma Civic Initiative from Ostrava requested
collective asylum in the U.S. for all Czech Roma. The
U.S. State Department turned down their request.
In the nearly 10 years since the collapse of
Communist rule, numerous Roma organizations have
sprouted at the local and national level. But Roma have
become the frequent targets of wanton acts of violence
and even murder, largely by skinheads. Observers of the
Czech Republic and Slovakia often argue that many Czechs
and Slovaks are racist in their attitude toward Roma,
convinced that virtually all members of the Roma
community are criminally inclined and mentally impaired.
The author is an RFE/RL correspondent based in Prague.
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RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
________________________________________________________
RFE/RL NEWSLINE 15 July 1999
SLOVAK HUNGARIAN ETHNIC PARTY WANTS SCHUSTER TO RETURN
LAW TO PARLIAMENT. Leaders of the Hungarian Coalition
Party (SMK) on 14 July called on President Rudolf
Schuster not to promulgate the minority language law
passed by the legislature last week but to return it to
the parliament. Schuster, who met with the SMK leaders
within the framework of meetings with all parliamentary
party groups, pledged to set up a team of experts and
decide on the issue after receiving their advice, CTK
reported. MS
HUNGARY TO MAKE MORE ARMED FORCES CUTS. Prime Minister
Viktor Orban told Hungarian Radio on 14 July that a
resolution recently approved by the government and kept
secret till now stipulates that the military must
undergo further change. "Due to expenditures that
occurred during the Kosova crisis, the armed forces have
reached the limit of their spending," he said, adding
that "development projects promised upon accession to
NATO have been halted." "Nepszabadsag" reported that the
government intends to reduce the armed forces to 35,000-
40,000 from the present 55,000. In other news, the
Defense Ministry has banned the staff of its Strategic
and Defense Research Institute from publishing, after
some analysts released articles critical of NATO's air
strikes in Yugoslavia, "Vilaggazdasag" reported on 15
July. MSZ/MS
HUNGARY'S SOCIALISTS SUBMIT BILL ON PRESIDENTIAL
ELECTIONS. The opposition Hungarian Socialist Party
(MSZP) submitted to the parliament on 14 July a motion
to amend the constitution to allow direct presidential
elections. Other parliamentary parties had indicated
earlier that they will not support the motion. MSZ
MOLDOVA AND THE PRESIDENTIAL SYSTEM: LITTLE COUNTRY, BIG
QUESTION
By Michael Shafir
Moldovan President Petru Lucinschi seems determined
to change the country's constitutional makeup and
introduce a full-fledged presidential system. Under the
current basic law, the Moldovan system is half-way
between a parliamentary system and a semi-presidential
one. In his quest, Lucinschi is encountering the
resistance of the legislature. It may be too early to
predict the outcome of the confrontation. But whatever
that outcome, the issue is one that needs to be
evaluated from a considerably broader perspective than
that offered by the specific Moldovan case.
The question is which system, the presidential or
the parliamentary, better serves democracy. In a speech
delivered to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council
of Europe on 25 June, Lucinschi explained that in the
last eight years, Moldova has had seven governments. As
a result of this political instability, he said,
economic reforms have been stalled or only partly
implemented, demonstrating the governments'
inefficiency. But if presidential systems were a
guarantee for efficiency, Latin American countries would
surely head the list of states with efficient
governments. Furthermore, an efficient government is not
necessarily a democratic one, as many authoritarian
systems proved.
The governments' inefficiency, according to
Lucinschi, reflected the divisions within coalition
governments that had to reflect the parliament's makeup
as well as "destructive divisions" between the
legislature and the successive cabinets. That argument
is false for two reasons. First, a "unified" government
is no guarantee that economic reform will be
implemented. To do so, it must also be "reform-minded."
In the previous legislature, the Agrarian Democratic
Party had an absolute majority but that state of affairs
did not advance reforms. Second, and more important,
attacks on "destructive divisions" are part and parcel
of the political discourse of those who consider
democracy itself to be "divisive."
Without necessarily attributing such beliefs to the
Moldovan president, it may be appropriate to recall a
former "transitional" president's statement that "the
presidential system is a kind of lottery and to a great
extent depends on the personal characteristics of the
man elected." The statement was made in 1993 by Poland's
former president, General Wojciech Jaruzelski. If that
statement is correct, is not the switch to a
presidential system too dangerous to contemplate?
Needless to say, Jaruzelski can hardly be taken as a
yardstick, since there are too many examples of systems
that developed precisely in the opposite direction to
that which Polish society enforced on its former
president.
Western political leaders would be well advised to
refrain from answering such questions. For them, much is
at stake, which may explain why the West supported the
constitutional referendum in Russia in 1993. But how
many politicians took into account that Yeltsin's
successor may be called Gennadii Zyuganov?
If the question were addressed to political
scientists, on the other hand, the answer would likely
be substantially different as well as particularly
pertinent for "transitional democracies." According to
political scientists Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan,
democratic consolidation is advanced by parliamentarism,
rather than by a presidential system. Available data
show that of the 41 countries in the world that
experienced a democratic system for 10 consecutive years
between 1981 and 1990, 30 were parliamentary systems,
seven had a semi-presidential system, and only four were
presidential systems of the U.S. type.
But as two British political scientists, Karen
Henderson and Neil Robinson note, in the post-communist
context, the tendency toward presidentialism increases
as one moves eastward, from the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Slovakia, and Slovenia, to Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania
and further to the former Yugoslavia. The tendency then
"takes off" in what is now the CIS, to which Moldova
belongs. Lucinschi's drive thus fits into this pattern.
This leads to the question of "under what
circumstances." Historical legacies cannot be easily
wiped out and, as Henderson and Robinson show, the
stronger the tendency toward presidentialism, the weaker
the civil society and the weaker the civil society, the
stronger the urge for a so-called "delegative
democracy," where checks on those holding power function
during (but not between) elections and in which the
electorate tends to pin its hopes on some kind of
"savior figure."
Little Moldova is indeed confronted with a big
question, but not one that cannot be answered. If
"historical circumstances" make the presidential system
efficient and functional on the other side of the
Atlantic, one would be well advised to remember that the
U.S. is more of an exception than the rule.
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Copyright (c) 1999 RFE/RL, Inc.
All rights reserved.
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