BUCHAREST, Romania -- Alexandru Paleologu, a leading intellectual, senator and diplomat, has died on Sep 2. He was 86. His funeral will be held today, 01:30 PM, at Bucharest's Bellu cemetery. Paleologu died at home overnight after being ill for several months, friends and state news agency Rompres said Friday.
He had just been awarded a top prize for diplomatic excellence by President Traian Basescu the previous day. Paleologu served briefly as Romania's ambassador to France after the fall of communism in 1989, but resigned after falling out with then-President Ion Iliescu over his belief that Iliescu had not distanced himself sufficiently from the communist system.
In 1990, Paleologu declared himself the "ambassador of protesters" staging rallies against Iliescu in downtown Bucharest. The protests later were broken up by coal miners, and six people were killed and hundreds injured in three days of street violence.
"He had huge inner spiritual wealth, something you could feel by just looking at him," said political analyst and friend Stelian Tanase.
Paleologu was a founding member of the Civic Alliance, one of the first groups to press for democracy after 1989. He also served as a senator representing the Liberal Party from 1992 to 2004, although he was more a figurehead and less involved in daily political life.
Born into a family of Bucharest intellectuals, Paleologu worked for the Foreign Ministry before communism came to Romania in 1946. He later went into hiding in small town in the mountains in southern Romania, and was later arrested and sentenced to 14 years in a communist prison for plotting against the state. Paleologu spent five years in prison, and was released in the 1964 general amnesty for political prisoners.
A liberal before World War II, Paleologu was one of the first public figures in the post 1989-era to acknowledge that he had collaborated with the dreaded communist-era Securitate secret police, something that occurred after he was released from serving his sentence as a political prisoner. He told The Associated Press in a 2001 interview that he had become an informer out of fear, and said that he had always tried to give the secret police useless and harmless information.
Paleologu was widely admired for his manners and for a style reminiscent of the years before communism, considered one of Romania's most glorious eras. "He defied communism though his elegance and culture and his liberal view of life," said friend Dan Ciachir, who called Paleologu a mentor. "He taught me that brandy can be drunk with water, but whiskey should be drunk alone." Ciachir, who met Paleologu in 1970, said the only time he saw him without a tie "was at the seaside and during the hot Bucharest summers." "He was a Francophile with the look of an English lord," said news channel Realitatea TV.
During his trial in 1959, Paleologu insisted on wearing a handkerchief in the breast pocket of his prison garb.
True to his earlier beliefs, Paleologu continued to back the monarchy and particularly King Michael, who was forced to abdicate in 1947. He also was a strong supporter of the Romanian Orthodox Church, despite occasionally criticizing its leaders.
In 1990, while briefly serving as Romania's ambassador to Paris, Alexandru Paleologu acted as Grand Master of the then French-based Grand Lodge of Romania.
Paleologu is survived by his third wife, Pia, and son, Toader, a philosophy professor and political commentator. His funeral was scheduled for today, 01:30 PM, at Bucharest's Bellu cemetery.
AP and Romania Report
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