After Causescu's overthrow - hope,
GYÖZÖTT A NÉP! MEGDÓLT A DIKTATÚRA!
H
OPE, mixed with apprehension and distrust - those were the feelings of a group of
ROMANIA
Romanian-Hungarian refugees returning to their country on January
2. One had fled illegally across the "green frontier," like many thousands of others threatened by Causescu's police. I found fear and distrust myself in the same compartment with them. It was the first train from Budapest to Bucharest in four days. (There is only one, and it goes overnight.) Rail traffic had
THE FIRST victorious mass uprising in a Stalinized country been halted after secret police diehards since the Hungarian revolution took place in Romania in the fired on the international trains. As we days around Christmas. While the army took command of the approached the Romanian frontier, my fighting and managed subsequently to disarm the irregular companions pulled the blinds shut and turned off the lights for fear of snipers.
forces, under the pretext of stamping out the "terrorism" of
They begin to talk fearfully about what the secret police diehards, the state repressive apparatus has might await them at the frontier. They been thrown into disarray. Romanian journalists speak of a recalled incidents of harassment in the past, waits of up to seven hours. I told
"phantom state." The Communist Party is so much on the them about the treatment Irish people get defensive that its members and leaders claim that overnight it at points of entry in Britain and about the vanished totally and forever. In response to a small way the French government treats Basque refugees. That started a long and very frademonstration in Bucharest on January 12 that reflected a ternal discussion about the resemblances general feeling that the same people are still running the among oppressed peoples.
country under various disguises, the new government, itself
A journalist from the publication of a composed mainly of former CP leaders, declared the party nationalist pro-capitalist organization in
Hungary was pessimistic about the future illegal, although they have since back-tracked. The "National for Romanian Hungarians. He had grown
Salvation Government" is clearly terrified of any up in Romania, and thought that nothing demonstrations getting started, and prepared to promise had really changed; the Romanians were still chauvinists and only making pretencpractically anything to prevent them.
es for the sake of European public opinion.
Attitude to national minorities a touchstone
I said I thought the future depended on whether the revolution went forward and that a touchstone of any revolution was its attitude toward national minorities. If the revolution advanced and the people took their lives into their own hands, the demands of the Hungarians would be met;
if it went backward, the minorities would be the first to be attacked. Most of them were hopeful.
We reached the border around midnight.
The officials were notably unaggressive.
The Hungarians were astonished. But the whole elaborate apparatus was obviously intact. We waited for three hours in a desolate frozen landscape with snow falling and filtering into the poorly constructed cars, as officials slowly went their rounds and soldiers searched.
traces of fire. Along the sidewalks in the central squares were shrines to the martyrs of the revolution - rows of candles in front of placards and makeshift altars, often covered with loaves of bread and fruit. Crowds were always gathered around them, mostly made up of young people, many of high school age. The papers were full of homage to "the heroic youth."
There were slogans on the walls, but they seemed to date from the previous weeks — "The dictatorship has fallen, "the shoemaker [Causescu] has fallen, "Shoemaker, we will make shoes out of your hide." There were some slogans of "Down with Communism." There were
GERRY FOLEY many posters, but they seemed essentially to have been put up by the new government. The message was always along the lines "the people have won, and now the National Salvation Front is in charge and everyone must rally behind it." In the underground stop at the Piata Universitarii in the city center, typed communiques were pasted up apparently by private groups. There were always crowds reading them. Mostly they were appeals for democracy and "dialogue."
Here and there were lines in front of stores, apparently for meat, fish and cigarettes. The longest lines seemed to be for newspapers and books. The journalists I talked to estimated that the demand for
The train was almost totally empty after we passed the
MAGYAR ELO first big Hungarian towns inside Romania.
The Hungarian journalist went all the way to Bucharest, his hometown. When he arrived, he said, with relief, that the
Uj, demokratikus lapunk,
1. szám a romániai magyarsóg
1989.
szócsöve, december 23, szombat ma különkiadásban
Oj sorozat rhythm of life seemed normal. That proved to be a superficial impression.
KÖZPONTI DEMOKRATIKUS NAPILAP — BUKAREST
Very little had been done to repair the damage done in the fighting. Broken glass still lay everywhere. Bullet holes could be seen in plate glass windows. In buildings around the downtown squares, rows of windows stood empty, surrounded by jelenik meg
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ROMÁNIAI
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3
International Viewpoint #177 • January 29, 1990
ROMANIA papers was four times the supply. They thought it would be impossible to increase the press runs to anything like that amount because of a lack of paper. Romania has its own paper industry, but a lot of it was
Some critical books, originally printed in tiny editions, were being reprinted. One was Marin Preda's Cel Mai Lubit dintre paminteni ["The Most Beloved of Earthlings"), a fictionalized account of the early days of the Stalinist regime. The longest line I saw was for such books at the Sadoveanu bookstore near the Piata Universitarii. By the end of the day, it was possible to get into the store, but it needed an extraordinary hunger to fight one's way to within actual reach of the books.
Massive shortage of books and dictionaries
There were, in fact, few books of any kind in the bookstores. Causescu had been suspicious of all kinds of books, I was told, even Russian ones. This was the first major city I have ever been in where there was no Russian bookstore. Dictionaries of foreign languages were virtually unattainable. Contacts with foreigners had been forbidden. But many Romanians spoke French — the country has been under French influence since it achieved independence, and especially in the interwar period. Moreover, it is an article of nationalist faith that Romanians are a Latin people, and that gives a special importance to the language of the major "Latin"
I saw a huge crowd surrounding a truck full of newspapers. They were copies of the Paris daily Libération. The crowd pounced on them like famine-stricken
Almost all the periodicals in Bucharest were published in a Stalin-gothic palace on the northern edge of the city, called the Casa Scintei, for Scinteia, the organ of the Communist Party. It is now called "Freedom of the Press Square." The building was ringed by military forces and armed guards belonging to the building's staff. I went first to the office of the official press agency. The staff there had not been changed. An official told me that she had been offended by a denunciation of the CP by Brucan, himself a former CP leader. "He was privileged; I wasn't." She was bitter about the cuts the Causescu regime had made in the agency's budget. It had cut off all the foreign press services and subscriptions. She noted that the budget for them amounted to about as much cash as Causescu's daughter, Zoia, had on her
I went to the editorial offices of Adevarul, the old CP organ renamed. I met a journalist who was on the staff for his second day and had just written his first article. He told me, "I participated in the 4 to this paper and asked them if they want- revolution. As soon as it was over, I came ed someone from the revolution on the paper's staff remained essentially unchanged, and it had been unchanged for a long time. There had been a freeze on hiring, and for years, there had been virtually no openings for young people.
He thought that National Salvation Committees now existed at all levels of the society, but he did not have much concrete knowledge about became clear that the situation was quite uneven. In Adevarul, there was a National Salvation Committee that played a monitoring role. It was explained that such a committee was necessary there because the staff had been so little changed and the old party organ remained suspect.
In the case of Romania Libera, another Bucharest daily, three well-known dissidents, people who had tried to start an underground journal but were grabbed by the secret police during the printing of the first issue, had taken over the editorship. They had credibility, and so it was felt that there was no need to form a National Sal-
New editors elected on CP youth paper
At the other Romanian daily published in the Casa Scintei, Tineretul Liber, the former CP youth organization paper, new editors were elected the very day I visited the paper. Since there had been elections, it was argued, there was no need for a National Salvation Committee.
Government subsidies had been cut off. All the papers claimed to be independent. But no new system of financing has been conceived. For the moment income from sales is unusually high, but it is far from clear that the press can be financed that way. The staffs are small for daily papers, about 100 for Adevarul, 40 for Tineretul Liber, 62 for the Hungarian daily Magyar Szo. The printing plant workers have already organized and won Sundays off.
"The first legal student rally in 45 years," as the students and the press billed it, took place on Sunday, January 7, at the Polytechnic Institute. The report of it in Adevarul of January 9 was an indication that the population had good reason to mistrust the old party paper.
The article reported none of the conflict between the government and the new student association that formed the background to the rally, that had been called to protest decisions taken by the Ministry of Education to set the winter term without consulting the students.
In fact, the students had wanted to hold a demonstration, but found that the government was dead set against that. It told them that there was no reason for demonstrating because the government would agree to any demands they raised. At the same time, a decree was issued requiring 48 hours notice for any demonstration. A prolonged argument continued among the students about whether to hold the meeting indoors or outside. The issue seemed finally to be decided by the freezing weather.
Competence must be the
Three or four thousand students showed up, despite the vacations and return of the large numbers of students from the provinces to their homes. Slogans against corruption predominated -competence," "No bribes [to professors to pass exams]." There was also a placard against "politics." There were expressions of hostility to "former Communist Party
The organizers of the meeting said over and over again that the new student associ-
"nonpolitical." Their explanations that the students were too young and inexperienced to take political positions did not seem to be well received. But a rejection of "politics" — meaning the substitution of political criteria for scholarly ones, political domination and political corruption — was very much in evidence. The students' demands included university autonomy and the inviolability of university precincts.
On the other hand, the "nonpolitical" nature of the associations was invoked every time the question of possible differences with the National Salvation Front came up. The question of political positions was raised in the press conference following the rally by a Romanian exile who had returned as a correspondent for the New York Post. He argued at length that elections were coming up in a couple of months and the students could not remain passive. The representativeness of the student spokespersons was also challenged by Romanians present.