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Fwd: AIM: Minority Rights and Romanian Law on Local Public Administration


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Subject: Fwd: AIM: Minority Rights and Romanian Law on Local Public Administration


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Fwd: AIM: Minority Rights and Romanian Law on Local Public
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Copyright: All those wishing to use or publish the following text are
welcome to do so, provided that they indicate the source and inform
the AIM office in Paris which is interested to receive comments and
reactions on the information it provides.
AIM, 17 rue Rebeval, F-75019 Paris, France, [email protected]
 

*** Minority Rights and Romanian Law on Local Public Administration
 
AIM Athens, February 20, 2001

On February 16, 2001 Cluj, the spiritual capital of Transylvania was
in the focus of national and international media attention due to the
demonstration organized by the Great Romania Party (GRP), usually
referred to as extremist, xenophobic and nationalist, against the
recently adopted law on local public administration, which includes
important provisions on language rights of the national minorities in
Romania.

The meeting initiated by Gheorghe Funar, the famous Mayor of Cluj and
Secretary General of GRP, well known for his anti-Hungarian sentiments
and endeavor, was meant to demonstrate for "the protection of the
Romanian language and against the anti-constitutional provisions of
the law on local public administration". Although the organizers had
expected over 100,000 participants, in the end less than 6,000
participated, mainly villagers transported by buses from neighboring
localities, as well as employees of the Cluj City Hall.

The demonstration itself may justifiably be considered a failure as
compared to the intentions and expectations of the GRP; however, the
event and what has been voiced during it cannot be ignored, and needs
to be handled carefully by the governing party, the Party for Social
Democracy in Romania (PDSR), which by endorsing the controversial law
on local public administration seems to have walked into a trap
similar to the one that had made the life of the previous governing
coalition extremely difficult.

In the last elections of November 2000, PDSR won 37% of the seats in
the Parliament, and, lacking a reliable and comfortable partner with
whom it could have formed a coalition, it was forced to undertake the
responsibility of a minority government. In the given situation, PDSR
sought political support from three political parties of the
opposition, the Democratic Party, the National Liberal Party and the
Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR), based on
protocols signed with each, that reflected the main priorities of the
respective political organizations.

The adoption of the Local Public Administration Law on January 19 in
an extraordinary session of the lower house of the Romanian Parliament
was the result of the PDSR-DAHR agreement, and followed the previous
adoption of the law on restitution of real estate properties,
expropriated or nationalized during the communist rule, which has been
voted by the DAHR MPs in the version submitted by PDSR, though it did
not reflect all the expectations of the Hungarian minority in Romania. 

The adoption of the law on local public administration was vehemently
opposed by the representatives of GRP, the leading political force of
the opposition holding 20% of the seats in the Parliament, who
declared that the provisions of the law regarding the public use of
minority languages are anti-constitutional, since they establish a
second official language in the country, excluded by article 13 of the
Romanian Constitution. Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the picturesque leader of
the GRP, frequently labelled as extremist nationalist, who was close
to win the second round of the presidential elections in December 2000
against Ion Iliescu, warned against the possibility of transforming
the "language of the horses" (Hungarian) into Romania's second
official language.

With the Cluj demonstration of February 16, the saga of the Romanian
law on local public administration has seemingly opened a new chapter,
with some new protagonists, but the same old conflicts and
contradictions. 

The law adopted originally in November 1991, was amended in May 1997,
through an emergency decree issued by the coalition government that
resulted after the 1996 elections, which had included - for the first
time in the history of Romania - the representatives of the Hungarian
minority, too. The emergency decree, together with an ordinance issued
subsequently to amend the Law of Education adopted in 1995, reflected
some of the main expectations of the Hungarian minority, and the
entering in force of the two decrees in mid-1997 were celebrated as a
long-awaited victory of DAHR, representing the 1.6 million ethnic
Hungarians, 7% of the country's population.

The subsequent parliamentary debates, which were supposed to approve
the decrees, brought to surface, however, deep divisions of the
coalition that ruled Romania between 1996-2000, and even within the
main political force in it, the Christian Democratic National Peasant
Party (CD-NPP). George Pruteanu, then senator of CD-NPP, today senator
of PDSR, launched an aggressive nationalistic campaign against the
provisions of the decrees,
motivated by what he called the protection of Romanians against the
danger of losing their identity, particularly in Harghita and Covasna
counties, where the Hungarian minority constitutes the overwhelming
majority of the population of the two territorial subunits. Under the
pressure of this campaign, echoed diligently by the mass media, the
approval in the Parliament of the ordinance on local public
administration proved to be impossible, the decree being attacked
later in the Constitutional Court and declared anti-constitutional.

Being faced with this situation, the coalition elaborated a new draft
of the Local Public Administration Law that aimed at a more thorough
reform of local administration, and included the provisions of the
previous emergency decree referring to the contested minority language
rights. This new draft was adopted in the Senate, the upper house of
the Romanian Parliament, soon before the end of the previous term.

Including the debate of the draft in the agenda of the new lower house
of the Parliament was the result, as said earlier, of the
post-electoral political negotiations. The House of Deputies adopted
on January 19, 2001 the law in a slightly different version as
compared to the one adopted by the Senate, but since the differences
do not regard the provisions on minority language rights, the
necessary reconciliation of the two versions imposed by the rule of
the Parliament cannot affect those provisions by any means.

In its present version, the Local Public Administration Law grants the
minorities the right to use their mother tongue in communicating with
authorities in areas where they represent at least 20% of the
population, to use bilingual inscriptions with the names of localities
and public institutions, to be informed in their mother tongue about
decisions of the authorities, provisions which are expected to affect
at least 11,000 towns and villages of Romania.   

The adoption of the law in the House of Deputies has attracted much
international attention and sympathy for the new Romanian government.
Due to this attention, the series of comments and protests unleashed
by the GRP representatives make the situation of the PDSR government
extremely uncomfortable: they may jeopardize not only the internal
stability of the government, but its international credibility as
well, which is looked upon with much suspicion anyway. The support
offered to these protests by a number of PDSR representatives, amongst
which the same George Pruteanu, who has created immense difficulties
to the previous coalition, is particularly embarrassing.

PDSR and the Prime Minister, Adrian Nastase seem to have been in
control of the situation so far. They succeeded seemingly to silence
their internal opposition and have condemned firmly the nationalistic
agitation of the GRP in general and its Secretary General, Gheorghe
Funar in particular. President Ion Iliescu declared on February 7 that
he is ready to promulgate the law on local public administration in
its actual form once the Parliament ends the approval process.

Nonetheless, the saga of the Local Public Administration Law in
Romania is probably not close to its end yet. The upshot of the
February 16 demonstrations in Cluj are still to be seen, as well as
the resolution of the protest signed by several mayors of important
cities in Transylvania, who have threatened with strike if the law is
applied in its actual form. A protesting document issued by civil
society organizations of the Romanian "minority" in Harghita and
Covasna counties has recently warned the Prime Minister and the
President of the "possible consequences" of the law in the two
sensitive administrative subunits. The handling of the issue will
probably be significantly affected also by the fact that influential
Roma organizations have approached territorial representatives of PDSR
to negotiate the application of the law in localities where the
percentage of the Roma population allows the use of Romani language in
public administration.

As a matter of fact, the saga of the law on local public
administration is part of a more comprehensive debate on the future of
Romanian democracy. What is at stake in fact is not less than deciding
in favour of liberal democracy or another particular form of majority
rule, which Sammy Smooha has called "ethnic democracy". The
distinctive features of an ethnic democracy are the dominance of a
core ethnic nation, which owns and controls the sate, and which
perceives the existence of non-core ethnic groups as a threat, against
which the core nation needs to live in a permanent mobilization.
Although PDSR seems to be committed to continuing the efforts aiming
at the establishment of a liberal democracy in Romania, it will have
to perform an extremely difficult task if it wants to avoid the traps
of ethnic democracy in Romania.
-----------------------------------------------
(1)   Levente Salat is Executive President of the Ethnocultural
Diversity Resource Center (Cluj, Romania)


# Levente Salat (1)


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