Exorcising the Demons of Communism
Its been more than a quarter of a century since the fall of the communist dictatorship, and the Romanian Judiciary is barely starting to exorcise the demons of a regime dubbed as criminal and illegitimate.
Bogdan Matei, 31.03.2016, 14:03
The former warden of the forced labour colony in Periprava, in the Danube Delta, the 80-year old Ion Ficior, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Wednesday. The Bucharest Court of Appeal found him guilty of crimes against humanity. In the five years in which he ran the colony, between 1958 and 1963, he implemented and coordinated a repressive, abusive, inhuman and discretionary detention regime against political detainees, thus causing the death of at least 103 inmates.
According to the indictment, the prisoners in Periprava did not get any medical care of any sorts, were deprived of food and heat and were subjected to numerous forms of physical and psychological torture. Prosecutors show in the indictment that the regime imposed in the colony by Ficior didn’t even provide basic means of subsistence for the prisoners, whose sentences were longer than 10 years. Besides sentencing him to 20 years in prison, the court also ruled that Ficior be taken away all his military ranks, on the basis of which, for decades, the former warden cashed in a generous pension. Now, according to the court’s ruling, he must pay 310,000 Euros in damages to eight plaintiffs, former detainees or their families.
Ficior is the second, out of a group of dozens of Communist torturers who are still alive and whom the Romanian judiciary has sentenced to time in prison. Last month, in a resounding first in the Romanian justice, the former warden of the Ramnicu Sarat Penitentiary, Alexandru Visinescu, got a final 20 year prison sentence, also for crimes against humanity, committed 50 years ago. Quite emblematically, the Visinescu trial brought to the witness stand a handful of former political detainees, survivors of the horrors committed against them in prison, emaciated by years of detention, illnesses and traumas, opposite a quite fit and bully 90-year old.
Sentencing such characters, often dubbed by the media as ghouls of the past, is just a matter of reparative justice. According to historians, between 1944 and 1989, the Communist dictatorship, instated by the Soviet occupation army and perpetuated through bloody abuses committed by the political police, the Securitate, sent to prison more than 600,000 Romanians: students, peasants, Orthodox and Catholic priests, democrat or nationalist politicians, businessmen and court officers. For all these victims, justice is being done too late. However, for today’s Romanian society, condemning the crimes of communism remains an elementary ethical obligation.
(Translated by M. Ignatescu)
