Unrest in Ukraine’s Little Hungary

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Eastern Ukraine has been under assault from Russian backed rebel forces for the past five years, but few have heard of a smaller conflict, which could be brewing in the west of the country, between Ukraine and Hungary. Some have accused the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban of trying to create a breakaway state in impoverished Transcarpathia, once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Ukraine and Hungary both expelled diplomats from each other’s nations, following a row over passports and a Hungarian cultural centre has been repeatedly firebombed. Lucy Ash meets people in the Ukrainian border town of Berehove and investigates whether deepening tensions could destabilise the region and further dash Ukraine’s hopes of being a unified country inside NATO and the EU.

Producer: Josephine Casserly

(Image: Pupil at a Hungarian-language secondary school in Berehove in Western Ukraine walks down a corridor bearing a portrait of Lajos Kossuth, the 19th Century political reformer after whom the school is named. Credit: Balint Bardi)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading this podcast from the BBC World Service.
0:07.1	So you're saying there was a bomb thrown through this window?
0:10.3	Every window there were bombs. I'm Lucy Ash and this week's assignment on the BBC World Service
0:17.0	comes from what used to be one of the quietest parts of Ukraine
0:21.0	on the border with Hungary.
0:23.0	I'm going to be here.
0:25.0	Everything was black, so everything was like ashes,
0:30.0	like everything was burnt,
0:32.0	and you couldn't touch anything without getting ashes on your hand or your jacket.
0:38.0	I'm in the shell of what was once a cultural center for the ethnic Hungarians who live in this most Western province of Ukraine,
0:45.0	a little known impoverished region called Transcarpathia next to the border with Hungary.
0:51.0	This building was firebombed last winter and the second attack
0:55.6	destroyed most of the ground floor. Why though was this place a target?
1:00.2	It's not a military base, it's not an embassy or a consulate.
1:05.0	We didn't have like government documents or we didn't deal with government issues here
1:12.0	and that's why she thinks it's an attack on the Hungarian community.
1:16.7	150,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine.
1:20.8	They wound up on this side of the border when it was redrawn after World War I.
1:27.0	Attention this week may be focused on the presidential elections in the capital Kyiv, nearly 650 kilometers
1:36.1	east, but I've come to investigate the Rao brewing here in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.
1:43.2	Ukraine is already at war with Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country.
1:48.0	Now it's worried that Hungary is creating a breakaway state here in the west.
	...

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