Radio România Internațional

Tag: ethnic minorities

Ukraine and the languages of ethnic minorities

After
becoming independent from the defunct Soviet Union in August 1991,
the Ukrainian state for a long time maintained an ambivalent attitude
with respect to its many ethnic minorities. On the one hand, at an
individual level, the ethnic minority status is not an obstacle to
social advancement. The country’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is a
member of the Jewish community, the defence minister Rustem
Umarov hails from the Tartar community, while the governor of the
Mykolaiv region has distant
Korean
roots. On the other hand, with respect to the collective rights of
ethnic minorities, the political class in Kyiv has been relatively
reticent and criticism on this subject has come both from at home and
abroad. Experts say it wasn’t until Ukraine was awarded the status
of EU candidate country that it began to adopt a more flexible
position on this subject, given that respect for the rights of ethnic
minorities is a fundamental value of
the European Union.

The
protection of persons belonging to national ethnic minorities is
important for a democratic and European Ukrainian state, said
Romania’s foreign minister Luminiţa Odobescu during joint
statements with Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for
European and Euro-Atlantic integration Olga Stefanishyna.
Earlier,
Ukraine’s Parliament adopted legislation amending a number of laws
on the rights of national minorities. The bill proposed by the
authorities in Kyiv to amend the relevant legislation is a positive
step forward and a much-welcome move, said minister Odobescu.
She
added that the Romanian side would continue to have a transparent and
constructive approach to this issue. Olga Stefanishyna said the
legislation relating to ethnic minorities was so drafted as to foster
inclusive dialogue with the latter. We are grateful to the
Romanian minority who became involved in the entire process and to
our counterparts from the Romanian government who shared with us
their legislation and best practice. […] In Ukraine we have
thousands of children who benefit from education in the Romanian
language. Now their number will be bigger. Ukraine has moved to
recognise Romanian as the official language of the Republic of
Moldova, said the Ukrainian official, referring to Kyiv’s
decision to finally invalidate the Soviet misconception about the
existence of a Moldovan language different from the Romanian
language.

Neighbouring
Ukraine is home to over 400,000 ethnic Romanians, most of whom live
in northern Bukovina, the north and south of Bessarabia and the
Hertsa region, former Romanian territories which the Soviet Union
annexed in 1940 and which Ukraine inherited as the legal successor of
the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. When Russia invaded Ukraine
last year, many ethnic Romanians went to fight under the Ukrainian
flag, and a large number of them have lost their lives on the
battlefield. (CM)

11 December 2023
October 18, 2017 UPDATE

EDUCATION LAW — The Romanian President, Klaus Iohannis, held a phone conversation on Wednesday with his Ukrainian counterpart, Petro Poroshenko, on the controversial education law, recently adopted by the Kiev authorities. According to the Presidential Administration in Bucharest, the Romanian President expressed, in firm terms, the discontent about the law, which produces negative effects on the right to education in the native languages of the ethnic minorities in Ukraine, including the Romanian one. The Romanian President said the Kiev authorities should have held consultations with representatives of the national ethnic minorities and of the neighbouring countries. Klaus Iohannis has called on his Ukrainian counterpart to comply with the commitments Ukraine has constantly made to the Romanian side relative to the observance of international norms and standards as regards the protection of the national minorities’ rights. In turn, President Poroshenko gave assurances that the opinion of the Venice Commission on this law will be observed. According to the normative act, the children of the ethnic minorities will be able to study in their languages only in primary education, and afterwards they have to attend classes only in the Ukrainian language. Almost 500,000 ethnic Romanians are living in Ukraine.

ROMANIAN-SPANISH RELATIONS – The Romanian foreign minister, Teodor Melescanu, met in Bucharest on Wednesday with his Spanish counterpart, Alfonso María Dastis. The two ministers discussed about bilateral trade relations and the stage of preparations for the first common session of the Romanian and Spanish governments. Minister Melescanu mentioned the very important contribution of the Romanian community to the economic development of Spain and thanked his counterpart for the Spanish authorities’ support for the integration of the Romanian citizens. On this occasion, the two sides signed an agreement on ways to prevent tax evasion and to eliminate double taxation for incomes. We recall that the over one million Romanians living in Spain make up the largest foreign community in that country.

JUSTICE — Romanian Justice Minister Tudorel Toader announced on Wednesday that his ministry has finalized the proposal to modify the basic package of legislation regulating justice. He said he would meet on October 26 European Commission First Vice-President Hans Timmermans to discuss the project. Toader called on the Venice Commission to approve the procedure to appoint high-ranking prosecutors. The draft amending the justice laws will be promoted as a parliamentary initiative.

LEGAL NOTIFICATION— The Speaker of the Romanian Senate, Calin Popescu-Tariceanu, announced on Wednesday that he will file a notification to the Constitutional Court, early next week, on a possible conflict between the Government and the Public Ministry, on the issue of government decisions. The talks on the notification of the Constitutional Court emerged after the National Anti-corruption Directorate opened a file involving two former members of the current cabinet, Sevil Shhaideh, former deputy prime minister and Regional Development Minister, and Rovana Plumb, who has been Minister Delegate for European Funds. They tendered their resignations last week, against the backdrop of accusations levelled against them in the file. The National Anti-corruption Directorate claims that in 2013, two plots of land close to the Danube riverbed were illegally transferred, by a government decision, from state property to property of the Teleorman County, in the south, and into the administration of the Teleorman County Council. Back then, Shhaideh was state secretary at the Regional Development Ministry and Rovana Plumb was holding the environment portfolio.

BRUSSELS — European Council President Donald Tusk has introduced an ambitious schedule of 13 regular summits over the next two years to revive the European Union after the Brexit. Tusk made public this schedule on Tuesday, after several calls for a profound revision of the Union, including from French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker. The schedule starts with the end of the week summit in Brussels, which will be attended by Romanian President Klaus Iohannis. President Tusks plan will also include an extraordinary European summit in Romania a few weeks after the UK leaves the EU, which is scheduled for March 2019, as well as a security summit next year in Vienna.

TRADE — The U.S. trade mission Trade Winds 2017, the largest government trade mission in the history of the Southeast Europe region is Taking Place in Bucharest, between October 18-20. The mission is organized by the US Department of Commerce in partnership with the Romanian government. The event concludes on Friday, and will be attended by 100 American and 50 Romanian companies. In the three days of the forum, the attendees will be holding business and trade conferences, as well as discussions with American commercial attaches from 25 European states. Parallel events are held in Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Serbia. This is the 10th year the Department of Commerce’s U.S. Commercial Service has led Trade Winds.

18 October 2017
Ukraine, criticised for its new education law

Ukraine is in the wrong, is how Korodi Attila, an MP for the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania and a member of Romanias delegation to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, has summarised the resolution adopted by the Council on Ukraines new education law.

Himself a member of an ethnic minority, he said that before passing the law, the authorities in Kiev should have waited for the opinion of the Venice Commission, have consulted with the neighbouring countries and show respect for the European standards and fundamental principles of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.

According to Korodi, these conventions very clearly define the basic principle underlying the access of young people belonging to national minorities to education in their languages. The resolution was adopted with an overwhelming majority by the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, which justifies the call of the Romanian delegation, supported by five others, that the issue of the Ukrainian law be urgently debated.

The resolution reads: “where states take measures to promote the official language, these must go hand in hand with measures to protect and promote the languages of national minorities. “If this is not done, the resolution also notes, “the result will be assimilation, not integration. The move taken by Romania is only the most recent effort made by Bucharest in its attempt to block the law that drastically restricts access of Ukraines many ethnic minorities to education in their languages, by only providing education in minority languages until the end of primary school.

Earlier, Romanias foreign minister Teodor Melescanu and his Hungarian, Bulgarian and Greek counterparts signed a joint letter expressing their concern and profound regret vis-à-vis the adoption of the new law. The education minister Liviu Pop even travelled to Kiev to argue against the law. The Parliament in Bucharest unanimously passed a declaration calling for the re-examination of the law and saying it watches “with concern and maximum attention the consequences of the law. President Klaus Iohannis has decided to postpone indefinitely a scheduled visit to Kiev this month.

Commentators describe as absolutely legitimate Bucharests concern, given that almost half a million ethnic Romanians live in Ukraine, mostly on the eastern Romanian territories annexed by the former Soviet Union in 1940 and inherited by Ukraine as a successor state in 1991. Over the last two centuries, the Romanian communities in what is today Ukrainian territory have lived under different administrations, including Habsburg, Hungarian, Czech, Tsarist and Soviet. Opinion leaders say, however, that they would never have imagined that Ukraine, with its stated aspirations for European integration, would so drastically try to limit the fundamental right of ethnic minorities to education in their languages.

13 October 2017
Reactions to Ukraine’s new education law

The Romanian
authorities have strongly reacted after the Ukrainian President Petro
Poroshenko signed the new education bill into law on Monday. Bucharest has
voiced its regret that in spite of repeated calls on the Ukrainian authorities
to reconsider, President Poroshenko eventually promulgated this controversial
law that significantly restricts tuition in minority languages, the Romanian
language included.

The Romanian Foreign
Ministry has announced it will continue efforts to make international
institutions aware of the negative effects of this law. Actions at bilateral
level will also continue so that ethnic Romanians in Ukraine can further study
in their mother tongue. Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu said this in an exclusive
interview to Radio Romania:

What is important for us is to make sure that ethnic
Romanians in Ukraine can continue their studies at high standards in their
mother tongue. Therefore, we have scheduled a meeting between the Romanian and
Ukrainian education ministers who will hold concrete talks on the curricula and
the particular subject matters that need to be studied in Romanian or in
Ukrainian.

In the meantime, the Ministry for the Relation with
the Romanians Abroad and the Education Ministry are working on a bill that
should help Romanian ethnics in Ukraine learn their mother tongue. The Minister
for the Relation with the Romanians Abroad, Andreea Pastarnac, has given us
details:

The Ministry for the Romanians Abroad together with
the Education Ministry are drafting a bill that should allow us to grant an
education package to the ethnic Romanian pupils and students in Ukraine so that
they can further choose to study in Romanian until the new education law takes
effect. Also, we will try to discuss with the Ukrainian side ways of obtaining
a special status for the Romanian ethnics in Ukraine, so that the current
formula of tuition in Romanian can be preserved.

Romania’s Parliament is also taking steps towards
finding a solution to this problem. A delegation of deputies and senators will
soon travel to Kiev to initiate political dialogue with the relevant Ukrainian
authorities, in an attempt to resolve this matter in keeping with the European
norms. A group of Romanian MPs have already met the Ukrainian Ambassador to
Romania, Oleksandr Bankov, who has given assurances that no school with tuition
in minority languages will be closed down or its teachers dismissed. The
Ukrainian official has mentioned, on this occasion, Romania’s constant support for
his country’s EU accession.

27 September 2017
9 September, 2017

EU
agency relocation. Romania has officially launched its bid to host the European
Medicines Agency currently based in London and which will be relocated after
Brexit. The healthcare minister Florian Bodog says Romania has a 15-year
experience in the field and skilled labour in the form of 18,000 highly
qualified researchers. France, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary and Bulgaria also
offered to host the European Medicines Agency. The European Commission will
assess the bids by September 15 before announcing its final decision on the
sidelines of the General Affairs Council in November. The European Medicines
Agency is a decentralised agency of the European Union responsible for the scientific evaluation, supervision and safety monitoring of medicines in
the EU.

Hungary-Romania. Hungary has reiterated its decision not
to support Romania’s and Croatia’s accession to the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). The reasons given are a move by the
Romanian authorities to close the Roman-Catholic Theological College in Targu
Mures in Romania’s case and a dispute over an investment of the Hungarian
company MOL in Croatia in the latter case. The activity of the
Hungarian-language school in Targu Mures was suspended because the institution
no longer existed following a final court ruling. The foreign ministry in
Bucharest said any educational institution in Romania must respect, without
exception, the Romanian legislation, which does not discriminate on ethnic and
religious grounds. Any attempt to present the situation at the school in Targu
Mures as a failure to respect the rights of ethnic minorities is inaccurate,
the Romanian authorities also said, pointing out that there are many
educational institutions in Romania that demonstrate the Romanian state ensures
the right of the ethnic Hungarian minority to learn and be taught in its mother
tongue.

Commemoration. A massacre
committed on September 9th, 1940 by the troops of Horthyst Hungary
is commemorated today in the village of Treznea, in north-western Romania.
After the enforcement of the Vienna Award, by which Nazi Germany and fascist
Italy forced Romania to cede northern Transylvania to Hungary, the Hungarian
troops killed hundreds of ethnic Romanians. 86 people were killed Treznea and
157 in Ip. A similar massacre was committed on the 14th of October
1944 in Moisei, when 29 ethnic Romanians were killed.

Ethnic minorities. The Romanian authorities have again
called on Ukraine to re-examine its new education law that drastically
restricts education in the mother tongue for ethnic minorities. Romania’s
foreign minister Teodor Melescanu said after a telephone conversation with his
Ukrainian counterpart Pavlo Klimkin that the situation can only be solved
during a meeting between the education ministers of the two states. Under the
legislative changes adopted by the Ukrainian Parliament, teaching in high
schools and universities is to be done only in the state language, while
teaching in the mother tongue of ethnic minorities will only be provided in
nurseries and primary schools. Almost half a million ethnic Romanians live in
the neighbouring Ukraine, mostly in the eastern Romanian territories annexed in
1940 after an ultimatum by the former Soviet Union and inherited by Ukraine as
a successor state in 1991.

US Open. The
Romanian-Dutch pair Horia
Tecau and Jean-Julien Rojer won the men’s doubles title at the US Open,
defeating the all-Spanish pair Feliciano Lopez and Marc Lopez in straight sets.
This is Tecau and Rojer’s second Grand Slam title after winning their first at
Wimbledon in 2015. Tecau also played the mixed doubles semifinals together with
the American player Coco Vandeweghe, but lost to the Swiss-British pair Martina Hingis and Jamie Murray.

Boxing. The Romanian boxer
Ronald Gavril was defeated by the American boxer David Benavidez by a split
decision in a match for the WBC super middleweight title held on Friday night
in Las Vegas. Gavril thus missed the chance to become Romania’s fifth world
champion in professional boxing after Mihai Leu, Leonard Doroftei, Lucian Bute
and Adrian Diaconu.

Festival. The George Enescu Festival has
entered its 8th day. The highlights today are the concerts given by
the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev and Camerata
Salzburg conducted by Tiberiu Soare. The concerts are broadcast by Radio
Romania’s music and culture channels.

9 September 2017
Ethnic Minorities in visual culture – focus Romania

Between August 20 and October 4, the PostModernism Museum Association exhibited in Brussels a research project entitled “Ethnic Minorities in visual culture -Focus Romania. The initiative comes in the context of Europe-wide talks regarding the integration of migrants, and looks at the 18 ethnic minorities represented in the Parliament of Romania at present. The project celebrates the centennial anniversary of Greater Romania, to be marked on December 2018, while at the same time questioning concepts such as ethnic identity, cultural diversity and nationality. With details on that here is the curator of the project Cosmin Nasui.

What we as researchers were mainly interested in was not to find new labels to attach to concepts, but to identify the multicultural factor and the extremely important contribution it had in shaping a young nation. Our interest was in reading how such a contribution turned out to be crucial in the extremely important moments when the Romanian identity was created. Another issue we were also interested in was to see what minorities lived on Romanian territory in the last hundred years and which of them were transnational minorities, that is minorities belonging to Europe and not necessarily to us. For instance, the Roma population and the Jews… It was also interesting for us to have a look at the neighboring minorities, those which came into being as the territory of the nation state successively expanded or shrank. In other words, at certain moments the Romanian territory encompassed neighboring populations, or rather, important communities from neighboring populations remained on Romanias territory. What we had in mind here were the Hungarians in Transylvania, the Germans in Dobrogea, the Saxons in Banat, very interesting communities, with a very interesting contribution in terms of visual culture.

The exhibition, which was the result of research work and which was staged in Brussels, is based on representations in Romanian visual culture of the “old, traditional minorities, such as the Jews, Greeks, Lipovans, Hungarians, Turks, Tartars, Roma, as well as on representations of the “new minorities, which have cropped up after the 1989 Revolution, like the Chinese, British, French, Indians, Lebanese. With details on that, here is Cosmin Nasui again.

“There are original paintings, graphic art works, sculpture and photography works, alongside infographics. This means we tried to display the entire research work in a visual manner and we transferred each of the sub-issues into the 14 diagrams focusing on exoticism, discrimination, autonomy, exile, colonisation. Images and texts overlap, so that everyone should find it very easy to trace and understand a particular topic, which we have followed for the span of 100 years.

The “old, historical minorities were very interestingly represented in Romanian painting by such artists as Iosif Iser, Nicolae Tonitza, Octav Băncilă, Nicolae Grigorescu, but they are also represented in the photographs and postcards that circulated at the time. Explaining all that, here is Cosmin Nasui once again.

“Visual culture, especially cinema, approaches these minorities. It is quite interesting to follow the so-called new wave in Romanian cinema, with its range of themes stemming from the area of ethnic minorities. For the Chinese minority we have Year of the Dragon, a documentary directed by Adina Popescu and Iulian Manuel Ghervas. For the Saxon minority there are a couple of films directed by Radu Gabrea, such as “Red Gloves or “The beheaded rooster. There are films, from fiction to documentaries to docu-fiction, such as Alexander Nanaus work, ‘Toto and his sisters, looking at the issue of an old minority in Bucharest, that of the Roma community. We also had a series of exhibitions mounted in Bucharest, focusing on discrimination. Again, there is an interesting series of monuments erected after the moment the Holocaust was recognized. They can be found in Cluj, in Bucharest. The first visual signs highlighting the process of recognition of the Holocaust on Romanian territory were the plates that were placed in the railway stations where the death trains departed.

The Ethnic Minorities in visual culture-focus Romania project has also a continuing research component. The commentaries and testimonials of visitors will be integrated in future exhibitions, as well as in the exhibition catalogue. From Brussels, the exhibition arrived in Bucharest, and will be open over October 9 and November 3 at the Museum of Bucharest Municipality, the Minovici Mansion. Then it will travel to Brasov, Cluj and Craiova, and next year it will reach the Benelux countries.

(Translated by E. Nasta)

15 October 2016