The miner’s raids, 32 years on
Bucharest commemorates 32 years since the so-called “miners raids of June 1990.
Bogdan Matei, 14.06.2022, 13:50
More than three decades have passed, but Romania is still to shed light on the darkest episode of its post-communist history. It s been three years since the High Court of Cassation and Justice had decided to return the case for a reassessment of the indictment, which it deemed non-legal. In 2017, military prosecutors had finalised investigations in the miners raids and indicted 14 persons. High-profile names, such as Romanias former president Ion Iliescu, today in his 90s, the prime minister at the time, Petre Roman, his deputy, Gelu Voican-Voiculescu, and the then director of the Romanian Intelligence Service, Virgil Magureanu. According to prosecutors, they allegedly masterminded and directly coordinated the attack against the protesters in the University Square, in the centre of Bucharest, who were peacefully expressing their political opinions, which were at odds with those of the majority in power at that time.
On 20th of May 1990, five months after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescus communist dictatorship, his former minister from the 1970s, Ion Iliescu, now seen as the leader of the anti-communist revolution, won the countrys first free elections with some 85% of the votes. His party, a heterogeneous combination of real revolutionaries and second-rate communists, had also won two thirds of the seats in Parliament. Faced with the harsh verdict of the election results, the protesters, including many students, who had occupied the University Square since April, declaring it “an area free of neo-communism”, had begun to leave. Of the tens of thousands of exuberant and peaceful protesters, only several dozen people on hunger strike had now remained in the square. The police began to evacuate them on the evening of 13th of June using disproportionate force, an image reminiscent of the reprisals during the revolution.
It is still unclear today if the people who reacted by engaging in street fights with the police and occupying the headquarters of the interior ministry and the public television station really did have a connection with the people who had protested earlier in the Square. Iliescu and his people described them as “legionnaires”, a term referring to the Romanian far right in the inter-war years, and, although the army had restored order, called on the population to rescue the democracy “under threat”. The miners from the Jiu Valley, in the centre, responded to the call. They controlled the capital for only two days, the 14th and the 15th of June, taking the place of any legal authority. Enough time though to leave behind 1,300 people wounded more than 1,000 abusive arrests and at least 6 people dead. A vandalised university and ransacked headquarters of the opposition parties and independent newspapers complete the picture of the invasion.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Romania was to continue investigations into the case, while the former prosecutor general Laura Codruta Kovesi admitted that the inquiry into the miners riot was “one of the biggest dissatisfactions in the entire history of the public ministry”. (EE)
