August 27, 2007 (the date of publication in Russian)
Alexander Rublev, Alexei Chichkin
A CHILD OF "THE SUPREME RACE"
EU Commissioner views Slavs as inferior citizens?
After World War II Austria faced a serious political challenge. Many European politicians demanded that the native country of Adolf Hitler share responsibility for the ascent of Nazism, and therefore the burden of reparations, along with Germany. Vienna, in its turn, tried to portray itself as a victim of a Nazi occupation. Eventually, Austrian politicians managed to provide evidence of resistance of its population to the Nazi, represented with the activity of guerilla units in the provinces of Styria and Carinthia. Though those guerillas were of Slovenian and Croatian origin, they were Austrian citizens, thus enabling Austria to position itself as a participant of anti-fascist resistance.
For this priceless service, Austrian Slavs deserved gratitude from the state. However, this part of the native population of Austria's south-west, comprising almost fifty thousand people, were not granted any rights for cultural autonomy, such as education in the mother language and its use in local mass media and municipal management.
The issue of cultural rights of Austrian Slavs was repeatedly raised by Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After the disintegration of the Yugoslavian federation, the Slavonic population of Styria and Carinthia lost support from outside. Only a narrow group of Europarliamentarians, headed by Tatiana Zhdanok – an ethnic Russian MP from Latvia, elected from the Movement for Human Rights in Integral Latvia – revived the problem on the all-European level.
"Our group has unanimously endorsed a number of rather harsh recommendations, concerning elevation of the legal status of the Slavonic minority in Austria", says Mrs. Zhdanok. "In our draft resolution, we raised the problems of education in the native language, absence of bilingual identification certificates, as well as notations and signposts of towns and villages, and deficiency of broadcasting in Slovenian and Croatian language. We urged the Government of Austria to comply with the basic provisions of the European Charter of Regional and Minority Languages".
Benita Ferrero-Waldner, a citizen of Austria and the European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighborhood, regularly deals with problems of human rights, as well as rights of ethnic and confessional minorities. However, her approach is spectacularly biased. In some cases, for instance in the issue of the Albanian minority, she is very active and helpful. However, the same person becomes impenetrably deaf when European parliamentarians mention about the rights of Russian-speakers in Latvia and Estonia.
This contrast becomes especially striking when problems of minorities are raised in her native country. Could the Austrian Eurobureaucrat be overwhelmed with a personal phobia – or she is rather concerned of her personal popularity in the provinces where the Germanic majority does not want to discuss any "privileges" for the neighbor Slavs?
Mrs. Ferrero-Waldner's political stand may be predetermined with some particular features of her personality and political biography. Before achieving the position of a European Commissioner, she headed Austria's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her candidature was endorsed by the coalitional government of the rightist-centrist People’s Party (OVP) and the radical rightist Freedom Party (FP), chaired by Jorg Haider, son of a convinced Nazi, famous for his rabid attacks against ethnic minorities and immigrants. The coalition was very unpopular in Europe. After FP's success in the national elections, Israel even withdrew its Ambassador from Vienna. However, the obviously "brown" hue of the Austrian cabinet of that time did not contradict to personal principles of Mrs. Ferrero-Waldner, who accepted the chair of Foreign Minister from the rightist coalition and never expressed any protest against Haider's legislative initiatives. On the contrary, she felt quite comfortable in the company of radical rightists.
On this background, Mrs. Ferrero-Waldner's support for the decision of the newly-elected rightist Government of Estonia to pull down the memorial of the Liberators in Tallinn is quite logical and well corresponds with her political biography. The policy of language discrimination of the Russian minority, practiced in Estonia, is also quite acceptable for this lady, as in her native country, Slavs are treated essentially in the same way.
On the other hand, it is possible that Mrs. Ferrero-Waldner is motivated not with ideological bias but with shallowness of her humanitarian education, sometimes perceived as illiteracy. Addressing foreign media, she was proud to declare that she speaks several foreign languages, including Brazilian – though the people of Brazil speaks Portuguese. Such flubs, hardly forgivable for a professional diplomat, could be otherwise explained either with clinical megalomania, or with implicit joy of belonging to the supreme race.
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