Violence and Prose...

I've just read an e-mail from a friend full of info and links, reminding me that this is the anniversary, nineteen years ago almost to the day, when an estimated 10,000 miners invaded Bucharest and rampaged their way through it, killing, maiming, beating innocent people, destroying the Liberal Party HQ and private houses as they went. Here's what happened. The fear of going out onto the streets even to go to work lasted quite a time, and nineteen years isn't that long ago really, is it?

To think that one of the instigators, Vadim Tudor, is now representing Roumania in the European Parliament makes me feel sick. I won't mention the other two idiots since it's off subject and I'll be berating them for hours. It's not the point of this 'particular' post.

Nicole says, "it is a  shameful page in Romania's history, and absurdly, the principal instigator, Ion Iliescu, was exhonerated by the courts. An insult to the memory of those who were assaulted or lost their lives."

She has been particularly prolific today and sent me heaps of info which I will share with you. Here are some details from the 1990 statistics showing the effect on the suppression of the students. Quite dreadful. Oprescu denied all knowledge - and look where he, too, is today....

Frank Sellin, political scientist, says, "June 1990 represented not the first, not the second, but the third mineriadă on Bucharest. The first two dry runs were in January and February 1990, used to intimidate opposition demonstrations against the National Salvation Front of Iliescu and his fellow workers, mostly second and third tier ex-communists from pre-1989 days.

Most importantly, a mineriadă doesn't just spontaneously generate itself among not-so-educated miners who are just barely past the sudden exit of a communist regime, not to mention severely repressed after the 1977 miners' strike and infiltration by the Securitate. It has to be organized.

Transporting hundreds of people from the Jiu Valley to be prepared to bash heads in Bucharest -- at least five hours by train -- required trains, weapons, and according to news reports at the time, plenty of alcohol.

So if the coercive forces of the state were no longer able to control the situation in Piaţa Universităţii in June of 1990, who still had the organizational capacity to transport and arm the miners?

Just like two times previous? Iliescu can rewrite history all he wants, but that just adds insult to what should be a search for redemption for the young and innocent lives lost in June 1990 to aggravated assaults by the miners."

He has written an excellent blog  of information - please go and visit it. The comments which go with his post on this subject also make veeeery interesting reading.

For more articles, click on this link. This very good one from NYT dated June 15, 1990:

Evolution in Europe; ROMANIAN MINERS INVADE BUCHAREST

By CELESTINE BOHLEN, Special to The New York Times

Published: Friday, June 15, 1990

Responding to an emergency appeal by President Ion Iliescu, thousands of miners from northern Romania descended on the capital city today with wooden clubs and rubber truncheons and sought crude revenge for anti-Government rioting Wednesday.

In grimy work clothes and helmets, their faces blackened by soot, the miners took control of Bucharest's main boulevard and central square, menacing and beating passers-by whom they apparently suspected of having tried to bring down the Iliescu Government.

Their suspicions appeared to be indiscriminate; motorists in their cars, well-dressed professors, students, photographers, reporters, mothers with children and girls walking their dogs were chased off the street, sometimes hit across the shoulders with rubber hoses.

By evening, the miners had emptied University Square, which was the setting of a marathon anti-Government demonstration that was broken up in a police raid before dawn Wednesday.

Summoned by Mr. Iliescu to save the Government from a ''fascist rebellion,'' the miners joined other workers loyal to the governing National Salvation Front early this morning and ransacked the headquarters of the two main opposition parties, setting fires, breaking windows and carting off or destroying equipment and documents.

The miners' arrival in the city came the day after soldiers opened fire on anti-Government demonstrators outside the Interior Ministry, killing at least four and wounding scores in the worst violence in Eastern Europe since December, when Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in a popular revolt.

Opposition Papers Seized

In the violence today, pro-Government workers laid siege to the apartments of prominent Government opponents and halted the publication of Romania Libera, the main opposition newspaper.

By the afternoon, the miners were still in control of the headquarters of one opposition party, the Peasants Party, lounging in the courtyard and on the balconies amid broken typewriters and piles of trash. At the Liberal Party headquarters, militiamen guarded the doors, while party members stayed away.

''We took a common decision to stay home and stay in touch by telephone,'' said Sorin Botez, a spokesman for the Liberal Party. Other critics of the Government also stayed off the streets today.

The rampage by the miners and other workers, tolerated by the few policemen visible today in Bucharest, came just as Romania's new Government, headed by Mr. Iliescu and the front, is about to take office. Although bitterly opposed by students, liberal intellectuals and the so-called historical parties, the front won the May 20 election by a landslide, buoyed by Mr. Iliescu's personal popular appeal.

Attacks by Miners Assailed

The extent of the Government's role in bringing the miners to the city, beyond Mr. Iliescu's appeal, was not known. A Government spokesman, Ion Pascu, said the police and the army had not responded to save the Government in what he called a coup attempt by opposition forces. The spokesmen said that in the absence of an adequate police force, the Government would continue to rely on the miners, who he said might stay in the capital for another two or three days. The miners are thought to number about 7,000.

Although the miners said that they came to Bucharest spontaneously after Mr. Iliescu's summons, the Government has clearly taken responsibility for them. This afternoon buses arrived at University Square to take the miners to an exhibition hall where they watched the World Cup soccer match before being bused back to the square and then to some location in the city where they were spending the night.

Mr. Botez criticized the attacks against the Government on Wednesday, but said they did not justify Mr. Iliescu's call to the miners. ''It is not a good beginning for a new Government to start with acts of terrorism,'' he said. ''It is a unique case in European history, a world premiere, for a president to incite one part of the population against the other.''

Dumitru Mazilu, who resigned from the leadership of the front last winter in a dispute over the Government's response to a demonstration against the front, said today that his apartment was surrounded for about five hours by a group of belligerent miners, armed with sticks, who threatened to kill him.

In a pre-dawn raid Wednesday, the police cracked down on the protest that had occupied University Square for seven weeks.

Witnesses to the raid Wednesday said a number of protesters were beaten as they were dragged off by the police and 253 were arrested - although all were released a few hours later.

Later in the day anti-Government protesters armed with gasoline bombs and guns seized in a raid on Central Police Headquarters, laid siege to the Interior Ministry, the state TV station and the Government's central offices at Victory Square. Five people were killed and 277 were wounded, the Health Ministry said.

Because of the crisis, sessions of the assembly and senate scheduled for today were postponed until Monday. A joint session after that is formally to appoint Mr. Iliescu head of state.

A miners' spokesman said in a statement carried by the Rompres press agency that they would stay in Bucharest as long as necessary. ''We shall stay here until we are sure that order is reinstated and people go back to work,'' the statement said. ''Nobody called us to Bucharest so we won't accept anyone telling us to go back home.''

Mr. Pascu said the Government would continue to rely on the miners while examining the creation of a new police force, a kind of national guard, that would supplement the function of the municipal police. ---- 'Vigilante Violence' Assailed WASHINGTON, June 14 (Reuters) - The United States accused Romania today of using vigilante violence against anti-Government demonstrators and said it would defer a decision on normalizing trade ties.

''The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the rioting of the past two days, and the Government-inspired vigilante violence that departs from the commonly accepted norms of democracy and the rule of law,'' said the White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater. ''We are concerned that the deplorable events of the past two days are being used to justify the suppression of legitimate dissent in Romania.''

The State Department spokeswoman, Margaret D. Tutwiler, replied affirmatively when asked if it was fair to assume that Washington would defer a decision on granting most-favored-nation-status to Romania until it is satisfied with the human-rights situation there.

The British Government accused the Iliescu Government of using the tactics of the Ceausescu regime. In London, a Foreign Office official, William Waldegrave, said: ''What is depressing is both the rhetoric - talking about all their opponents of being fascists and gypsies, just like Ceausescu - and the way in which they called out the 'rent-a-mob' of coal miners who were bused in, armed with pickax handles and knives, and loosed off into the streets.''

Article also from The Independent in 1999. Please also pay a visit to this blog and to Wikipedia.

So much pain in this country of my heart. Fighting, always fighting to try to make things better. Or in fact, one could opt for the other choice which is to sit and do nothing at all. Unfortunately, many have taken this option and it's hard to blame them. One stands up and is knocked down again. Constantly. Time and time and time again. Has so much changed since the 'revolution' of 1989? What is one to do when the people at the top are the most corrupt of all. Elena Negula, a victim of the miners attack and hunger striker, sums it up in an old Romanian idiom, "we want to make something good and instead we break our own heads."

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The 120th anniversary since the death of the national poet, Mihai Eminescu, also deserves a mention a day late (sorry!). Wikipedia says the following curiosity regarding his death:

"Recent sources claim that the Romanian and Austrian authorities of the time staged the "illness" of Eminescu in order to marginalize a powerful political adversary of the Romanian-Austrian treaty that was signed at that time. The secret treaty required Romania to cease its support to Transylvanian Romanians (then under Austrian rule). It did so (for a time), which caused certain Transylvanian-born Romanians to leave Bucharest. Eminescu, too, was under constant surveillance, and the only (unconfirmed) syphilis diagnosis was given by Romanian doctors."

Having already shared the Dacian Prayer with you a long time ago on this blog, here's another, The Lake, below. Eminescu may not be everyone's cup of tea (I mentioned him to a Roumanian friend the other evening who said, "oh don't tell me you LIKE Eminescu?!!"), but one must admit that he portrays the spirit of the country of my heart and its people perfectly. Perhaps that's why, to some, he may read uncomfortably. Of course, it does lose something in translation - the following is not my dear Popescu, who was able to transfer the Roumanian to English without dropping a thing. Mr Cuclin has made a valiant effort, though.

The Lake

Water lilies load all over
The blue lake amid the woods,
That imparts, while in white circles
Startling, to a boat its moods.

And along the strands I'm passing
Listening, waiting, in unrest,
That she from the reeds may issue
And fall, gently, on my breast;

That we may jump in the little
Boat, while water's voices whelm
All our feelings; that enchanted
I may drop my oars and helm;

That all charmed we may be floating
While moon's kindly light surrounds
Us, winds cause the reeds to rustle
And the waving water sounds.

But she does not come; abandoned,
Vainly I endure and sigh
Lonely, as the water lilies
On the blue lake ever lie.

(1876, Translated by Dimitrie Cuclin)