Romanian President: the country’s Communist regime was “illegitimate and criminal” (Dec 19, 2006)

Dec 19, 2006 (Romania Report & sources)

During an extraordinary parliamentary session on Monday, the country’s President Traian Basescu formally exposed and condemned the Communist crimes in Romania. Thus, Romania becomes the first state in the former East-European Block to officially denounce such crimes.

President Basescu’s statement summarised a 700 pages report issued by a special Presidential Commission which was set up, earlier this year, in order to assess to outcome of the 45 years long Communist rule. As many as two million people were killed or persecuted by the former communist authorities in Romania, an official report says.

Mr Basescu said the 1944-1989 Communist regime was "illegitimate and criminal". He made no difference between the “Stalinist Communism” imposed by the Soviet Union guns and the “National-Communism.”

He proposed a national memorial-day and museum for the victims of communism, along with a new history textbook.

The report was compiled by a presidential commission headed by Vladimir Tismaneanu, a well-known political scientist and former anti-communist dissident, who immigrated to the US in the 1980s.

Mr Basescu said the communist regime "trampled on the law and forced its citizens to live in lies and terror".

He levelled 21 charges against the communists, among them the imposition by force of a puppet pro-Soviet government in 1945, the destruction of Romania's democracy and persecution in the name of the class struggle of entire groups of Romania's population.

The report estimates the number of victims of communism in Romania at between 500,000 and two million.

It identifies former Romanian President Ion Iliescu - now an opposition Social Democratic Party senator - as one of the former close aides of Ceausescu and a prominent party bureaucrat who helped consolidate the communist regime.

Former Polish President and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and Bulgaria's former President Zhelyu Zhelev were among those at the parliamentary session.


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President Basescu’s speech was continuously booed by the leader of the ultra-nationalist ‘Greater Romania’ Party, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and his MPs. Mr Tudor is named in the report as a "poet of the communist regime". During the session, Mr Tudor even sent his supporters to terrorise some prominent anti-communist intellectuals, who came as guests in the Parliament balconies. Vadim Tudor himself took the stairs and shouted invectives towards the anti-communists and said “Ceausescu was a great man as compared with you, who are some insignificant worms.”

As about Mr Tudor’s behaviour, Cristian Tudor Popescu (the most popular Romanian journalist) said: “During this Parliament session we were able to see how hideously the Communism looks like. (…) Senator Vacaroiu (the session’s chairman) did not observe the rules as he did not evacuate Mr Tudor and ‘Greater Romania’ Party MPs who acted as hooligans.”


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Later in this evening, at the ‘Cotroceni’ Palace, Romania’s President Traian Basescu offered a reception to honour the distinguished guests Lech Walesa (former leader of ‘Solidarnosch’ and former President of Poland) and Zhelyu Zhelev (former President of Bulgaria). The former King of Romania Michael the 1st was also present. He was forced to step down from the throne by the Communists, back in 1947. He said that he had faith, he had trusted the Romanian people and now, after 49 years, he was happy to live the moment when his country openly exposed the Communist crimes.

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International media on Romania denouncing the Communist regime

Dec 19, 2006 (Romania Report)

Craig S. Smith of The New York Times reports from Paris that “President of Romania denounces Soviet era” (the story also makes the ‘International Herald Tribune Europe’ online edition). “Romania opens way to prosecute communist-era crimes” REUTERS reads. “Romanian President Says Communist Regime 'Criminal', Radio Free Europe says.

The New York Times Craig S. Smith’s report reads as it follows: President Traian Basescu of Romania on Monday formally condemned the Communist dictatorship that ruled his country for more than four decades, the first time a Romanian head of state had officially denounced the Soviet-era system.

"The regime exterminated people by assassination and deportation of hundreds of thousands of people," Basescu told his country's Parliament. He based his assessment on a 660-page report compiled by a presidential commission charged with analyzing the country's Communist past.

The move comes just two weeks before Romania joins the European Union on Jan. 1 and represents a belated attempt by the country to make a more complete break with the Communist past than was possible in the managed revolution of 1989. After the Communist authority collapsed in Moscow that year, many of the region's Communist officials simply changed hats and continued to participate in government when authoritarian one-party regimes morphed, largely unchallenged, into independent free-market democracies.

Romania's last Communist-era dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, was overthrown and executed but was replaced by a coalition of former Communist party officials under the banner of the National Salvation Front.

Some other former Soviet-bloc states have already condemned their Communist pasts. In July 1993, the Czech Republic passed an act condemning its Soviet-era government, and Bulgaria's Parliament passed a resolution condemning the former regime there in 2001. Last month, Ukraine's Parliament passed a bill labeling the Stalin-orchestrated famine of the 1930s that killed an estimated 10 million people an act of genocide.

"It is as important as the condemnation of National Socialism after the end of World War II," said Plamen Tzvetkov, a professor of history at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia.

But in many of the formerly Communist countries, the transgressions of the authoritarian past were never fully explored and the systems that made them possible were never completely condemned. Romania was among the most recalcitrant. Earlier this year, the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly passed a resolution condemning the region's former Communist regimes and called on all of the former communist states "to reassess the history of communism" and condemn the regimes "without any ambiguity."

As a result, Basescu was under increasing pressure from civil society and the European Union to condemn Romania's communist-era government, one of the most repressive in the region. He was reluctant to do so without an authoritative report to back it up.

In late March, he formed the Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship with young historians, psychologists and anthropologists to provide him with such a report. He named a University of Maryland professor, Vladimir Tismaneanu, to head the effort.

The work was not without its challenges because much of the Communist-era nomenklatura remain embedded in Romania's structures of power. The commission met silence from some government agencies and resistance from others. One of the commission's own members resigned, admitting that he had been a Communist Securitate informer.

The final report is long and occasionally lurid. One chapter recounts the chilling "Pitesti experiment," in which young political prisoners were systematically tortured and subject to brainwashing techniques by other prisoners in order to destroy their sense of self and replace it with loyalty to the state.

The report charges the Communist regime with crimes against humanity and puts responsibility for the misdeeds primarily on the party and its secret service, the Securitate.

"There's a lot of information in the report, woven together to make the indictment of Communism quite powerful," Tismaneanu said.

Ion Ilescu, the former president who dominated Romania's post-Communist political scene and is now honorary president of the opposition Social Democrat Party, is mentioned in the report as an important ideologue of the Romanian Communist Party. He served at one point as the head of the Central Committee's Department of Propaganda.

On Monday, he accused Basescu of "McCarthyism" and "politicizing history" and attempting to demonize the democratic left. The Social Democratic Party has adopted a resolution condemning the report.

The report cites the names of many other former apparatchiks, including Tismaneanu's own late father, Leon Tismaneanu, who was deputy director of the state publishing house and wrote in support of the regime.

Corneliu Vadim Tudor, now leader of the ultranationalist ‘Greater Romania’ Party, was singled out for his role as a former Communist state poet.

Tudor and his supporters tried to disrupt the parliamentary session Monday. At one point, Tudor stood up, blew a whistle and held up a red card like those used to signal fouls in soccer. While some lawmakers applauded Besascu's remarks, others sat in silence.

The parliamentary session drew luminaries from the Communist-era dissident world, including King Michael I of Romania, who was forced to abdicate by the Communists in 1947, and Lech Walesa, the Polish labor leader and later Polish president who started the Soviet empire's unraveling with the Gdansk shipyard strikes.

Basescu, who was at one time captain of the largest ship in Romania's state-owned merchant fleet, said he would support the commission's recommendation that Romania establish a national day commemorating the victims of Communism and erect a museum of dictatorship. "The Communist regime was illegitimate and criminal," Basescu said. "It treated an entire population as a group of guinea pigs for an experiment."



Radu Marinas from Reuters yesterday reported: Romanian President Traian Basescu opened the way on Monday for the prosecution of crimes committed by the country's former communist dictatorship by issuing the first official condemnation of them.

Presenting a state-sponsored report on the crimes of communism drafted by a 19-member commission, Basescu asked for forgiveness from those who saw their lives ruined by communism.

"I categorically condemn the communist system in Romania, from its creation until its collapse in 1989," he said. "Dissidents were crushed ... The regime condemned the entire nation to misery, starvation and despair," he told parliament.

Basescu said the commission, made up of historians, dissidents and analysts who prepared the report, found that up to 2 million Romanians were killed, deported, imprisoned or forced into labour camps during the five decades of communism.

"I ask for forgiveness from all the people who saw their lives ruined by the communist dictatorship," he said. Analysts said the report could give legal arguments to victims seeking compensation and could speed up the process of restitution private property nationalised by the communists.

"It's a step forward," said political analyst Adrian Moraru.

Romanian communism crumbled in a violent revolt in December 1989, ending decades of bloodshed, deprivation and oppression that had left little room for resistance.

But Romania's democratic governments have been slow to condemn the hardline rule of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and later Nicolae Ceausescu, who was shot on Christmas Day 1989, with many elected politicians having close ties to the former regimes.

Analysts say this reluctance was an important reason behind Romania's slow transition from communism, which accelerated in the last few years and won the Black Sea state an invitation to join the European Union in January. Basescu said he would support the creation of a museum of dictatorship, a monument to the victims of communism and a school textbook.

Opposition deputies from the (ultranationalist) ‘Greater Romania’ Party (PRM) booed and whistled as Basescu spoke to protest against the report labelling their party president Corneliu Vadim Tudor as Ceausescu's "court poet". They held banners with an image of Basescu behind bars.

"It is a false, politically orchestrated report," Tudor said. "I agree we should unmask the crimes of the Stalinist era, but shouldn't it also condemn the Queen of England, who was in the same car with the dictator?"



Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty: Romanian President Says Communist Regime 'Criminal'

Romanian President Traian Basescu presented to parliament a report denouncing the former communist regime as "illegal and criminal," RFE/RL's Romania-Moldova Service reports (also using AP material.

Basescu, in presenting the 650-page report, accused the communist regime of gross violations of human rights.

"For the citizens of Romania, communism was a regime imposed on them by a political grouping that claimed to own the truth, a totalitarian regime that was born through violence and came to an end through violence," he said. "It was an oppressive regime that deprived the Romanian nation of five decades of modern history and broke the law and forced the citizens to live in lies and in fear."

Ultranationalist hecklers interrupted Basescu with jeers.

The officially commissioned report was drafted by a team led by University of Maryland professor Vladimir Tismaneanu. It details communist-era crimes, including the repression of dissidents and religious groups, censorship, starving the population, and confiscating or demolishing the homes of hundreds of thousands of people.

Basescu backed the panel's recommendation to establish a national day commemorating victims of communism.

If approved by lawmakers, it would be the first official condemnation of communism in Romania, where the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in 1989 after 45 years in power.

Romania Report & sources