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Neighboring Rumania is emerging from the Ceausescu tyranny with two ethnic traumas. In the west, almost half the country consists of the disputed region of Transylvania, where most of Rumania's ethnic Hungarians live. Ceausescu regularly accused them of sabotage and planned to destroy their villages and force them into housing complexes. Delighted at Ceausescu's fall, the Hungarians still wonder if the new government will treat them fairly. Case in point: the handling of Laszlo Tokes, the dissident Hungarian clergyman in the town of Timisoara whose harassment by Ceausescu's forces in December helped spark the revolt that eventually toppled the regime. Although Tokes was later named to the ruling National Salvation Front, he is still being guarded by the army in a remote northern village. Ostensibly it is for his own safety, but Tokes's father claims that the real reason is to prevent him from becoming a Hungarian folk hero.
To the east lies the Soviet republic of Moldavia, which Stalin created in 1940, when he annexed Bessarabia in a deal with Hitler. During the years when Ceausescu kept his people hungry and cold to sell food and fuel abroad, there was little reason for the 2 million Rumanians on the Soviet side of the border to long for home. Now, with democratic elections scheduled for April, some Moldavians have called for reunification with Rumania. Meanwhile, Rumania's newly recreated National Peasant Party has called for the return of the lost territory. To deflect just such demands, Moscow promised it would open the long-frozen border with Rumania for tourism and trade. Last week it announced that visas are no longer required for brief visits.
After World War II, the Soviet Union bit off a large chunk of eastern Poland and compensated for it by moving Poland's border with Germany westward to the banks of the Oder and Neisse rivers. When the German territories of Silesia and Pomerania thus became Polish, more than 3 million Germans fled or were expelled, but hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans remain. In a series of postwar treaties, including the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, signed by 35 states, West Germany has promised not to challenge the new frontiers of Europe. But Bonn insists that final agreement must await a peace treaty formally ending the war, a step that the cold war prevented.
Most West Germans dismiss the idea of reclaiming their former territories. But revanchist organizations, which include some of the survivors of the Germans who left the east, continue to use the issue as a political weapon. Hartmut Koschyk, head of the 2 million-member Association of Expellees, suggests that a "compromise" with Poland could work out a border "territorially in the middle."
In Paris last week, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said soothingly that "the Germans have no intention of provoking in the Europe of the future a discussion about frontiers" that would disrupt the Continent. But he again stopped short of saying Bonn has no territorial claims against Poland, insisting that he could not speak for both German states on the issue. With a national election in December, he apparently does not want to risk losing votes to the ultra-right-wing Republican Party.