Thirty years have passed but Romania is yet to clarify the darkest episode in its post-communist history.
Overshadowed by the EU summit in Sibiu and the campaign for the European elections on the 26th of May, the latest developments in the area of the judiciary are no less spectacular. On Wednesday, the interim prosecutor general Bogdan Licu appealed a Supreme Court ruling to send back to the Prosecutor's Office the case of the so-called miners' riot of June 1990. Earlier, a preliminary chamber judge from the High Court of Cassation and Justice has decided to return the case, deeming the evidence presented as invalid.
Military prosecutors completed investigations into the miners' riot two years ago. They indicted 14 persons, including some high-profile figures such as the former president Ion Iliescu, the prime minister at the time Petre Roman, his deputy Gelu Voican Voiculescu and the then director of the Romanian Intelligence Service Virgil Magureanu. They are accused of masterminding and directly coordinating the assault against the protesters in the University Square, in the centre of Bucharest, who were peacefully expressing their political views, views that contradicted those of the majority in power at the time.
On the 20th of May 1990, less than five months after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu's communist dictatorship, Ion Iliescu, Ceasescu's former minister from the 1970s and now seen as one of the leaders of the revolution, won the country's first free presidential elections with 85% of the vote. His party, a heterogeneous mix of genuine revolutionaries and second-rate communists, also won two thirds of seats in Parliament.
The University Square, which had been occupied as early as April by students and proclaimed a "neo-communism free area", had begun to empty, as the protesters were coming to terms with the severe verdict of the elections. The place once full of tens of thousands of exuberant and non-violent people was now only home to several dozen people on hunger strike. On the evening of the 13th of June, the police started to evacuate them from the square using disproportionate force, which was reminiscent of the repression during the revolution.
It's still not clear today if the people who reacted the next day by engaging in street clashes with the police and occupying the headquarters of the interior ministry and the public television station had anything to do with the people who had protested in the square. Iliescu and his people described them as "legionnaires", a term referring to the Romanian far right during the inter-war years, and, although the army had already restored order, they called on the population to rescue the "democracy in danger". 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.
Five years ago, 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".
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