Seen on: NPR
Ex-Romanian Dictator Ceausescu, Wife Are Exhumed
by The Associated Press
Taking the country by surprise, forensic scientists on Wednesday exhumed what are believed to be the bodies of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena at the request of their children.
Ceausescu ruled Romania for 25 years with an iron fist before being ousted and executed during the 1989 anti-communist revolt in which more than 1,000 people were killed.
Some Romanians doubt that the Ceausescus were really buried in the Ghencea military cemetery in west Bucharest. There is also some nostalgia for the communist period and regrets that the couple was executed on Christmas Day, 1989.
The news of the exhumation, the latest development in a five-year court case, broke as most Romanians were asleep. Officials rapidly closed the cemetery as dozens of journalists began arriving at the gates. A few elderly people wandered around the sprawling cemetery but were kept away from the exhumations by guards.
Ceausescu was toppled Dec. 22, 1989, as Romanians fed up with years of draconian rationing and communist rule revolted. He tried to flee Bucharest by helicopter but his pilot switched sides. After a summary trial, Ceausescu and his wife were executed by a firing squad three days later.
A team of pathologists and cemetery officials hoisted the wooden caskets of Ceausescu and his wife out of their graves Wednesday. They took samples from the corpses and put them into plastic bags — a process lasting more than two hours — before reburying the coffins.
"We are closer to knowing the truth," the couple's son Valentin Ceausescu told The Associated Press by phone.
Officials say it will take up to six months to determine the identity of the remains.
Ceausescu's alleged remains were better preserved than those of his wife, said Mircea Oprean, the couple's son-in-law who was present at the exhumation.
Oprean's wife, Zoia Ceausescu, had sued the defense ministry in 2005, saying she had doubts that her parents were buried in the cemetery. She died of cancer in 2006 and her brother Valentin took up the case.
Cemetery worker Cornel Muntean told the AP that Ceasescu was dressed in a thick gray overcoat. An AP reporter saw a dirty cloth being removed from Ceausescu's remains and what looked like a thick gray fur hat at the end of the coffin.
Romanians rose up in 1989 as other Communist regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe, angered and exhausted by years of rationing as the dictator tried to pay off the country's foreign debt. Meat, cooking oil and butter were severely limited and blackouts were common.
Ceausescu stifled dissent with his Securitate secret police, which were believed to have 700,000 informers in the nation of 22 million.
Showing posts with label Romania. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romania. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
A Different Kind of Anniversary - 20 Years Since the Death of Ceausescu
In contrast with the last article on Stalin....
Somewhere, I recall reading that collective memories begin to take shape some 20-30 years after a traumatic historical event has taken place, because it is the time necessary for a generational shift to occur.
Somewhere, I recall reading that collective memories begin to take shape some 20-30 years after a traumatic historical event has taken place, because it is the time necessary for a generational shift to occur.
From: BBC News
Romania marks sombre anniversary
By Nick Thorpe
BBC News, Bucharest
The people of Romania are marking the 20th anniversary of the 1989 revolution which brought down Nicolae Ceausescu.Small commemorations have been held at cemeteries and sites associated with the revolution in several cities, including Bucharest and Timisoara.
President Traian Basescu referred to more than 1,100 people who died during the revolution, as he was sworn in for a second, five-year term in office.
He told parliament the full truth was not known about the bloody uprising.
Those responsible for the deaths had not been punished, he added.
Speaking of the people killed in 1989, Mr Basescu said: "Their sacrifice was the foundation stone of today's democratic institutions."
He made his speech in the House of the People, built by the former dictator Ceausescu, which dominates central Bucharest.
Only a handful of top army and secret police officials were ever put on trial over the events of the revolution.
Two army generals began a 15-year sentence only last year.
There is a sense in Romania that the revolution is disappearing into the history books - and that gives a new urgency to this year's celebrations.
They come as a BBC investigation has disclosed that many Romanian orphans who came to international prominence in the 1990s after the end of communist rule are still in institutional care and living in appalling conditions.
The report uncovered widespread evidence of neglect, with some patients left bed-bound and lying in their own faeces.
Many of the thousands of unwanted babies who were left in state orphanages under communist rule are now in adult institutions.
The Romanian government says it is committed to upholding the rights of those with disabilities.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Romania's Secret Police
This seems to be a day full of news on repressive secret police forces and the miles of files they left behind. For more on Ceausescu and Romania, click here.
From BBC News:
Romania's state terror legacy lingers
By Oana Lungescu
BBC News, Bucharest
Twenty years ago, communist regimes collapsed one after the other like dominoes across Central and Eastern Europe.
The last one to fall, in a bloody revolution, was Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. But communism has left a poisonous legacy in the vast archives of the secret police, the dreaded Securitate.
Inside a sprawling military compound at Popesti-Leordeni, on the outskirts of the Romanian capital Bucharest, grey metal shelves are stacked with bulging grey files. There are more than two million files on 20km (12.4 miles) of shelves.
Germina Nagat calls it "an evil library". As the chief investigator for the
Mrs Nagat spends a lot of time poring over the files.
"You can find anything," she says. "It's a story of human guilt, human weakness, sometimes courage."
Boiled bark
What Ioana Voicu Arnautoiu has found here is an incredible story of defiance.
A concert violinist, she was born in a cave in the Carpathian mountains. Her parents were partisans, part of a small desperate band that resisted the communist takeover in the 1950s.
They held out for nine years - surviving sometimes on boiled bark - before the Securitate hunted them down.
Now it is the Securitate's own records that are revealing Ioana's family history, in 85 thick files and a collection of black-and-white photographs.
One shows her mother climbing out of the cave and going down a ladder, carrying baby Ioana under one arm like a doll.
Before her father was executed, the Securitate took a last photograph of his gaunt face, with dark, haunted eyes. Her mother died later in prison.
Ioana was spared. Aged two, she was taken to an orphanage and adopted by a loving family. She grew up without knowing who she really was - until Communism fell and the archives opened.
Her story might be unbelievable - if the Securitate had not archived everything so thoroughly. What in some ways is even more unbelievable is the extensive records on those who did not actively resist.
Blackmail
Almost anything could be a reason for opening a file, Germina Nagat explained: "Persons who had relatives abroad; persons who used to tell jokes; persons interested in studying foreign languages."
By the 1980s, about one in 30 Romanians was a Securitate informer, including 10-year old children.
Some did it out of conviction, some were blackmailed. Most were offered something - a rare opportunity to travel abroad or better career prospects.
Like so many Romanians, I too had a file. In 1983, a Securitate officer tried to get me to spy on people I knew in exchange for a passport to travel abroad, and cancer drugs for my father. I said no.
When I asked to see that file five years ago, I was told it could not be found.
But the bulk of the archives was only transferred to the CNSAS before Romania joined the European Union in 2007. And recently, my file also surfaced.
Strictly secret
It was with some trepidation that I went to the CNSAS headquarters to read it.
The first surprise was that it came not in one, but two volumes. And it started much earlier than I thought - roughly at the time I became a student of English and Spanish at Bucharest University.
In one report, dated April 1983, a Securitate captain wrote that I refused to sign a written pledge to inform. The next page, marked "Strictly Secret" was signed by his superior.
It is a list of measures to be taken for my surveillance, including bugging my phone calls and intercepting my letters.
I suddenly recognise my father's minute handwriting in a letter to a friend abroad that I never knew he had sent.
It was duly photocopied, together with both sides of the envelope. The file contains many of my own letters. Some passages were underlined in blue or red pen by the Securitate.
The second volume is more of a shock. It contains 138 pages with transcriptions of phone-calls, including with my mother and my then-boyfriend. What we mostly talked about was my father's illness and his impending death.
All those conversations replay in my mind, as I go through dozens and dozens of transcriptions, all written in longhand by what appears to be a whole army of Securitate scribes.
The file ends in December 1985, several months after I had been allowed to leave Romania and just as I started working at the BBC's Romanian Service in London.
As the archives show, another arm of the Securitate continued to monitor me, along with many other exiles working for foreign broadcasters, until the last days of 1989...
Bullet in the head
To see the file at last is liberating, but deeply unsettling. So many strangers photocopied my letters and transcribed my phone calls - and for what?
But opening the archives is unsettling for others too. "These files aren't mine or yours, they belong to the state," said Dumitru Burlan, a retired Securitate colonel who was Nicolae Ceausescu's chief bodyguard.
At the CNSAS, chief investigator Germina Nagat believes that these dark secrets have to be exposed.
She and her colleagues regularly uncover evidence that some of those who collaborated with the former secret police are now senior judges, politicians and top civil servants.
"They have a hidden agenda - resistance to reforms," she said. "To violate the human and civil rights every day, that was their job. And now [they] have to do the reverse!
"How can you do this? You cannot be a ballerina after being an elephant!"
Romanian courts are dealing with some 700 cases of alleged Securitate collaborators in high places, but so far judges have ruled on only three.
There may be many Communist-era elephants out there still trampling on Romania's fledgling democracy.
You can hear more in State Secrets , Oana Lungescu's two-part documentary on the
starting on 10 December.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8401915.stm
Published: 2009/12/10 09:55:42 GMT
From BBC News:
Romania's state terror legacy lingers
By Oana Lungescu
BBC News, Bucharest
Twenty years ago, communist regimes collapsed one after the other like dominoes across Central and Eastern Europe.
The last one to fall, in a bloody revolution, was Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. But communism has left a poisonous legacy in the vast archives of the secret police, the dreaded Securitate.
Inside a sprawling military compound at Popesti-Leordeni, on the outskirts of the Romanian capital Bucharest, grey metal shelves are stacked with bulging grey files. There are more than two million files on 20km (12.4 miles) of shelves.
Germina Nagat calls it "an evil library". As the chief investigator for the
Mrs Nagat spends a lot of time poring over the files.
"You can find anything," she says. "It's a story of human guilt, human weakness, sometimes courage."
Boiled bark
What Ioana Voicu Arnautoiu has found here is an incredible story of defiance.
A concert violinist, she was born in a cave in the Carpathian mountains. Her parents were partisans, part of a small desperate band that resisted the communist takeover in the 1950s.
They held out for nine years - surviving sometimes on boiled bark - before the Securitate hunted them down.
Now it is the Securitate's own records that are revealing Ioana's family history, in 85 thick files and a collection of black-and-white photographs.
One shows her mother climbing out of the cave and going down a ladder, carrying baby Ioana under one arm like a doll.
Before her father was executed, the Securitate took a last photograph of his gaunt face, with dark, haunted eyes. Her mother died later in prison.
Ioana was spared. Aged two, she was taken to an orphanage and adopted by a loving family. She grew up without knowing who she really was - until Communism fell and the archives opened.
Her story might be unbelievable - if the Securitate had not archived everything so thoroughly. What in some ways is even more unbelievable is the extensive records on those who did not actively resist.
Blackmail
Almost anything could be a reason for opening a file, Germina Nagat explained: "Persons who had relatives abroad; persons who used to tell jokes; persons interested in studying foreign languages."
By the 1980s, about one in 30 Romanians was a Securitate informer, including 10-year old children.
Some did it out of conviction, some were blackmailed. Most were offered something - a rare opportunity to travel abroad or better career prospects.
Like so many Romanians, I too had a file. In 1983, a Securitate officer tried to get me to spy on people I knew in exchange for a passport to travel abroad, and cancer drugs for my father. I said no.
When I asked to see that file five years ago, I was told it could not be found.
But the bulk of the archives was only transferred to the CNSAS before Romania joined the European Union in 2007. And recently, my file also surfaced.
Strictly secret
It was with some trepidation that I went to the CNSAS headquarters to read it.
The first surprise was that it came not in one, but two volumes. And it started much earlier than I thought - roughly at the time I became a student of English and Spanish at Bucharest University.
In one report, dated April 1983, a Securitate captain wrote that I refused to sign a written pledge to inform. The next page, marked "Strictly Secret" was signed by his superior.
It is a list of measures to be taken for my surveillance, including bugging my phone calls and intercepting my letters.
I suddenly recognise my father's minute handwriting in a letter to a friend abroad that I never knew he had sent.
It was duly photocopied, together with both sides of the envelope. The file contains many of my own letters. Some passages were underlined in blue or red pen by the Securitate.
The second volume is more of a shock. It contains 138 pages with transcriptions of phone-calls, including with my mother and my then-boyfriend. What we mostly talked about was my father's illness and his impending death.
All those conversations replay in my mind, as I go through dozens and dozens of transcriptions, all written in longhand by what appears to be a whole army of Securitate scribes.
The file ends in December 1985, several months after I had been allowed to leave Romania and just as I started working at the BBC's Romanian Service in London.
As the archives show, another arm of the Securitate continued to monitor me, along with many other exiles working for foreign broadcasters, until the last days of 1989...
Bullet in the head
To see the file at last is liberating, but deeply unsettling. So many strangers photocopied my letters and transcribed my phone calls - and for what?
But opening the archives is unsettling for others too. "These files aren't mine or yours, they belong to the state," said Dumitru Burlan, a retired Securitate colonel who was Nicolae Ceausescu's chief bodyguard.
At the CNSAS, chief investigator Germina Nagat believes that these dark secrets have to be exposed.
She and her colleagues regularly uncover evidence that some of those who collaborated with the former secret police are now senior judges, politicians and top civil servants.
"They have a hidden agenda - resistance to reforms," she said. "To violate the human and civil rights every day, that was their job. And now [they] have to do the reverse!
"How can you do this? You cannot be a ballerina after being an elephant!"
Romanian courts are dealing with some 700 cases of alleged Securitate collaborators in high places, but so far judges have ruled on only three.
There may be many Communist-era elephants out there still trampling on Romania's fledgling democracy.
You can hear more in State Secrets , Oana Lungescu's two-part documentary on the
starting on 10 December.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8401915.stm
Published: 2009/12/10 09:55:42 GMT
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