Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 1939. THE SLOVAK CRISIS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 129, 14 March 1939, Page 4

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 1939. THE SLOVAK CRISIS.

The crisis that has arisen in Czechoslovakia is the outcome of a protracted struggle between the Czechs and the Slovaks, intensified; by the ceding of Sudetenland to Germany last September. To fully appreciate the position it must be borne in mind that Czechoslovakia has been more of a conglomeration of peoples than a nation, the development of national consciousness being impeded not only by racial and language differences but also b'y the establishment at Prague of a highly centralised Government under the domination of the Czechs, the most numerous element in the population and, with the Germans, the most enlightened. Even before the recent secessions, Czechoslovakia was predominantly a Slav about eleven of her fifteen million people tracing to the Slav race. Their racial kin were the Poles, Yugoslavs (South Slavs), Bulgars and the great Russian people. Through the Hapsburgs they had been ruled for centuries by the Germans numbering 3,250,000 in Bohemia and Moravia and by the 750,000' Magyars, who lorded it in Slovakia and the Carpathian province of Ruthenia. The Magyars are a warrior race related to the Finns, coming out of Eastern Europe and Asia stamped with many Mongolian characteristics. When the Czechoslovak Constitution was drafted in 1919 and 1920, a Convention Parliament, which included fifty-four Slovak deputies, debated the possibility of Slovak autonomy at great length and with great keenness. The Slovak deputies constituted a “Slovak Club, which acted as a distinct parliamentary party just as the Czech political group did; and this Slovak body, although at first divided into centralists and autonomists, unanimously decided to accept the Charter of the Constitution, in which no provision was made for autonomy. But .there was not the same unanimity among the Slovak people themselves and the autonomists have from time to time renewed pressure for the granting of a large measure of autonomy. Still internal difficulties relating to law and language, culture and politics were apparently being gradually overcome. Then suddenly, the action of the Sudeten Germans rekindled the flame.