Budapest pests

International frictions, like Paris frocks, run to style. And just as frocks which pursue vogue too breathlessly make ladies stick out in the wrong places, stylish frictions often make nations look silly. Recent fashion in creating conflicts has been to discover an oppressed minority. Last week, as long-smoldering Hungarian-Rumanian feelings suddenly flared up, the style slipped over into the realm of absurdity.

Crux of the Budapest-Bucharest discord has been Transylvania, which Hungary lost to Rumania in 1918. Last week Hungarian newspapers, notably the semiofficial Pester Lloyd, mouthpiece of ambitious Foreign Minister Count Stephen Csaky, turned on a vitriolic press campaign charging the most horrible atrocities against a most helpless minority in Transylvania--the Szeklers.

Few people had thought much about Sudeten Germans before Adolf Hitler began pitying them. Almost no one--except a few professional anthropologists and race historians--had even heard of the Szeklers before last week. But according to Hungarian papers, these poor people, who are of purest Magyar stock, were taking a pitiful mauling from the barbaric Rumanians. Thirty-six Szekler boys, whose innocent pleasure it was to gather and chat studiously about Hungarian arts and literature, were rounded up and "put through the third degree by the Rumanian police and mistreated in such a cruel way that some of them were left unconscious." Many others were arrested and mistreated for nothing more than possessing arms. Everyone in Central Europe, protested Hungarian papers, has some sort of weapon these days.

Who were these pathetic "expatriates"? The Szeklers (in Hungarian, Szekely, pronounced roughly Say-Kaiy)* are in no sense Hungarian expatriates. They make up less than one third of Transylvania's population (3,400,000). Most of them settled in Transylvania and the Banat on their way into Europe from Asia in the Ninth Century, before there was any such thing as a Hungary. Through most of their history they have had no more desire to be affiliated with Hungary than with Rumania.

They have hated all their rulers: Hungarians, Mongols, Turks, Habsburgs, Rumanians. During their latest affiliation to Hungary (1868-1918), their repression of the Rumanian majority in Transylvania was appalling. Nevertheless it was on behalf of this Hungarian minority that Budapest was last week crying up war.

What will probably prevent this petty war is fear of a bigger one. Both countries are courting neutral Italy assiduously, as a sort of insurance. And Italy, herself looking for insurance, wants Rumania and Hungary to get together in a solid anti-Soviet Balkan bloc. Last week Theophilus Sidorovici, leader of the Rumanian youth movement and reputed agent of King Carol II, was in Rome, where he gave the Pope a Rumanian carpet and mosaic of the Virgin, gave Premier Mussolini and Foreign Minister Count Ciano King Carol's regards. Hungarians, viewing this visit with suspicion, let it be known that Count Csaky himself would soon go to Rome.

But another Budapest announcement made it look as if Count Csaky's diplomatic visits are not always what they appear. During the past six months Count Csaky made frequent trips to Germany which were interpreted as meaning that Hungary was drawing closer to Germany. Last week the suave, ambitious, reckless, 45-year-old Count's engagement to beautiful, 28-year-old Countess Anna Maria Chorinsky was announced. Those trips to Germany, it appeared, were just to court the pretty lady at her family castle near Graz.

-- The term was last week being used in its broad sense--any Magyar in Rumania.

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