This week, further hearings have been held at the Bucharest General Prosecutor’s Office on the file concerning the June 1990 miners’ raid,
which put an end to a large-scale protest against the left-wing power that took
hold of Romania after the fall of the Communist regime in December 1989. On
Wednesday, prosecutors indicted the former head of state, Ion Iliescu, with
crimes against humanity, alongside another two of his then collaborators: the
Director of the Romanian Intelligence Office, Virgil Magureanu, and the Defense
Minister Victor Stanculescu. Also part of this investigation are other
resounding names such as the former Prime Minister Petre Roman and his deputy
Gelu Voican Voiculescu.
On Thursday, the prosecutors also indicted the former
leader of the miners in Jiu Valley, Miron Cozma, who said he was innocent and
stressed that it was not him who had brought the miners to Bucharest in June
1990, but the then authorities. He himself was brought to Bucharest by force,
Cozma claimed. Cozma was accused alongside the former presidential adviser Emil
Cico Dumitrescu and the former vice-chairman of the National Union Provisionary Council, Cazimir Ionescu. We recall that in June 1990, against the background
of violent incidents in the capital, which the army had already managed to
stifle, the former head of state Ion Iliescu invoked an attempted far-right coup, and
called on the population to defend the democratic institutions of the country. The raid of the
miners from Jiu Valley on Bucharest, where they attacked the University, the
headquarters of the opposition parties and the offices of some independent newspapers,
ended in four officially registered dead and hundreds of wounded, as well as
over one thousand people arrested abusively.
The miners’ raid file
came back on prosecutors’ table in February 2015, a few months after the
European Court of Human Rights condemned the Bucharest authorities for the way
in which they had managed the situation back in June 1990. On September 17th,
2014, the Court obliged Romania to restart the investigation and to pay 60
thousand Euro in damages to the three plaintiffs who could not find justice in
the Romanian courts. In Bucharest, the miners’ raid had been investigated into
for eight years, but the case was eventually closed, and nobody was prosecuted.
In Strasbourg, however, the Human Rights Court’s judges based their decision
on evidence of violation of several articles of the European Convention on
Human Rights, such as the one regarding torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. After 25 years, the miners’ raid file is now reopening old
wounds and is stirring fierce debates. Prosecutors hope to bring justice in this case, the
serious event to have ever occurred in Romania after the anti-communist revolution of
December 1989.