The second former communist torturer in the defendants’ box
The Prosecutors Office with the High Court of Cassation and Justice has decided to start the prosecution of Ion Ficior, the former commander of the work camp in Periprava, in southeastern Romania. Ficior is the second on a list of people accused of genoc
România Internațional, 25.10.2013, 13:59
85-year-old Ion Ficior was indicted by prosecutors for genocide. According to the investigators of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes, between 1958 and 1963, when Ion Ficior was in charge of the Periprava labour camp, he implemented and coordinated a repressive, abusive, inhuman and discretionary regime that 103 political detainees fell victim to. Prosecutors say that the regime imposed by Ion Ficior was mainly aimed at exterminating political detainees, using both direct and indirect methods: terrible detention conditions, maltreatment, lack of food and medicine, cold, hunger, terrible physical punishments.
20 of those who survived the regime in Periprava built the Ficior case with their testimonies. But he is just one of the hundreds of torturers that the communist regime used as tools in the large scale operation aimed at liquidating professional and intellectual elites in Romania, said Octav Bjoza, the president of the Association of the Former Political Detainees and Survivors of Periprava.
Octav Bjoza: “ It’s a bit too late for us. Most of us have managed to forgive our torturers. The communists sent to those camps Romania’s best people, both morally and professionally, to be destroyed. Many detainees died there. But Ficior and Visinescu are just two of the many who did that.”
Alexandru Visinescu, commander of the prison in Ramnicu Sarat, is the one that tops the list of torturers that the High Court of Cassation and Justice is prosecuting for genocide. Such actions are possible thanks to the investigations carried out by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of Romanian Exile, whose list comprises 35 employees of the former communist Prison Directorate.
