“I can’t imagine a more indigenous people in Ukraine than the Hungarians” – Szijjártó
Kiev
Budapest demands that Kyiv stop discriminating against the Hungarian national minority.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó stated this in an interview with Izvestia, answering the question: How does he assess the law on indigenous peoples adopted in Ukraine, according to which only Ukrainians, Karaites, Crimean Tatars and Krymchaks received special rights.
“Unfortunately, there is this long-standing conflict between us and Ukraine. I wish it didn't exist, but it does. Ukrainian parliament passed the law [about education], which definitely violates the rights of the Hungarian minority. I always tell my Ukrainian colleagues: if you compare the situation with the Hungarians before the adoption of the law and after, then you see an obvious difference - we don’t want anything supernatural, we only want to return to the status that we already had before,” the minister said.
According to him, if Ukraine is seriously thinking about European integration, the rule of law and democracy, then it should return its rights to the Hungarian minority.
He also noted that in Hungary the term “indigenous people” means that this community has been living in the specified territory for a long time.
“I cannot imagine a more indigenous people in Ukraine than the Hungarians. This, of course, is some exaggeration, but nevertheless these people have been living in this territory for centuries. There are even people there who, without leaving one city, could be citizens of as many as five countries: the USSR, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, Hungary. The ownership of the territory has changed, but not the people living on it,” noted the head of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry.
“As I understand from my Ukrainian colleagues, in their dictionary “indigenous” means something else. To me, this is honestly a little strange because this term can only have one meaning. One way or another, the Hungarians were not included among the indigenous peoples, although this could have solved the current situation. Because, as far as we understand, indigenous minorities have the same rights that Hungarians had before all the legislative changes. We constantly communicate with my Ukrainian colleague, Minister Kuleba, but so far we have not been able to achieve any breakthrough,” Szijjártó concluded.
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