The Romanian Revolution, 29 years on
29 years on, the heroes of the anti-Communist revolution in Romania are commemorated all over the country
România Internațional, 21.12.2018, 14:02
Every year in
late December Romanians commemorate the victims of the December 1989
anti-Communist revolution. Some still recollect those events with grief and
sorrow although 29 years have passed ever since.
The Romanian
President Klaus Iohannis laid a wreath of flowers at the Memorial Cross in the University
Square in Bucharest to honor the memory of the victims, and senators and
deputies observed a moment of silence.
On Thursday the
city of Timisoara, in the west, marked Victory Day. On December 20th,
1989, after several days of repression by the Communist authorities, the people
of Timisoara took to the streets in great numbers. The army withdrew to the
barracks and from the balcony of the Opera House in Timisoara the people
declared Timisoara the first city of Romania free of Communism.
To mark this
moment, siren calls were heard in downtown Timisoara where the anti-Communist
revolution sparked 29 years ago. It all started from a spontaneous protest
against the authorities’ attempt to evacuate reformist pastor Laszlo Tokes, as
he had been critical of the Communist regime in the international press, which was
interpreted, in the spirit of the epoch, as incitement to ethnic division.
On December 17th,
the protest extended to the center of the city, which became the main stage for
shouting anti-Communist slogans, which was literally inconceivable at the time.
Faced with such an unprecedented situation, the authorities ordered the army to
go to the streets that were already teeming with informers of the Securitate
political police.
A brutal
intervention followed and scores of people were shot. To wipe off the traces of
the violent repression, the corpses were taken from the hospital morgue and
transferred to Bucharest to be cremated, the ashes being thrown into the sewer
system as part of the operation symbolically called the Rose.
On December 21st,
the anti-Communist revolution extended to Bucharest and culminated on December
22nd with dictators Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu fleeing Bucharest. Subsequently,
they were caught and shot dead on the very Christmas Day after a brief trial.
In December 1989 more than one thousand people died and at least three thousand
were wounded. 29 years on, the prosecutors’ investigation into those events has
not been finalized and the culprits are still at large.
Initially
classified, the revolution file was reopened in 2017 after the judges decided
that the previous investigations had been very superficial. Military
prosecutors announced the extension of criminal procedures, in rem, in relation
to crimes against humanity. Judges have shown that in order to keep the power,
the new political and military power instated after 1989 caused the killing and
arrest of a great number of people. The president of the Association ‘December
21, 1989’ Doru Maries says that the only thing that can be done for the
revolution heroes is JUSTICE.
