Summary: The Benes Decrees - Bilateral and Multilateral Aspects
Thomas M. Buchsbaum
After a long period of silence, the Benes Decrees suddenly became the focus of attention again, due to the upcoming EU membership of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. During the election campaigns of 2002 and 2003 the political parties of the Czech Republic were outdoing each other in reacting negatively to the demands of repealing the Benes Decrees that legitimized the collective dispossession of German and Hungarian speaking minorities.
What Prague had overlooked in that context was that the repeal demand did not refer to all of the Presidential Decrees but only to the few that legitimized the collective dispossession of German and Hungarian speaking minorities as well as their displacement and expulsion. These laws that are still applicable today are in stark contrast to international humanitarian rights and strain the bilateral relations between the Czech Republic and Austria and complicate the integration of the Czech Republic into the EU.
At the core of the relevant Benes Decrees is the collective uncompensated dispossession of German and Hungarian speaking minorities who were also collectively deprived of their Czech citizenship. In line with these decrees and on the basis of official and semiofficial calls the minorities in question were expelled, though an explicit "expulsion decree” never got beyond its first draft stage. A law of 8 May 1946, however, exempted expulsions from punishment and the restitution laws passed after the fall of the Iron Curtain discriminated those expelled and dispossessed against others sharing that fate.
Austria repeatedly demanded that the Czech Republic acknowledge and apologize for the injustice done, lift the relevant Presidential Decrees as well as the 1946 law of exemption from punishment for expulsion, apply its restitution laws indiscriminately, and make a symbolic material gesture of accepting its moral responsibility, all of which has so far been denied by Prague.
Up to now, the Czech Republic has neither complied with the requests of the UN Human Rights Committee nor with those of the European Parliament of 1999, both of which demand that laws be ridded of discriminating content. However, the European Parliament, after reviewing three expert assessments, does no longer see this shortcoming as an obstacle for Czech EU accession.
Fact of the matter is, that neither historians nor international bodies were able to answer the questions concerning the Benes Decrees in a universally acceptable manner. To do that will be the task of the states directly involved and cooperation with civil organizations will be of central importance in that effort. Unilateral reproaches as well as holding on to outdated positions will have to give way to futureoriented, unprejudiced approaches, so that it will eventually be possible to come to terms with a very complex past.
Ihre Meinung/your opinion/votre opinion:
