Last week opposition party PS organized an outreach visit to southern Slovakia where in Komarno on 20 November the PS parliamentary group adopted a resolution on coexistence and development in southern Slovakia. Among other points, it called on the government to make gestures of goodwill towards Hungarians in Slovakia, which may include acknowledging that Czechoslovak authorities committed violations of humanitarian principles and other wrongs against the Hungarian community in the post-war period.
According to the resolution, such gestures may also include adopting measures "to ensure that state authorities, when assessing lawsuits on determining ownership of property connected with confiscation decisions, observe the principle that the decrees of the President of the Czechoslovak Republic, as part of Slovak law, have expired and cannot serve as a basis for decisions creating new legal realities".
The statements by PS drew strong criticism from coalition parties as well as from the opposition KDH. Its vice-chair Viliam Karas stated that although PS believes it is appealing to voters of Hungarian nationality, "in reality it does nothing but introduce tension into society and awaken old wrongs that may harm all of us – Slovaks and Hungarians alike".
Foreign and European Affairs Juraj Blanar (Smer-SD) declared on Tuesday that the statements by PS on the Beneš Decrees are unacceptable. He accused PS of trying to attain power even at the cost of "playing the Hungarian card".
"I consider this an undermining of the Slovak Republic at its foundations and a disruption of the post-war settlement, which is absolutely unacceptable," the Minister emphasized, pointing out that Slovak-Hungarian relations are currently at the best level in the history of the independent Slovak Republic.
SNS Chairman Andrej Danko called on all political parties, including PS, not to reopen the issue of the Beneš Decrees, and stated that if PS continues to pursue the topic, SNS will prepare a legal analysis.
Danko argued that it is not good to reopen the trauma of the post-war settlement and pointed out that the Beneš Decrees remain valid legal provisions. He further criticized other statements by PS concerning life in southern Slovakia. "I do not think that southern Slovakia suffers from a lack of infrastructure," he said and concluded that the party merely seeks to provoke tension between Slovakia and Hungary.
The head of Hlas-SD and Interior Minister Matúš Šutaj Eštok also criticized PS's statements. "It proposed halting the application of the Beneš Decrees. We have the best relations with Hungary in history today, so why not throw a grenade into them, right? Only the progressives are unfailingly throwing it on the Slovak side of the Danube," he wrote on social media.
The Beneš decrees were a series of laws drafted by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in the absence of the Czechoslovak parliament during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in World War II. They concerned the restoration of Czechoslovakia and its legal system, denazification and reconstruction of the country. They also dealt with the status of ethnic Germans and Hungarians in the postwar state, and represented the legal framework for the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia.
The decrees treated German and Hungarian citizens as collective criminals. As a result most ethnic German and Hungarians, those with long time roots in Czechoslovakia and those who settled there during the German occupation, lost their Czechoslovak citizenship and property.
The decrees remain controversial and have never repealed. They are still used to confiscate property from Hungarians in Slovakia.
Source: TASR, Wikipedia
