The Slovak-Hungarian reconciliation

The Party of the Hungarian Coalition (MKP) in Slovakia recently proposed that the parliaments in Bratislava and Budapest pass a statement of reconciliation to close the history of strained relations between the two countries. Slovak historian Stefan Sutaj, president of the Slovak-Hungarian Historians' Commission, advocates a somewhat different concept of reconciliation in an interview with Józef Szilvássy. "It would be a mistake to make a categorical list of all the injustices for which the two countries should apologise to each other... If the French and the Germans had opted for this solution the list of complaints would be several thousand pages long... Since the history of conflict between Slovakia and Hungary is much less bloody than that between Germany and France, I'm confident we will be able to bring about reconciliation within the near future. But politicians would do better to keep out of this and leave the past to the historians."

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