The European Parliament on Thursday voted a resolution on marking 30 years
since the anticommunist revolution of 1989 in Romania. This is the first time
Parliament adopts an official standpoint on the events of ’89, which altered
the course of the country forever. Debated in Monday’s plenary sitting, the
document says that 1,142 people were killed, another 3,000 were gravely wounded
and a few hundred were detained illegally and tortured. The European Parliament
thus commemorates the event, paying homage to the victims’ families, saying
that people’s sacrifice at the time enabled Romania’s transition to democracy,
the rule of law and market economy, and helped integrated the country in NATO
in 2004 and the European Union in 2007. MEPs called on Romania to strengthen
its efforts to clarify the truth in relation to the events of the revolution.
Parliament
also called on the institutions of the European Union and its Member States,
including Romania, to do their utmost to ensure that the crimes of communist
regimes are remembered, and to guarantee that such crimes will never be
committed again. In Bucharest, President Klaus Iohannis hailed the adoption of
the resolution, which again confirms that the sacrifice of Romanians in
December 1989 is a cornerstone of democracy in Romania. The President admits
that the state needs to acts swiftly to ascertain the truth behind the events
of ’89, and to bring the guilty to justice. In December 1989 Romanians said
no to communism and they paid for that with their lives. Today, Romanians are
again part of the European family, MEP Traian Basescu said in turn. Back in
2006, during his term as president, Traian Basescu officially condemned the
communist regime, labeling it criminal and illegitimate.
Set up in Romania at
the end of the Second World War with the occupation of Soviet troops, the
dictatorship in Bucharest is considered by some historians as some of the
harshest behind the Iron Curtain. In the first two decades, the repressive
apparatus of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a sympathizer of Stalinist Russia, some
600 thousand people were imprisoned, from democratic high-ranking officials to
simple peasants who would not give up their lands, from Eastern-Catholic
cardinals to students who loved their country. Having succeeded Dej, Nicolae
Ceausescu fueled, for a short while, the illusion of domestic liberalization
and the breakaway with Moscow. In time, his regime became a one-man
dictatorship, centered on a grotesque personality cult and imposing a severe
austerity on the population. His pathological thirst for power would eventually
turn Romania into the only country in Central and Eastern Europe where the
toppling of the communist regime resulted in bloodshed.
(Translated
by V. Palcu)