Cold shoulder for Romania’s harsh regime

Press, 5 April 1989, Page 43

Cold shoulder for Romania’s harsh regime

NZPA-Reuter Vienna Romania’s communist leader, Nicholae Ceausescu, faces growing isolation, under attack abroad from both East and West and at home from former top party officials. The ultra-orthodox Mr Ceausescu, aged 71, has long had a reputation for running the harshest regime in the Soviet bloc. The Romanian-born playwright, Eugene lonesco, described it last month as "a daily nightmare of severe poverty and rampant fear of the secret police.” But the chorus of protests grew to a roar last year when Mr Ceausescu, who had led the country for 24 years, announced plans to eliminate half the country’s villages and rehouse the population in new urban centres. The main reason put forward by Mr Ceausescu is to bring the standard of living of country people nearer that of townspeople by grouping them into larger units where facilities such as schools, and cultural and leisure centres could be provided. In earlier versions of the scheme he mentioned that it would also make 300,000 hectares of new farmland available, but that argument has since been dropped. There have also been protests over Mr Ceausescu’s decision to bulldoze an old residential district of Bucharest, once described as the Paris of the Balkans, to make way for a mammoth new civic centre. Apart from the sheer scale of the project in one of Europe’s poorest countries, and at a time of drastic shortages of food, electricity and heating, critics were angered by reports that some residents had been given less than 24 hours to vacate their old homes.

At a meeting of European Community Foreign Ministers recently, Britain’s Sir Geoffrey Howe said there was "universal astonishment about the way Romania behaves

towards its citizens.” The French President, Mr Francois Mitterrand, told diplomats at a New Year’s reception he had no intention of visiting a regime he described as “anachronistic and wounding to the human conscience.”

France recalled its Ambassador to Bucharest and postponed planned bilateral talks in protest against the human rights situation in Romania.

The protests have not been confined to the West. Hungary, a communist ally of Romania, rewrote the traditional code of strict solidarity within the seven-country Warsaw Pact by co-sponsoring a resolution to the U.N. Human Rights Commission demanding an investigation into alleged human rights abuses by Bucharest. Criticism of Mr Ceausescu’s policies has also come from independent groups in other Eastern bloc allies such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. The Hungarian Government accused Bucharest in particular of violating the rights of the two million strong Hungarian minority in Romania by forcible assimilation, curbing the use of the Hungarian language and demolishing Hungarian villages under its rural reorganisation scheme. In another departure from traditional Eastern bloc solidarity, the Soviet Union, the Ukraine, East Germany and Bulgaria either abstained or did not take part in the vote for the resolution, passed by 21 votes to seven. The Romanian delegate, Mr Gheorghe Dolgu, immediately condemned “a brutal interference” in his country’s internal affairs, and declared the resolution null and void. This means a U.N. special envoy will not be allowed into the country, but will have to base his report on testimony from exiles.

The Inter-Parliament-ary Union, at a meeting in Budapest, cancelled plans for a 35-country meeting of Parliamentarians in

Bucharest, saying Romania was no longer a suitable venue to discuss European security and cooperation. Criticism of Mr Ceausescu has also come from inside Romania, a rare event in a country where dissent is quickly and ruthlessly suppressed by the powerful secret police. In mid-March six former senior Communist Party officials, including a former Foreign Minister, former Deputy Prime Minister and former Ambassador to Washington and the United Nations, signed an open letter to the Romanian leader accusing him of violating human rights accords, ignoring constitutional guarantees and mismanaging the economy.

“At a time when the very idea of socialism, for which we have fought, is discredited by your policy, and when our country is being isolated in Europe, we have decided to speak up,” the letter said, according to a copy reaching emigre groups in the West. The letter was widely seen as the biggest challenge to Mr Ceausescu since worker riots in Brasov, central Romania, in 1987 which began as a demonstration against new work norms but exploded into a general call for both more food and human rights. The signatories wrote that they were aware that by their action “we are risking our liberty and even our lives.”

One of them, the former U.S. and U.N. Ambassador, Silviu Brucan, was detained twice by the security authorities after it was published in the West but released on each occasion, according to Western diplomats in Bucharest.

Another of the signatories, a former Politburo member and trade union leader, Gheorghe Apostol, aged 77, said in an interview broadcast on Voice of America: “I am not afraid. I will not live very long and I want to die as a decent man.”