Ethnic Relations : Tempers Flaring in Transylvanian City : Romanians and Hungarians are reviving their ancient feud over the territory.

When Erno Jakab tried to launch a private cable television service earlier this year, the city fathers of this crumbling Transylvanian stronghold summarily vetoed his plans because the offerings included MTV.

Romanian nationalists who have come to power under Mayor Gheorghe Funar thought the initials stood for Magyar Television, the state broadcasting network in neighboring Hungary.

It took Jakab, an ethnic Hungarian, three months to convince authorities that the rock video channel had nothing to do with the country that ruled Transylvania until World War I.

“But is it so unimaginable that in a region where one-fourth of the people speak Hungarian that some programming in that language might find a market in the future?” asks Jakab, a bearded young entrepreneur startled by the nationalist tempest swirling around him. “I’m convinced the market is already there, but in this current environment of hysteria I wouldn’t dare suggest it.”

Since Funar was elected mayor of Cluj in March, Hungarian-language advertisements and posters have been banned in the city. Bilingual street signs have been removed and fines levied on merchants who conduct commerce in both languages.

Romanians who advocate cultural autonomy for ethnic Hungarians are being branded as traitors, and political moderates of all backgrounds say they fear association with anything Hungarian. One Romanian scientist was even denounced by pro-regime newspapers for taking part in a Hungarian folk dance with his wife.

A land renowned for its violent history as well as its vampire legend, Transylvania has been swept by a sudden outbreak of nationalism that raises the specter of another officially provoked bloodletting like the one raging in what remains of Yugoslavia.

The repression so far has been limited mostly to curbs on the complex Hungarian language, but those measures have ripped deeply into the intricate social fabric. Language has been the club with which Romanians and Hungarians have bludgeoned each other for centuries. Each time the coveted region changed hands as the spoils of war, the victors sought to impose their tongue as a means of culturally shackling the vanquished.

Funar and nationalist instigators from the feared Vatra Romanescu society have rekindled ethnic passions here by suggesting that Hungary is seeking once again to recover the vast Transylvanian region, where 7 million people live. Hungary vehemently denies designs on its former possession, but the claims are undermined by influential Budapest politicians openly nostalgic for the lost grandeur of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the days when this city was the provincial capital called Kolozsvar.

Some Budapest newspapers have recently taken to using Cluj’s Hungarian name, and a deputy leader of the ruling party in Hungary, nationalist writer Istvan Csurka, only last month called for restoration of Hungarian “living space,” a cryptic reference to the territories lost under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.

Intellectuals, who make up a fair proportion of this university city, say they cannot imagine a return to the times when Romanians and Hungarians fought each other. They point out with pride that only two lives have been lost in inter-ethnic violence in the region since the overthrow and execution of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu nearly three years ago.

But the Cluj leadership’s first steps toward crushing Hungarian culture and ethnic tolerance eerily retrace the path that led Serbs and Croats to savage bloodletting in the former Yugoslav federation. And in Romania, which suffered one of the harshest dictatorships of the Communist era, creation of an ethnic scapegoat could appeal to the bewildered Romanian majority aching for someone to blame for their poverty and hardship.

“These extremists will look for ways to raise tensions, because this is the only way to justify their presence on the political stage,” said Octavian Buracu, a Romanian geologist and pro-democracy activist. “If the perceived danger from Hungarians disappears, these parties have no reason for being.”

Elections held last month disclosed a troubling rise in nationalist sentiment and strengthened the hand of extremist forces. Funar’s National Unity Party and the reactionary Greater Romania Party won about 14% of the vote and are expected to be included in the new Bucharest government still being formed. Funar has demanded the Interior Ministry portfolio for his party, which would give it control of security forces and police.

One of six presidential candidates, Funar ran on the single-issue platform of his claimed “Hungarian threat” and was expected to draw little support outside the Transylvanian region. Despite the crowded field and the broad appeal of populist President Ion Iliescu, Funar garnered nearly 12% of the national vote.

During his failed campaign for a seat in Parliament, Buracu was accused by the regional army commander in Transylvania of being a traitor and a spy for Budapest because he had married a Hungarian woman and was seen taking part in a group folk dance known as the Csarda.

“As long as our rulers see a problem in this kind of normal behavior, there will be no peace here,” Buracu warned.

He complained that his efforts to inaugurate an Assn. for Inter-Ethnic Dialogue have been fought at every juncture by those in power in Cluj.

“What worries me is that two years ago, the people of Yugoslavia watched what was happening in Nagorno-Karabakh and thought such a tragedy could never happen to them,” Buracu recalled. “We’ve seen in Bosnia that local disputes can easily spread and get out of control if the people have been poisoned by propaganda.”

Much of Funar’s success in convincing working-class Romanians of a Hungarian danger stems from a sudden revival of Hungarian culture after the overthrow of Ceausescu. The dictator sought to assimilate Hungarians in Romania by closing their schools and forcibly integrating their villages.

After the December, 1989, revolution, Hungarians rushed to resurrect their language by opening schools, hospitals and theaters where Hungarian is spoken.

“Schools in the Hungarian language have no reason for being. It’s like teaching the people Martian!” argues Adrian Motiu, a member of Parliament from Funar’s party and a founder of the staunchly nationalist Vatra Romanescu society.

Funar leaves no doubt in the minds of those who have met him that whipping up an anti-Hungarian mind-set is the path to power he has chosen.

“Transylvania was, is and will be Romanian land, despite public opinion that has been misled by the governors of Budapest and by Hungarian irredentists who consider Transylvania to be part of Hungary,” Funar said in an interview.

Accusing Budapest of plotting to retake the territory, Funar offers a bizarre explanation for the rest of the world’s failure to recognize what he says is an imminent Hungarian land grab. He contends that Budapest has mesmerized Western leaders by raising an army of attractive Hungarian women who are specially trained and “at a certain age exported to the beds of (foreign) dignitaries.”

With such a leader at the helm in Cluj, Transylvania’s most important city, nationalist extremism may be encouraged throughout Romania and subject its Hungarian, German and Gypsy minorities to ever harsher treatment at the hands of the majority.

“We must be optimistic. We hope this is a very limited segment of society acting like this,” said Hungarian shopkeeper Laszlo Martonossy, noting that most of the attacks on Hungarian businesses have been carried out anonymously in the middle of the night.

Martonossy has refused to take down the plaque reading Szent Mihaly Aruhaz--Saint Michael’s Shop, named after the nearby cathedral--that adorns the door of his store selling videocassettes, cosmetics and tourist trinkets.

The city government has fined him 30,000 lei each of the past two months for violating the public ban on Hungarian. The fines, equal to about $75 each, exceed the average monthly salary in Romania. Martonossy has refused to pay them.

Romanians who fail to join the nationalist repression are also subject to becoming victims.

Carol Harsan is a free-lance journalist working with other Romanians to develop social services, such as a rape prevention center and assistance to the handicapped and orphans, that have been nonexistent here. He accepted a $400 contribution from the Soros Foundation to travel to Britain to study similar programs. That has exposed him to innuendo in the pro-regime newspaper Adevarul Cluj that he is beholden to Hungarian enemies.

“The whole project would be destroyed if I were to publicly admit I accepted this money. The situation is much too sensitive at the moment,” said the frightened journalist.

Hungarian political leaders in Transylvania say they are deeply worried that even clear efforts to distance themselves from the occasional saber-rattling in Budapest have failed to defuse the tensions.

Peter Buchwald, president of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, which holds about 7% of the seats in Parliament, said Hungarians here unquestionably recognize Romanian sovereignty over Transylvania.

“We want to keep our distance from these parties that give the impression we are under the influence of authorities in Hungary,” Buchwald said, referring to Csurka and others who have openly denounced the Trianon Treaty as an injustice that Hungarians want rectified.

“I hope we will never reach the situation like in Yugoslavia today, because we Hungarians are only 7% or 8% of the population and, unlike the Serbs and Croats, we have no arms,” Buchwald said. “There is no way we could defend ourselves. We are at the mercy of the majority population, so all we can do is hope.”

Tremors in Transylvania

Tension between Romanians and Hungarians in Transylvania, which now contains about 7 million people, stretches back to ancient times. ROMANIANS: Descendants of the Dacians, an ancient people who fell under the dominance of the Roman Empire in the 1st Century. They intermarried with Roman colonists and adopted elements of Roman culture, including a form of Latin that evolved into modern Romanian. Barbarians forced the Romans out of Dacia in AD 271.

HUNGARIANS: Descendants of the Magyars, who settled the mountainous heart of ancient Dacia--now known as Transylvania--in the 11th Century.

THE CONFLICT: Both groups claim the area as their ancestral homeland. Hungarians say Transylvania was uninhabited when the Magyars arrived. But Romanians say their ancestors remained in Transylvania after the Romans left and were the aboriginal inhabitants.

Sources: World Book, Romania--A Country Study, Political Handbook of the World