The miners’ raids back into the limelight

The June 1990 miners raids file will be reopened. Prosecutors hope to shed light on and make justice in the most serious event that ever happened in Romania after the regime change of 1989.

Valentin Țigău, 06.02.2015, 13:57

Romania’s general prosecutor on Thursday decided to reject some of the solutions found in the June 1990 miners’ raids file and to reopen the case. The events that took place in Bucharest between June 13th and 15th left behind several people dead and many wounded by bullets.

According to the law, the reopening of the case is to be confirmed by a judge with the Supreme Court. The decision was made after the European Court of Human Rights obliged Romania, in September 2014, to reopen the investigations. Military prosecutor Dan Voinea, who accused the former leftist president of Romania, Ion Iliescu, of instigation to violence in the June 1990 events, admits the appropriateness of reopening the file.

Dan Voinea: “It was necessary to reopen the miners’ raids file because, after 25 years, justice was not done to the victims of those days. However, the reopening of the file comes rather late, given that there are hundreds of complaints in these files. We’ll wait and see how things will unfold in this case. For 7 years nothing was done in this file”.

On June 13th 1990 hundreds of miners came to Bucharest to reestablish public order and defend democracy which was threatened, in their opinion, after several weeks of protests against the then power, held by the National Salvation Front, a group immediately set up after the 1989 revolution.

According to part of the observers, the one responsible for the miners’ brutal intervention is the then president of the country, the former, high-ranking Communist activist Ion Iliescu. Started against the backdrop of the general discontent with the political developments in post-December 1989 Romania, the anti-government protests were stopped by bringing the miners to the capital Bucharest.

Together with the riot police, the miners forced the protesters to give up their protest action, starting a genuine war on them, which ended up with several dead and hundreds of injured. The miners occupied and devastated the Bucharest University building, the head offices of the National Liberal Party and of the Christian Democratic National Peasant’s Party, which represented the rightwing opposition, and molested many intellectuals and opponents to the power. Ion Iliescu thanked the miners at the end of their intervention calling them the guardians of democracy.

At domestic level, the June 1990 miners’ raids meant the limitation of the freedom of the press and the persecution of the right wing political leaders. The effects at external level were catastrophic, Romania being excluded, for a temporary period of time, from the group of countries that received funding from the international bodies.