Thirty years after the death of Nicolae Ceausescu, whose fall dragged to Romania in the most traumatic episode of the collapse of the iron curtain, the story has not yet brought an end to his sinister legacy. A month ago started in Bucharest the macro trial that will determine the authorship of the almost thousand of deaths in the Romanian revolution, nearly all after the disappearance of the Conducator, and the prosecutors consider crimes against humanity. This year, in addition, may be imputed the first responsibility of orphanages —whose horrible existence revealed the fall of the regime— by the death between 1966 and 1989, and from 15,000 to 20,000 children. The image of the fright with which many identify the Ceauşescu’s Romania was the cadaveric legion of beings in the bones.
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the execution of The dictator and his wife, Elena, after 23 years in power, flew open the gate of a flow of repression, suspicion, permanent —azuzada by the infamous Securitate, the secret police— and misery-atrocious instrumented for whom the West came to be considered the free verse of communism.
in mid-December of 1989, the country seemed to be one more card in the house of cards of This. The transfer of pastor László Tőkés, critical of the regime, from his church in Timisoara, he lit the wick of the protests. Ten days after, the 25, the corpses of Ceausescu, executed after his summary trial, they were shown to the cameras in a show of exhibitionism vindicante, as the iraqi Saddam Hussein 14 years later. With the assassination, the blood began to run down the country. But what happened to that in Romania overflowed the tide of freedom that marched peacefully in the East european?
gore, accusing the former president Ion Iliescu, who assumed the presidency on December 22, the day that he fled Ceausescu; his exviceprimer minister and the chief of the Air Force. The Prosecution argues that led to the revolution and deliberately created an atmosphere of chaos in order to achieve the power, which resulted in “hundreds of unnecessary deaths”. Ergo avoidable, as, according to experts of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes —an official instance— were also the most deaths in orphanages, the lethal result of the will of perpetuation of a regime increasingly alienated and totalitarian: the prohibition of abortion and contraception, to increase the birth rate, the more an economy strangled to death and in the hands of the IMF, led to the practice of starvation to thousands of pregnant women and babies while the Ceausescu swam in a megalómana opulence.
expand photo Capture video of the trial to the marriage Ceausescu on 25 December 1989.
unlike their counterparts in Poland, Hungary or Bulgaria, which at the behest of Mikhail Gorbachev had understood the need for dialogue, Ceauşescu enrocó, reaching out to ask for intervention by the Warsaw Pact in October against the opening of poland. “The Romanian regime was the only one unable to change. Since 1965, Ceausescu had been promoted in the party leadership, the State and the Securitate loyal that they show obedience and servitude. In 1989 there was no one that could propose reforms or political solutions following the model of Gorbachev”, explains by e-mail the researcher Dumitru Lacatusu, from the Centre of Historic Consultation. “The Securitate had free reign to do what they did since 1948 [when it was founded the mode of the NKVD soviet]: suppress any attempt of revolt, as in 1987, in Brasov”, the scene of a massive strike in the textile industry.
“Ceausescu presented the protests in Timisoara as the action of foreign agents and terrorists, and ordered the Army and the Interior Ministry (Securitate and Militia) that the crush. And threatened his faithful with resign, what caused these to close ranks and encastillaran. In summary,” adds Lacatusu, “the Romanian was the only violent revolution because the communist elite was composed only of the faithful, by the lack of alternative to Ceausescu, his rejection of any type of reform and the defense of the regime by the Securitate”.
Adrian Cioroianu, historian, journalist, politician, and former minister of Foreign affairs, recalls the fall of the tyrant his unexpected debut in journalism. “I was a student and was on vacation in my hometown, Craiova (south-west). Day 22 I went out to the street with a flag after hearing on tv that Ceauşescu had fled from a meeting of the central committee of the party. Two or three dozen colleagues have been locked in the Student’s Home. On the 23rd day I premiered as a journalist on the first free number in the local newspaper,” she recalls.
The fervor of youth made him view the process against Ceausescu as a necessary evil. “His execution seemed to me logical. The dictator seemed so intangible and so invulnerable that, in my head, only his death could mean the triumph of the revolution. But now I understand that in December of 1989 took several levels: a popular revolt real (16 to 21), after a coup within the party (22-25), and the challenge of the anti-communist opposition, which then arose. But I think that was a real revolution, by its consequences in the following years”.
expand photo Burial of a victim of the revolution, on the 24th of December 1989 in Bucharest. ANDREI ILIESCU EFE
As if the three decades since they were a parenthesis of responsibility and abandonment of art, the two experts are reluctant to speak of the term transition: its concept, but also of your time. “Romania is, after 1989, democracy reborn. And in a democracy a political transition never ends. The problem, in my opinion, is that since the early nineties there has been no political desire real to shed light. The crimes of 16-22 can be elucidated, for the responsibility of the hierarchy. But in the recorded from of the 22, is hard to prove what was chaos revolutionary, and what manipulation, intentional or not. The paradox is that the justice is approaching the truth now, when the number of potential perpetrators has been reduced by natural reasons”. The own Iliescu has 89 years of age and a fragile health to face a trial that threatens to take: only in the first phase is expected to declare to 5,000 witnesses.
The stagnation político that followed 1989 is the key for Lacatusu, to analyze the shadows of the transition. “The elite that took power, which was presented as fruit of the revolution, became the National Salvation Front [FSN, newly created by Iliescu] party and state apparatus, and his first act was to call to Moscow. That elite did not hesitate to use political violence against the critics, but at the same time presented his regime as a true democracy. Iliescu signed the peace with the older nomenclature and with the Securitate, whose commanders were absorbed by the new system. It was in 1996, with the electoral triumph of the COR [centre-right coalition], when the politicians distanced themselves from the communism, but, after a four-year term, including president Emil Constantinescu declared defeated by the Securitate. At least until the entry of Romania into the NATO [in 2004], members of the Securitate were kept in institutions of the State. The imitation of democracy was a feature of the transition in romania. Only the euro-atlantic direction of NATO and the EU [2007] accelerated the transition”.
The complete alienation of the past it gives even face to face with the fact that the old nomenclature is travistiese as a democrat to incarnate during decades the new system. And the documentary evidence do not help either, remember Lacatusu: “to do justice to the victims, it is key that you make public the documents, not only of revolution, but of the whole communist period. But even the National Council for the Study of the Files of the Securitate (CNSAS), the institution that has taken care of your files, just documents dated until the 22nd of December [1989]”.
special Troops against units of the Army
The revolution more bloody of the iron curtain claimed a number of dead unknown. The figure is more prudent to speak of 862; other sources raise the balance up to nearly 1,300. The historian Adrian Cioroianu offered another estimate: “From the 22nd of December [day of the flight Bucharest Ceausescu] were killed 940 people; a huge number compared with around 150 who died in the previous days”.
The greatest shedding of blood occurred when “special forces camouflage, who had been trained in plan guerrillas to fight against a hypothetical foreign occupation of the country, clashed with Army units with the goal of inciting panic and confusion. And this is what they did, even facing these units. The regular forces responded chaotically, shooting at anything that it strange”. This would explain the high number of victims, according to the historian.
