Overshadowed by the EU summit in Sibiu
\nand the campaign for the European elections on the 26th of May, the
\nlatest developments in the area of the judiciary are no less spectacular. On
\nWednesday, the interim prosecutor general Bogdan Licu appealed a Supreme Court
\nruling to send back to the Prosecutor’s Office the case of the so-called
\nminers’ riot of June 1990. Earlier, a preliminary chamber judge from the High
\nCourt of Cassation and Justice has decided to return the case, deeming the
\nevidence presented as invalid. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
Military prosecutors completed
\ninvestigations into the miners’ riot two years ago. They indicted 14 persons,
\nincluding some high-profile figures such as the former president Ion Iliescu,
\nthe prime minister at the time Petre Roman, his deputy Gelu Voican Voiculescu
\nand the then director of the Romanian Intelligence Service Virgil Magureanu. They
\nare accused of masterminding and directly coordinating the assault against the
\nprotesters in the University Square, in the centre of Bucharest, who were
\npeacefully expressing their political views, views that contradicted those of
\nthe majority in power at the time. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
On the 20th of May 1990,
\nless than five months after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist
\ndictatorship, Ion Iliescu, Ceasescu’s former minister from the 1970s and now
\nseen as one of the leaders of the revolution, won the country’s first free
\npresidential elections with 85% of the vote. His party, a heterogeneous mix of
\ngenuine revolutionaries and second-rate communists, also won two thirds of
\nseats in Parliament. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
The University Square, which had
\nbeen occupied as early as April by students and proclaimed a neo-communism
\nfree area, had begun to empty, as the protesters were coming to terms with the
\nsevere verdict of the elections. The place once full of tens of thousands of exuberant
\nand non-violent people was now only home to several dozen people on hunger
\nstrike. On the evening of the 13th of June, the police started to
\nevacuate them from the square using disproportionate force, which was
\nreminiscent of the repression during the revolution. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
It’s still not clear today if the
\npeople who reacted the next day by engaging in street clashes with the police
\nand occupying the headquarters of the interior ministry and the public
\ntelevision station had anything to do with the people who had protested in the
\nsquare. Iliescu and his people described them as legionnaires, a term
\nreferring to the Romanian far right during the inter-war years, and, although
\nthe army had already restored order, they called on the population to rescue
\nthe democracy in danger. The miners from the Jiu Valley, in the centre,
\nresponded to the call. They controlled the capital for only two days, the 14th
\nand the 15th of June, taking the place of any legal authority.
\nEnough time though to leave behind 1,300 people wounded, more than 1,000
\nabusive arrests and at least 6 people dead. A vandalised university and
\nransacked headquarters of the opposition parties and independent newspapers
\ncomplete the picture of the invasion. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/p>\n
Five years ago, the European Court
\nof Human Rights ruled that Romania was to continue investigations into the
\ncase, while the former prosecutor general Laura Codruta Kovesi admitted that
\nthe inquiry into the miners’ riot was one of the biggest dissatisfactions in
\nthe entire history of the public ministry. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thirty years have passed but Romania is yet to clarify the darkest episode in its post-communist history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":78355,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37738],"tags":[28989],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-81704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-today-in-the-news","tag-miners"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n