Romanians bury their dead in mass graves

Press, 28 December 1989, Page 8

Romanians bury their dead in mass graves

NZPA-AP Bucharest Romanians purged themselves of Nicolae Ceausescu yesterday with tears of bitterness and relief, burying victims of the revolt to the sound of lingering gunfire. “He should be stripped naked, and his body paraded through the streets,” said Dimitru Minca, aged 70, whose grandson, Silviu, aged 14, was among the many young victims buried at Belu cemetery. Silviu Minca’s surviving friends said “terrorists” — the term they use for Ceausescu’s Securitate guards — called to them from a window and sprayed them with gunfire when they approached. His sister, Irina, aged three clutching a stuffed rabbit in the bitter cold, watched the funeral procession. All day, sobbing families accompanied coffins to a field of 200 freshly dug graves in southern Bucharest. Cemetery officials say 300 to 400 victims of the revolution will have to be buried, but hundreds

of others killed in the five days of fighting are believed buried in secret graves dug by Ceausescu loyalists. A gravedigger, Nicolae Abag, stood beside a pine cross marked, “First hero” and wept with the mourners. “This is so, so much,” he said. “I have not cried here since the earth moved in 1977” — the year an earthquake killed nearly 2000 people in the region. At the next grave, people mourned Nicisor Paunoiu, an elevator mechanic who responded to an appeal to protect a radio station under attack by the Securitate. Mr Paunoiu and three friends stormed a Securitate stronghold unarmed. Three of them were cut down by automatic weapons fire. He left a son and a daughter who was married just three Greeks ago. Further down, there was Dan Adrian Urucu, aged 21, a student, who went to protect the television station. He joined 3000 others in a human shield between attacking Ceausescu loyal-

ists and army men holed up in the 13-storey television building. Mr Urucu was felled by a bullet in the back. Bread rings and other foods were left beside many of the graves, under an ancient Romanian tradition of offering gifts to the dead for the afterlife. Mourners also brought with them rough-hewn wooden crucifixes and a spray of white chrysanthemums. Boughs from Christmas trees and burning long yellow candles v/ere left on many of the graves and there were photographs of smiling young faces tacked to the pine crosses. Some Romanians said they would have preferred a public trial of Ceausescu, but most seemed happy to be rid of the leader who dominated Romania through 24 years of harsh rule. At the cemetery, most people interviewed felt that a simple execution was not nearly enough. “They should have tortured him, made him pay,” saidi Silviu Minca’s uncle.