On August 2, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited Beregszasz, where he also met representatives of the Transcarpathian Hungarian minority, including Ildiko Orosz, the president of Rákóczi College. During the short meeting, the wife of the president of the institution did not get to speak, but she managed to hand over to the president the written version of her speech and a study on the situation of minorities, in which suggestions were also made, as well as the published works of the college and KMPSZ on the situation of minorities in Ukraine. Ildikó Orosz's unspoken speech can be read below.

Dear Mr. PRESIDENT!

I welcome you to Subcarpathia as a representative of the Subcarpathian County Council delegated by the Subcarpathian Hungarian Cultural Association. It is an honor for me that II. I can also represent the Ferenc Rákóczi Subcarpathian Hungarian College and the teachers of Hungarian-language schools.

Our community - like all communities in the region - has done everything it could on its front since the first day of the Russian aggression. We accept refugees, and our teachers and students continue to provide assistance and interpretation at the borders and in various rest camps, and we also took an active role in conducting the National Multidisciplinary Test organized in Hungary.

As a teacher and now as a representative of the Subcarpathian County Council, re-elected for the sixth time, I worked in the committee dealing with education and national minorities. As a result, I am thoroughly familiar with the opinions, positions and problems of the national minorities of our region, especially in the field of education and public language use.

On behalf of the national minorities of the county, I would like to thank you for postponing the implementation of Article 7 of the Education Law of Ukraine until one year later. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that this measure does not provide a definitive solution to the existing problem. In our region, the educational rights of national minorities are still limited. The right to choose the language of education in our county was guaranteed by every state in power to which we belonged, however, the current education law restricts this right, which has a 150-year tradition.

Our colleagues, the teachers of the region, have drawn attention to this problem several times, and have proposed its solution on several occasions. Please accept these ideas from us, which we have already presented in our previous studies, and taking the opportunity, I will briefly describe the essence of the studies, what we want, and how it could all be realized.

Last week, I participated in the forum on the education of national minorities in the European Union, where I learned about the new laws on public and higher education in Romania, which provide all the rights for national minorities that we would ultimately be satisfied with.

Pursuant to the new law, Romanian as the state language in Romania will be taught in educational institutions in the mother tongue of national minorities according to the methodology of foreign language education. The vocational ministry should help minority students learn the state language by launching a separate national program. The law also guarantees the operation of scattered schools, it stipulates that even if the number of students does not reach 300, it will provide all the resources necessary for their operation.

The legislators also took into account the interests of young people belonging to national minorities who intend to continue their studies in higher education. When enrolling at a university, students can use the language they studied in high school, with the exception of courses related to national security. In those fields where there is no higher education in the language of the minorities, national minority students receive a special quota.

Thus, after Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia, the situation of minority language education was resolved in Romania as well. Ukraine continues to view the events as an outsider. It is time to settle this issue and for our legislators to think about amending the Ukrainian Education Law or the Law on National Minorities and Communities, as has already happened in Hungary. In its national minority law adopted in 2011, Hungary listed the officially recognized national minorities in Hungary, among which Ukrainians are included, thus ensuring the right to establish their own mother-tongue education system with state funding, as well as to delegate the representative or spokesperson of their choice to the parliament.

We, the national minority communities of the region, want nothing more than what the Ukrainian people have fought for for centuries: to be able to study in our mother tongue on the land where we have lived for more than a millennium. Therefore, we ask you to solve the given problem, which is a source of international conflict for our country.

The representatives of the national minorities of our region – Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks – fight and die for Ukraine at the front, and they want nothing more than for them, their children and their families to have the opportunity to live, speak and study in their native language in Ukraine.

I wish a peaceful sky above all of us.

Beregszász, 02.08.2023.
Russian Ildiko

Source: kmf.uz.ua/hu

Cover image: Source: II. Ferenc Rákóczi Transcarpathian Hungarian College Facebook