We will spare no effort to achieve that the Beneš Decrees that deprived Slovakia’s Hungarian minority of its rights be annulled, the Secretary of State for National Policy (Hungary) said on Monday in Bonyhád, Tolna County. Árpád János Potápi said at the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the deportation of ethnic Hungarians from the former Czechoslovakia that Hungarians living in South Slovakia had suffered the hardest trials after the Second World War: they had become stateless in their native land and victims of a ‘diabolic scheme’ that looked for the guilty among the innocent.
The politician noted that in 1947 and 1948,23,000 (ethnic) Hungarian families, a total of almost 100,000 Hungarians living in South Slovakia fled to Hungary, however, in addition to people fleeing from Czechoslovakian territory between 1945 and 1949, nearly additional 100,000 people were forced to leave the thousand-year-old land of their birth under the Agreement on the Exchange of Populations between Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
He also mentioned that Slovakia formally apologized to the displaced (ethnic) Germans, and ‘also made its apology for the Romani Holocaust, the rehabilitation of the Hungarians has solely been omitted’, moreover the Slovak Parliament confirmed the validity of Beneš Decrees declaring the deprivation of rights (in 2007).
(MTI, 5 June 2017)
