| A BELATED LUSTRATION LAW 11/06/2010 |
| Last updated: 2010-06-14 13:27 EET |
Having been notified by the opposition Social Democratic Party, the Constitutional Court ruled the Lustration Law as unconstitutional, despite been voted on 20 years after the December 1989 revolution and 5 years after the respective law was forwarded to Parliament. Under the law the people who were part of the former power structure, of the repressive communist apparatus instated by the occupation Soviet troops at the end of WWII, were banned access to certain public offices and positions for 5 years.
Romanian communism had two extreme periods. In the 1950s, when the communist regime was consolidated, there were hundreds of thousands of Stalinist political trials followed by the imprisonment of those considered to be the enemies of the regime of Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej. The communist terror hit everybody: from the far rightists to socialists, from Orthodox and Greek Catholic priests to freemasons and Zionist Jews, from former dignitaries of democratic governments to peasants, from the Royal Army officers to students.
The other extreme period of Romanian communism was in the 1980s when Nicolae Ceausescu’s extreme austerity and political terror hit hard at the very core of the Romanian people. After half a century of exerting power in a discretionary way, the Romanian Communists left behind an impoverished country, disorganized and traumatized. And Romania’s wounds are still bleeding today. With few exceptions, the pillars of the Communist regime stood still. Many of the then communists are now in top positions in the political structure, are part of the diplomatic corps, are so-called businessmen in the newly created business environments or, more worryingly, can be found at the Constitutional Court.
The former East Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland long ago settled their accounts with the phantoms of the past, both morally and legally. In Romania however, after the verdict of the Constitutional Court, all those who held positions within the communist party, the government members, the secretaries and party activists, the heads of diplomatic missions and consulates, the secret police officers, the heads of the militias and of political prisons have thus escaped the rigours of the lustration law. The president of the Chamber of Deputies, Roberta Anastase, has promised that Parliament will reconsider the law and word it to the liking of the Constitutional Court, but her party colleague, Liberal Democratic MP Mircea Toader says the lustration law was passed rather late:
“What we are doing today should have been done in the 1990s, in 1991, 1992, because it’s not only about moral reparation, we’re talking about an activity in which politicians had to take into account the path Romania was following”.
The Social Democratic Party, set up by Ion Iliescu, a former communist dignitary before 1989 and then head of state for 10 years, has labelled the law as populist. Several Social Democrats voted for the lustration law but the party’s official stance is that the lustration law violates both the Romanian Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. Social Democrat MP Silvestru Micrea Lupu:
“The Social Democratic Party notified the Constitutional Court, will also notify the Venice Convention in order to express its substantiated opinion regarding this law; last but not least we’ll notify the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe which will notify the European Court so that it should express an opinion related to this law in correlation with the Convention’s provisions”.
For the representatives of the associations of revolutionaries who participated in the 1989 revolution, the passing of the Lustration Law was a much hoped for event. But the cancellation of the law by the judges of the Constitutional Court perpetuates the abnormalities of post-Communist Romania. Teodor Maries is the president of the “December 21 Association”:
“In my opinion the day when the lustration law was passed would have been the first day of normality in Romania. This is how the activity of Parliament should have started in January 1990. And today Romania would have definitely been different.”
Publicist Dan Alexe noticed that ‘some of the Romanians who would have been affected directly by the lustration law have already retired now’. But the concept of lustration in 2010 is totally out of place, there are a number of events that have taken place that work against the very spirit of lustration. Back in 2006 President Traian Basescu officially condemned the communist regime, labelling it criminal and illegitimate but, paradoxically, either out of negligence or because of his staff’s incompetence, last month he decorated Mr. George Homostean, one of the interior ministers of Nicolae Ceausescu, as a war veteran.
The acute economic and social crisis Romania is experiencing today, because of cynical and irresponsible post-Communist policies, has brought about an unexpected idea: the lustration of all those who governed Romania not only during the Communist regime but also in the past 20 years.
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2010-09-10
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