deeply inter­ested WW11 veteran

engage3d in research on Ger­many growth

You have to won­der how long it’s going to be before the Szek­ler auton­omy move­ment is back in the news:

Sfantu Ghe­o­rghe Jour­nal
Kosovo’s Actions Hearten a Hun­gar­ian Enclave

By NICHOLAS KULISH
Pub­lished: April 7, 2008

SFANTU GHEORGHE, Roma­nia — Dozens of wreaths trail­ing rib­bons in red, white and green, the col­ors of the Hun­gar­ian flag, cov­ered the base of a memo­r­ial to the 1848 rev­o­lu­tion in the town park here on a recent day. Deep in the heart of Roma­nia, just one lonely gar­land bears the country’s own blue, yel­low and red banner.

New Year’s is cel­e­brated twice here, first at the stroke of mid­night and then an hour later, when it is mid­night in Budapest. When Kosovo declared its inde­pen­dence from Ser­bia in Feb­ru­ary, hun­dreds of the town’s Hun­gar­i­ans took to the main square to demon­strate in favor of Kosovo, and by exten­sion their own aspi­ra­tions for autonomy.

A Hun­gar­ian minor­ity group is press­ing for greater auton­omy in a region where its mem­bers out­num­ber Roma­ni­ans. A new and more rad­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion, the Hun­gar­ian Civic Party, has risen to chal­lenge the estab­lish­ment Hun­gar­ian party, which has been a mem­ber of each coali­tion gov­ern­ment since 1996.

Those who argue that inde­pen­dence for Kosovo has set a bad prece­dent tend to talk about frozen con­flicts out­side the Euro­pean Union — Abk­hazia and South Osse­tia, in Geor­gia, and Transnis­tria in Moldova. But even in the Euro­pean Union, bor­ders are often arbi­trary. Many eth­nic minori­ties, like the Basques and the Roma, remain state­less while oth­ers, like the Hun­gar­i­ans in Roma­nia, as well as in Slo­va­kia and Ser­bia, are still sep­a­rated from their brethren.

The Hun­gar­ian minor­ity here, known as Szek­lers, cer­tainly believe their time for inde­pen­dence has arrived and that their pro­posed semi-autonomous state, Szek­ler­land, is an impend­ing reality.

“Kosovo is an exam­ple, and a very clear one, that if the com­mu­nity wants to live under self-government, we have to declare very loudly our will,” said Csaba Fer­encz, vice pres­i­dent of the Szek­ler National Coun­cil, a local Hun­gar­ian group founded in 2003 with auton­omy as its stated goal. Szek­lers are a dis­tinct eth­nic group from the Mag­yars, Hungary’s dom­i­nant population.

Their chances of suc­cess appear slim, but they are press­ing ahead to the cha­grin of Roma­ni­ans here, who say that as a local minor­ity they have fewer rights than Hun­gar­i­ans do as a nation­wide minority.

The Hun­gar­ian region, com­pris­ing part of Mures County and all of Harghita and Cov­asna, where Sfantu Ghe­o­rghe is the cap­i­tal, was once a bor­der area of the Hun­gar­ian king­dom defended by the Szek­lers. After World War I, the Szek­lers found them­selves smack in the mid­dle of Roma­nia, a few hours drive north through the Carpathian Moun­tains from Bucharest.

The con­clu­sion of the war is best remem­bered for the harsh terms imposed on Ger­many. But the peace agree­ment signed by Hun­gary in 1920, the Treaty of Tri­anon, was arguably even tougher. Hun­gary lost roughly two-thirds of its ter­ri­tory and pop­u­la­tion, includ­ing one-third of its Hun­gar­ian speak­ers, in the dis­so­lu­tion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a loss that to this day is known as the Tri­anon trauma. (Hun­gary regained most of its lost ter­ri­to­ries tem­porar­ily dur­ing World War II.)

Nowhere is the Hun­gar­ian minor­ity larger or more vocal in its demands for greater inde­pen­dence than in Roma­nia. Hun­gar­i­ans make up 1.5 mil­lion of Romania’s 22 mil­lion peo­ple, about half of them Szek­lers. Lit­tle won­der that Roma­nia, a mem­ber of the Euro­pean Union and the host of the just-completed NATO sum­mit meet­ing, joined Slo­va­kia, Ser­bia and Rus­sia in refus­ing to rec­og­nize Kosovo.

Unlike the Koso­vars, the Szek­lers are ask­ing for auton­omy within Roma­nia rather than com­plete inde­pen­dence, leav­ing for­eign pol­icy and national defense in the hands of the gov­ern­ment in Bucharest. Szek­ler­land would be nearly 4,000 square miles, with just over 800,000 peo­ple, three-quarters of them Hungarian.

...

The coun­cil shares its head­quar­ters with the newly minted Hun­gar­ian Civic Party, which was approved in March to take part in elec­tions, as an alter­na­tive to the main­stream Demo­c­ra­tic Union of Hun­gar­i­ans in Roma­nia. The Demo­c­ra­tic Union stands accused, by Roma­ni­ans in par­tic­u­lar, of old-fashioned eth­nic machine pol­i­tics. But their Civic Party oppo­nents accuse them of sell­ing out.

“Since 1996 they are in the gov­ern­ment and we think once they were, they rep­re­sented the inter­ests of the Roman­ian major­ity and not the Hun­gar­ian minor­ity,” said Zoltan Gazda, pres­i­dent of the Sfantu Ghe­o­rghe branch of the new party.

“We have always respected the Roman­ian laws in our fight for auton­omy, but if this does not have a good end­ing it may raise up other kinds of ten­sions,” Mr. Gazda said. “We have sig­nals that the dis­con­tent can increase with conflicts.”

...

Under Com­mu­nism, the dic­ta­tor Nico­lae Ceaus­escu tried to dilute the Hun­gar­ian pop­u­la­tions by mov­ing Roma­ni­ans into areas where they were con­cen­trated, par­tic­u­larly along the bor­der with Hungary.

...

And then there’s the “Szek­ler Legion”:

Cor­rib link to Irish man’s death
Apr 26th, 2009
by John Dono­van.
The Sun­day Times
April 26, 2009
Michael Dwyer worked on Shell project before his death in Bolivia
Mark Tighe and Eduardo Garcia

MICHAEL DWYER, the Tip­per­ary man shot dead in Bolivia, worked in secu­rity on the Shell Cor­rib project with a Hun­gar­ian asso­ciate of the main tar­get of the Boli­vian police attack.

It now seems likely that Tibor Revesz, 32, who worked with Dwyer for Inte­grated Risk Man­age­ment Ser­vices (IRMS), a secu­rity com­pany that pro­tects Shell’s gas project in Mayo, is the link between the Tip­per­ary man and Eduardo Rozsa Flores.

I-RMS refused to answer queries but issued a state­ment con­firm­ing that Dwyer worked for them up to Octo­ber 20 last year.

Before he trav­elled to Bolivia, Flo­res said he was going to the Santa Cruz region to form a mili­tia to pro­tect the region against the cen­tral government.

Both Flo­res and Revesz were mem­bers of the Szek­ler Legion, a Hun­gar­ian group that wants to fight for the inde­pen­dence of Szek­ler­land, home to eth­nic Hun­gar­i­ans in the heart of Romania.

One of the group’s web­sites con­tains a post, dated Octo­ber 30 2008, call­ing for vol­un­teers to send in their CVs if they could work for an unnamed man to help in the defence of Santa Cruz in Bolivia. This man may have been Flores.

Dwyer trav­elled out to Bolivia in Novem­ber with a Hun­gar­ian, believed to be Revesz, and two other men to do a secu­rity course. When this course fell through, Dwyer is said to have stayed on to work for a “wealthy guy” accord­ing to his father. The other men who trav­elled out with Dwyer did not stay in Bolivia.

....

Good to see you back on this web­site, Mr. Beckhough.

It is deeply mov­ing to me to see one of the Heroes of Bletch­ley Park check­ing in here.

Thanks and know that oth­ers are car­ry­ing on the good fight.

Yes, Dave and Mr Beckhough,

Oth­ers are car­ry­ing the good fight, reg­u­lar users of this web­site for exam­ple, such as myself, Pter­rafractyl, Steven, Rob Coogan, Dwight, R. Wil­son, to name a few. And I have good news for you: the days of the Euro­pean Union are num­bered. Stan­dard and Poor’s have just degraded France’s credit rat­ing from AAA to AA+. In a mat­ter of a few months, the whole EU will blow out and the Euro will be aban­doned. This night­mare will be over. Of course, you saw it for what it was years ago, but now we are mil­lions that can see the same thing.

Thank you for your great work, Mr Beckhough!

@Mr. Beck­hough: Why, hello, and good tid­ings! Glad to see you back, good sir. :)

In light of the ethnic-Hungarian Szek­ler move­ment in Roma­nia, here’s a 2010 arti­cle about Vik­tor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hun­gary seek­ing duel Hun­gar­ian cit­i­zen­ship for eth­nic Hun­gar­i­ans in neigh­bor­ing coun­tries. With Orban’s party hav­ing achieved near com­plete con­trol of Hungary’s levers of power, and ten­sions with Slo­va­kia already erupt­ing over the cit­i­zen­ship fast-track law, this will be a leg­isla­tive agenda to watch going for­ward:

Fidesz plans new IMF deal, eyes dual citizenship

By San­dor Peto and Mar­ton Dunai

BUDAPEST | Thu Apr 15, 2010 5:57am EDT

(Reuters) — Hungary’s new center-right gov­ern­ment will seek a new deal with inter­na­tional lenders and plans to make it eas­ier for eth­nic Hun­gar­i­ans in neigh­bor­ing coun­tries to obtain dual cit­i­zen­ship, for­eign minister-designate Janos Martonyi told Reuters.

The Fidesz party, which named Martonyi as its can­di­date for the top job in Hun­gar­ian diplo­macy, won elec­tions by a land­slide on Sun­day and could end up with a two-thirds major­ity in the next par­lia­ment after a run-off vote on April 25.

“Well, I think we have to sit down as soon as pos­si­ble (with the IMF and EU),” Martonyi said in an inter­view late on Wednesday.

“We have to talk about the present agree­ment and the exact sit­u­a­tion about that agree­ment, and given the fact that the present agree­ment will expire in Octo­ber this year, we also have to dis­cuss a pos­si­ble exten­sion under amended terms, per­haps, or about mak­ing a new agree­ment. We are com­pletely open.”

...

He also said the issue of grant­ing eas­ier access to cit­i­zen­ship to eth­nic Hun­gar­i­ans beyond the bor­ders would be on the next government’s agenda.

Dual cit­i­zen­ship for some 1.5 mil­lion eth­nic Hun­gar­i­ans in Roma­nia, half a mil­lion in Slo­va­kia and more in Ser­bia and Ukraine, was derailed by a failed 2004 referendum.

Fidesz has a good chance to get a two-thirds major­ity in par­lia­ment, nec­es­sary to mod­ify the exist­ing cit­i­zen­ship laws.

“Hun­gar­i­ans liv­ing in the neigh­bor­ing coun­tries... can (now) only obtain cit­i­zen­ship if they set­tle down in this coun­try... for a given period of time,” Martonyi said. “This will be sim­pli­fied by amend­ing the exist­ing legislation.”

For now, eth­nic Hun­gar­i­ans can only obtain cit­i­zen­ship if they ful­fill a set of legal cri­te­ria and pass cer­tain tests.

Martonyi said he believed grant­ing them eas­ier access should not lead to ten­sions with Hungary’s neighbors.

Slo­vak Prime Min­is­ter Robert Fico said the cit­i­zen­ship issue had the poten­tial to sour rela­tions between Hun­gary and Slovakia.

“There is some mis­un­der­stand­ing that this could be a kind of ‘en masse’ auto­matic grant­ing of cit­i­zen­ship. This is not the case,” Martonyi said. “Obtain­ing the cit­i­zen­ship (would be) always done on an indi­vid­ual basis.”

Martonyi said grant­ing these new cit­i­zens the right to vote was also a pos­si­bil­ity, but stressed the vot­ing right was a sep­a­rate issue and was not part of the planned legislation.

...

Yep, this could get ugly:

Decem­ber 19th, 2011
Fidesz youth group launches protest cam­paign against Slo­vak cit­i­zen­ship law
By MTI

Fideli­tas, the youth wing of rul­ing party Fidesz, has launched a series of actions in protest against moves by the Slo­vak author­i­ties to deprive Slo­vaks of Hun­gar­ian ori­gin of their cit­i­zen­ship when they take up Hun­gar­ian cit­i­zen­ship, Peter Agh, Fidelitas’s chair­man told a news con­fer­ence in front of the Slo­vak embassy in Budapest on Sunday.

Agh said what had taken place in Slo­va­kia in the recent past was unprece­dented in a mod­ern Euro­pean democ­racy. He noted that peo­ple had been stripped of their cit­i­zen­ship “whose only crime was to estab­lish a legal bond with another EU mem­ber state, namely Hungary.”

...

Boldoghy of the city of Komarno said all Slo­vaks should have the right to dual citizenship.

“The aim of my ini­tia­tive is that the Slo­vak gov­ern­ment — pre­cisely which one and its com­po­si­tion are irrel­e­vant — should abol­ish this point­less and essen­tially imprac­ti­ca­ble law. At the same time I should like to suc­ceed in ensur­ing that every Slo­vak cit­i­zen feels free to take up the cit­i­zen­ship of another coun­try,” Boldoghy said.

Slo­va­kia enacted the law after Hun­gary intro­duced a fast-track cit­i­zen­ship pro­ce­dure for Hun­gar­i­ans liv­ing beyond the border.

...

We are proud to announce the ironic term of the week: “Judi­cial Czar”.

There’s an impor­tant human cap­i­tal dynamic that’s emerg­ing in the euro­zone: labor migra­tion from the PIIGS to the wealth­ier mem­bers (it sounds like mostly Ger­many) and the asso­ci­ated “brain drain” of highly skilled work­ers. It part of a the nEU Nor­mal:

Ger­many to open doors for skilled work­ers from non-EU coun­tries
PTI Jun 23, 2011, 10.06pm IST

BERLIN: Faced with a short­age of highly qual­i­fied spe­cial­ists and skilled work­ers in many hi-tech fields, Ger­many has eased the restric­tions on migra­tion of some pro­fes­sional groups from non-EU coun­tries that had made it more dif­fi­cult for them to find work in the country.

It is for the first time, since the reg­u­la­tions on the recruit­ment of these pro­fes­sion­als were tight­ened in the early 1970s, that the Ger­man gov­ern­ment has agreed with indus­try and union lead­ers to go for a long-term con­cept that includes chang­ing immi­gra­tion laws.

The new con­cept endorsed by the cab­i­net yes­ter­day, exempted mechan­i­cal and elec­tri­cal engi­neers, auto­mo­bile con­struc­tors and med­ical pro­fes­sion­als from a require­ment that Ger­man com­pa­nies can appoint them only when suit­able can­di­dates are not avail­able within the coun­try or in the EU.

Ger­man com­pa­nies intend­ing to recruit those spe­cial­ists from non-EU coun­tries no longer require to pro­duce such a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from the Fed­eral Labour Office, Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel said.

Merkel said her government’s con­cept is a two-pronged strat­egy to tackle the short­age of spe­cial­ists by exploit­ing the poten­tial avail­able within the coun­try and by mak­ing the coun­try more attrac­tive for spe­cial­ists from non-EU countries.

Ger­man Insti­tute for Labour Mar­ket Research esti­mates that the coun­try will face a short­age of around 6.5 mil­lion spe­cial­ists and skilled work­ers by 2025 as a result of an age­ing pop­u­la­tion if effec­tive steps were not taken to off­set the decline through migra­tion and by devel­op­ing domes­tic resources.

Another insti­tute fore­casts Ger­man labour mar­ket will have vacan­cies for up to 240,000 engi­neers by 2020.

The open­ing of Ger­man labour mar­ket for job-seekers from East Euro­pean mem­bers of the EU on May 1 did very lit­tle to alle­vi­ate the short­age of spe­cial­ists because the influx of work­ers so far were mainly in the low-wage seg­ment, the stud­ies said.

...

At the same time, the gov­ern­ment also wants to open the areas of engi­neer­ing, auto­mo­bile con­struc­tion and health care for spe­cial­ists from non-EU coun­tries, Merkel said.

Until now, Ger­man firms were allowed to recruit only cooks spe­cial­is­ing in for­eign cui­sine and foot­ball pro­fes­sion­als and top-ranking ath­letes from non-EU coun­tries with­out a prior exam­i­na­tion that local or EU can­di­dates were available.

“This is only just the begin­ning and more needs to be done” to make the coun­try more attrac­tive for highly qual­i­fied spe­cial­ists and skilled work­ers from out­side the EU, Ms Merkel said.

How­ever, Chan­cel­lor Merkel’s Chris­t­ian Demo­c­ra­tic Union and its coali­tion part­ner Free Demo­c­ra­tic Party (FDP) could not agree on reform­ing a con­tro­ver­sial rule that spe­cial­ists and skilled work­ers from non-EU coun­tries should have a min­i­mum annual salary of 66,000 euros to obtain a res­i­dence per­mit in Germany.

Many experts and labour mar­ket ana­lysts argue that this min­i­mum salary require­ment is the biggest hur­dle for highly qual­i­fied job-seekers from non-EU coun­tries to migrate to this country.

It is esti­mated that less than 700 spe­cial­ists came to Ger­many in 2010 through this arrangement.

Ger­man Eco­nom­ics Min­is­ter Philipp Roesler, who is also the chair­man of the FDP, described the present min­i­mum salary require­ment for non-EU job-seekers as “too high” and demanded that it should be brought down to 40,000 to make the coun­try more attrac­tive for spe­cial­ists out­side the EU.

He said a min­i­mum salary require­ment of 40,000 euros would be ideal for spe­cial­ists from non-EU coun­tries and dis­missed fears expressed by his coali­tion part­ners from Merkel’s CDU that it will con­tribute to a mass migra­tion from out­side the EU.

Roesler was sup­ported by Labour Min­is­ter Ursula von der Leyen and Edu­ca­tion Min­is­ter Annette Scha­van, who shared the view that the present min­i­mum annual salary require­ment is too high and it will make Ger­many unat­trac­tive for spe­cial­ists from out­side the EU.

Leyen called for har­mon­is­ing the min­i­mum salary require­ment with Germany’s EU partners.

This will make sure that Ger­many will not be dis­ad­van­taged on an inter­na­tional level, she said.

...

Ok, so the Ger­man labor mar­ket is about to get the shock doc­trine (applied across the wage scale), espe­cially for highly skilled work­ers. And the FPD is even call­ing for migrant worker min­i­mum wage pol­icy har­mo­niza­tion with the rest of the EU mem­bers. This could get inter­est­ing:

The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor
Rebel­lious unions upend Ger­man order

Ger­many has a tra­di­tion of good rela­tions between unions and employ­ers, but as sup­port erodes for well-established groups, work­ers are join­ing smaller unions will­ing to buck the consensus.

By Isabelle de Pom­mereau, Cor­re­spon­dent / March 12, 2012

Frank­furt, Germany

Stranded pas­sen­gers doz­ing on their suit­cases and grum­bling over can­celled flights because of strikes is a scene one might expect in France or Greece, but not in Ger­many, where good labor rela­tions have been fun­da­men­tal to its eco­nomic success.

...

GdF’s strike, which had far-reaching effects despite the small num­ber of par­tic­i­pants, high­lights a shift in Germany’s orga­nized labor sys­tem: the rise of smaller, bolder unions who buck the tra­di­tion of consensus-building between industry-wide unions and employers.

After decades of allow­ing unions to essen­tially gov­ern them­selves through spe­cial labor courts, more and more Ger­man politi­cians are call­ing on the gov­ern­ment to rein in these rebel­lious unions.

...

Strikes are a com­mon form of protest against unpop­u­lar poli­cies through­out Europe, but in Ger­many strikes can only be staged against issues of pay and work­ing con­di­tions. When France raised the min­i­mum legal pen­sion age from 60 to 62 in 2010, the weeks of nation­wide strikes threat­ened the center-right gov­ern­ment. When the Ger­man par­lia­ment raised the retire­ment age from 65 to 67 in 2007, there were no strikes.

...

A splin­ter­ing of consensus

In the past cou­ple of decades, industry-wide unions have splin­tered into smaller ones, often made up of more highly qual­i­fied employ­ees. They say they have been neglected by the big­ger unions.

“You now have cer­tain groups in a strong nego­ti­at­ing posi­tion break­ing off and demand­ing their own, much bet­ter deals,” says Low­ell Turner, chair­man of the inter­na­tional and com­par­a­tive labor depart­ment at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity. “That’s a threat for the Ger­man model of indus­trial rela­tion and social partnership.”

Air­line pilots were among the first to do so, break­ing ranks with the white-collar employ­ees’ union and strik­ing to obtain their own deal. Six years later, a union rep­re­sent­ing doc­tors aban­doned an agree­ment with the ser­vice sec­tor union, which rep­re­sents 1,000 pro­fes­sions, in order to obtain a bet­ter deal than the one they thought the mega union could offer them.

Then, in 2007, an old, small, pre­vi­ously insignif­i­cant union rep­re­sent­ing Germany’s train dri­vers halted train traf­fic across the coun­try to demand a bet­ter deal for their dri­vers than the one secured by the rail­roads’ major union. It was the biggest strike the coun­try had seen since 1945.

“Unions are becom­ing more self-secure; they’re increas­ingly using the threat poten­tial,” says Gerd Held of Berlin’s Tech­ni­cal University.

...

Ha! Deficits....yeah, THAT’s the big prob­lem with what’s going on in Hungary.

I never thought I’d see another major demo­c­ra­tic com­mu­nity dis­credit itself as rapidly as the US lead­ers man­aged to do dur­ing the recent Bush era, but in recent years the euro­zone lead­ers are giv­ing the Bushies a real run for their money.