Radio România Internațional

Tag: anti-communism

  • November 23, 2019 UPDATE

    November 23, 2019 UPDATE

    ELECTIONS Romania holds the decisive round of its presidential election on Sunday. The incumbent president Klaus Iohannis, endorsed by the National Liberal Party, now in power, is facing the former Social Democratic PM Viorica Dancilă. Just like in the first round, the Romanians living abroad have 3 days to cast their ballots, and the number of pollings stations abroad has been doubled, to 838. The vote started at noon on Friday and will continue until Sunday. The number of citizens having voted so far indicates a higher turnout in the runoff than in the first round. By Saturday evening, over 315,000 Romanians had voted in foreign polling stations, of whom 17,500 voted by post, an option introduced this year for the first time. The largest numbers of voters were reported in Italy, followed by Britain, Germany, Spain and the Republic of Moldova.




    GAUDEAMUS The Gaudeamus International Book Fair, organised in Bucharest by Radio Romania, comes to an end on Sunday. On the last day of the fair, the awards of the 26th edition will be presented. 8,000 book stands have been put up as part of this edition, devoted to the 30 years since the anti-communist revolution of 1989. A total of 900 different events were scheduled, including book launches, debates and book signing sessions. On Saturday, the 4th day of the Fair, Prof. Thierry Wolton took part in the launch of the second volume of his trilogy “A World History of Communism. In this volume, entitled ‘The Victims’, Thierry Wolton speaks about the tens of millions that suffered imprisonment, deportation, torture and even extermination for their anti-communist beliefs.




    NATIONAL DAY 3,500 Romanian troops and another 500 from over 20 allied or partner countries, 200 military vehicles and over 50 aircraft will take part on December 1 in Bucharest in the National Day parade, the Defence Ministry has announced. The Romanian military on missions in theatres of operations in Afghanistan, the Western Balkans and Mali will also organise military ceremonies on National Day. Proclaimed a national holiday after the anti-communist revolution of 1989, December 1 marks the conclusion of the establishment of the Romanian nation-state at the end of World War 1, in 1918.



    COLECTIV After the Bucharest Court completed its investigations, on Monday the prosecution and the defence will present their closing statements in the case concerning the fire in Colectiv night club in Bucharest 4 years ago, in which 64 people died, one committed suicide further to the trauma and 200 others were injured. The Colectiv trial started in April 2016. After 2 years of deferrals over procedural matters, the judge assigned to the case retired, and during another year the new judge has heard the statements of scores of witnesses and victims.




    UN The 15 members of the UN Security Council endorsed a declaration reaffirming the ban on chemical weapons. The Council has reached a consensus long undermined by the war in Syria, and the Skripal affair in the UK or Kim Jong-nam case in Malaysia, AFP reports. The Council reaffirms that the use of chemical weapons is a violation of international law, and declares its firm opposition to it. The declaration, proposed by Great Britain, was passed unanimously. The UN Security Council urges all states that have not yet done so to sign the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons, which was signed in 1993 and came into force in 1997. Syria joined the Convention in 2013, Israel has signed it, but is yet to ratify it, whereas North Korea, Egypt and South Sudan are not yet parties to this Convention.




    POPE Pope Francis arrived in Japan on Saturday, on the second leg of his tour of Asia whose main goal is to send a message against nuclear weapons in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the only cities in the world ever hit by atomic bombs, Reuters says. On Sunday in Nagasaki the Pope, a vocal militant against nuclear weapons, will read a message against weapons of mass destruction. He will also meet with survivors of the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011, the most destructive after the one in Chernobyl in 1986. After Thailand, the first stop in his tour, the Pope reached Tokyo, where he will stay for 4 days. This is the first visit by a Sovereign Pontiff to this country in 38 years, and only the second in history. Another goal of his visit is to encourage the Catholic community in Japan, where only 1% of the population are Christians and half of these Catholics. The Pope will perform 2 services, one in Nagasaki and one in Tokyo, and will have meetings with senior Japanese officials and with Emperor Naruhito.


    (translated by: Ana-Maria Popescu)

  • A tribute to Corneliu Coposu

    A tribute to Corneliu Coposu

    The poems created by Corneliu Coposu in prison and written 17 years later, when he was released from communist prisons, have been brought together in a book launched Monday night in Bucharest, as part of a gala named after the celebrated Romanian politician. The event marked 24 years since the death of this anti-communist dissident, who was the leader of the Romanian Peasants Party until 1947. The President of the Romanian Association of Former Political Prisoners Octav Bjoza, spoke about Corneliu Coposus moral uprightness and about the role model he was for the Romanian society:



    Octav Bjoza: “It was very difficult to get close to him, but 2 or 3 times I had the chance to talk to him briefly. The last time was 4 or 5 months before he left for the last surgery in Germany. Do you know what he told me? Mr Bjoza, he said, I would like to see the members of Parliament battling for their strategies and programmes, and even ideologies, but after they leave Parliament I would like to see them together, going out to a concert, a play, a beer, or a football match. But these people… they hate each others guts, Mr Bjoza. Im sorry, but I find this unacceptable.



    Corneliu Coposu served time in the most terrible communist prisons: in Vacaresti, Jilava, Pitesti, Malmaison, Craiova, Aiud, Poarta Alba, the Danube-Black Sea Canal, in Gherla and Sighetul Marmatiei, and he was detained in harsh solitary confinement in Ramnicu Sarat between 1954 and 1962. During the 8 years spent alone in a cell, he spent his time praying, doing maths and writing poems, so as not to lose his mind.



    In spite of terrible hardships, Corneliu Coposu never renounced his principles and constantly struggled to turn Romania from a Soviet satellite into a Western democracy. Born in 1914, the great politician was trained under another noteworthy statesman, the former prime minister Iuliu Maniu, whose political secretary Coposu was. He was involved in organising the anti-communist opposition at the end of World War II, and organised student protests against the communists.



    In 1947 Coposu was arrested and detained without a trial. When released, the communist regime asked him to collaborate in exchange for clearing his name, but Coposu turned down the offer. He re-established the National Peasants Party as a clandestine group and in 1987 he had it affiliated to the Christian Democrat International.



    After the fall of communism in 1989, he brought together the opposition groups of the time into what was known as the Democratic Convention. He died in 1995, a year before the Convention won the local, parliamentary and presidential elections in Romania. Of Coposus 3 key goals, namely Romanias joining the European Union, NATO and the restoration of the monarchy, only the latter was not achieved.


    (translated by: Ana-Maria Popescu)

  • The Americans are Coming!!!

    The Americans are Coming!!!

    In the wake of WWII, Romanians hoped the Soviets would finally leave Romania and that the Americans would come to put things back on track. This was their only hope for a better future and a firm belief of the anti-communist resistance.



    Before Romania joined the coalition led by Germany, Romanian-American relations had been very good. However, Romanias decision to declare war on the United States on December 11, 1941 was contrary to the spirit that had previously defined bilateral ties. Also, the American air forces bombing Romania in 1944 had to do with a certain logic of war making, a logic that would nevertheless be hard to explain at times of peace. In spite of being enemies during the war, the Romanians went easy on the American pilots whom they had captured. According to eyewitnesses, some Romanian officers recovered the bodies of the American pilots killed in battle and organized proper burials. On August 23, 1944 Romania switched sides and joined the Allied Powers, a move that was in fact a return to normalcy.



    However, what followed after the war was nothing like the Romanian society expected it to be. The Soviet troops presence in the country and the communist partys seizing political power led Romanians into firmly believing the American troops deployment in Constanta or in the Balkans was their last hope.



    “The Americans are coming! had become a slogan, as, in the late 1940s, most Romanians believed it was a matter of months until the Americans would show up.



    Nicolae Dascalu was a member of the National Peasant Party and, while a student, an active member of an anti-communist organization between 1947-1949.



    In an interview with Radio Romanias Oral History Centre back in 2000, Nicolae Dascalu said the firm belief that the American troops were about to come gave many young people the courage to defend democracy and liberty: “Everybody hoped that the Americans would come and we all counted on their help. Of course, at first there was the enthusiasm that accompanies youth and the courage of fighting a battle with the confidence that democratic values would prevail in the end. No one was expecting such a long and terrible period of time, terrible, restrictive and totally against any human aspiration.



    In 2000 Elena Florea Ioan, the sister of Toma Arnautoiu, head of one of the best organized anti-communist armed groups, confirmed that her brother went to the mountains to join the resistance in the hope that the Americans were going to come soon.



    Elena Florea Ioan: “I realized that my brother left home to join the resistance in the mountains and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I urged my mother not to let him go, but she also believed that he had to, so I could not make him change his mind. My mother was being constantly worried, knowing that my brother had to hide all the time and did not have any peace. So, she hoped that he could find some peace by going to the mountains. Both of them firmly believed that the Americans would come in a month and get rid of Russians. So, my brother and others in the resistance truly believed that they would be on the run for a very short time. They had no idea how wrong they were. The anti-communist resistance in Nucsoara was the only one in Europe that stood firm 9 years. In other places, anti-communist militants did not resist, some were captured, died or surrendered. It was only here that they resisted 9 years.



    Some people were so disappointed that the Americans failed to show up that they even left the resistance.



    Such was the case of colonel Gheorghe Arsenescu, as Elena Florea Ioan tells us: “Colonel Arsenescu left the resistance to protect his life. I dont mean to criticize him but his gesture was not a patriotic one. He was among those who thought it would not take long until the Americans would come. But once in the mountains, having to deal with the lack of food and the hardships of a life into the wild, he started to argue with the others. He said he could not bear it any more. But there were other resistance members who said they would eat tree roots and leaves if they had to, only to stay united. And they did eat leaves when they ran out of food. But Colonel Arsenescu just could not adjust to the hardships of such a life. So he put my brother Toma in charge of the organization because he could no longer bear the hunger and the cold. He realized there were slim chances for the Americans to come and he left.



    The Americans, however, even if they did not come to free Romania, tried to organize some actions meant to keep the hope alive. Such actions were the parachuting in the country of Romanians from the exile, like the group headed by captain Sabin Mare in 1953. Unfortunately, the evolution towards cohabitation of the relations between the two political and military blocs, the communist and the democratic one, led to the abandoning of any plan by the latter to save the countries occupied by the Soviets. The Americans finally came to Romania and to Central and Eastern Europe, but that happened only after 1989.

  • 1989 in Bessarabia

    1989 in Bessarabia

    Bessarabians, just like the Romanians, celebrate a quarter of a century since the fall of communism and the end of the Russification policy that plagued their territory. We spoke to history professor Sergiu Musteata from Chisinau State University, about 1989 in Bessarabia:



    “Between 1985 and 1989, things were changing in the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic. It is interesting that the first demands of the people in the capital Chisinau were not just economic and social, they also had to do with the language and alphabet. Of course, the first word was ‘liberty’. If we look closely at the pictures, we notice that in many of them people hold signs with the word ‘liberty’. That was their main concern. People wanted to talk freely, they wanted to tell the truth as it stood. The worst offence for those people was being unable to talk and write in their mother tongue openly. That is why the first demands in Chisinau, which went on for the rest of the year, regarded the language and the alphabet. Starting in January 1989, after discussions started by the Writers’ Union in 1988, people started to join efforts towards having a single language, even though the Politburo of the Communist Party was laying hurdles in their path, even though it was trying to criticize the effort and call it provocation, even though they tried to ban certain public assemblies. People started to assemble in greater and greater numbers, and in the summer of 1989 they numbered several tens of thousands.”



    Chisinau was seething, like the other capitals of republics in the union, under the impact of Perestroika and Glasnost policies promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev. The national demands were the same for all the nations oppressed by the USSR for 70 years. Sergiu Musteata believes that it was the Grand National Assembly in Chisinau of August 27, 1989 that triggered true change in Bessarabia:



    “On August 31, 1989, the law passed for switching to a Latin language and alphabet. Over the course of an entire year, writers demanded that the Soviet imposition of the Cyrillic alphabet be reversed. They challenged those norms that prevented a good knowledge of Romanian and corrupted it. This way, the elections for the Supreme Soviet brought to the forefront a new elite, men of culture, especially writers, who formed a team on behalf of Moldova to attend the meetings of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union in Moscow. They had the courage, in 1989, to say that the Hitler-Stalin pact was a crime against humanity. They demanded that a commission be created in the Soviet Parliament to discuss the impact of that document. For the first time in Chisinau, the newspaper called ‘Literature and Art’ published the secret addendum to that treaty, which had that far been considered a myth. That’s when it was published for the first time, and it turned out that based on this document the world got divided.”



    Liberty eventually triumphed in Chisinau, just as it did in Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Kiev, and other capitals across the Soviet Union. Sergiu Musteata:



    “What happened in Chisinau marked the spirit of the national liberation movement. In 1987, things were discussed with no small amount of fear, in 1988 publishing started, and in 1989 freedom of expression and association burst forth. For the first time, in 1989, people started waving the tricolour flag at meetings, saying that the tricolour was their true flag. Also in 1989, later that year, for the first time, a large-scale meeting was held around the idea of uniting Bessarabia with Romania, in the context of condemning the Hitler-Stalin pact. The cultural and historical slogans inclined towards social and economic issues: economic independence, autonomous administration, which in the following years led to the declaration of sovereignty, and, in 1991, to the Declaration of Independence.”



    Sergiu Musteata recalled how the year 1989 led to Bessarabian Romanians re-gaining their identity. He speaks from experience:



    “In 1989 I was a first-year history student, and I remember that I took part in many public manifestations. On November 7, when traditionally there was a military parade to celebrate the Bolshevik revolution, for the first time in Chisinau people had the courage to step in front of the tanks to stop them in their tracks. Since then there have been no more tanks in the marches in the grand national square in Chisinau. People came out with flowers, and the soldiers, no matter their ethnicity, went no further. They stopped, hugged the passers-by, and received their flowers. For the first time, the Communist Party leadership fled the official stand. It was a sign that society was changing, that society wished for a different leadership, that it wanted something else. It was a sign that the time of the totalitarian regime, which had kept millions in fear, was now over.”



    Bessarabia had a much smoother transition to democracy than Romania, despite having a much more traumatic past.