Radio România Internațional

Tag: raids

  • June 13, 2019 UPDATE

    June 13, 2019 UPDATE

    AGREEMENT A National Political Agreement aimed at consolidating Romanias European path was signed in a public ceremony in Bucharest on Thursday. In his address on this occasion, president Klaus Iohannis once again criticised the Social Democratic Party, which, he said, harmed Romania a lot. It is because of the Social Democrats that Romania has been unable to develop more, Iohannis said, and emphasised that the Constitution and related legislation must be amended. Attending the ceremony were the leaders of the National Liberal Party, Save Romania Union, ProRomania and Peoples Movement Party, all of them in opposition. The Social Democratic Party and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, in power, as well as the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians, were not on the list of signatories. The Agreement was proposed by Klaus Iohannis to all the parliamentary parties that took part last week in consultations on means to implement the outcome of the May 26th justice referendum. At that time the head of state explained that the agreement is designed to help introduce legislation prohibiting amnesty and pardon for corruption offences and prohibiting the passing of emergency government orders in the field of the judiciary.



    CONGRESS The Social Democratic Party, in power in Romania, will elect its new leaders in a special congress on June 29th, with the partys presidential candidate to be chosen in another congress. These are the main decisions made by the Social Democrats Executive Committee on Thursday. On June 29th the Social Democrats are to elect their president, executive president and secretary general. Following a change in the party rules, the president will be elected by delegates appointed by local branches, rather than by all party members as it happened so far. PM Viorica Dancila, who is currently the interim president, has already announced her candidacy.



    COMMEMORATION Romania commemorated on Thursday 29 years since the June 1990 miners raids that ended a large-scale protest against the leftist party that took over power after the fall of the communist dictatorship in December 1989. On June 13, 1990, clashes broke out between the protesters in University Square in Bucharest and the police. The next day, coal miners from the Jiu Valley in western Romania arrived in Bucharest and raided opposition party offices, the University and other buildings, attacking protesters and other civilians. Six people died, nearly 1,000 were wounded and several hundred others arrested illegally. A criminal case in which the then president Ion Iliescu, ex-PM Petre Roman, former Deputy PM Gelu Voican Voiculescu and former intelligence chief Virgil Măgureanu are accused of crimes against humanity, is yet to reach the actual trial stage. In 2014, the European Court for Human Rights issued a decision forcing Romania to carry on investigations in this case.



    UK Boris Johnson, who promised to complete Brexit on October 31st, is in the lead in the Tory leadership race, after getting 114 out of 313 votes on Thursday. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt came second with 43 votes, followed by Environment Secretary Michael Gove with 37 and Home Secretary Sajid Javid with 23. Ten candidates were enrolled in the race to replace Theresa May, who stepped down as Prime Minister on June 7. The second round of voting is scheduled on June 17th.


    (translated by: Ana-Maria Popescu)

  • The 1990 Miner’s Raids File, Back on Prosecutors’ Table

    The 1990 Miner’s Raids File, Back on Prosecutors’ Table

    When we expected it the least, at the request of the General Prosecutor’s Office, the Bucharest High Court of Cassation and Justice opened the miners’ raids file on Monday. Prosecutors can now resume investigation into crimes such as murder and crimes against peace and humanity. Those believed to have caused the miners’ brutal intervention include the former leftist president Ion Iliescu, the then chief of the Romanian Intelligence Service, Virgil Magureanu and the head of the Romanian Police, general Corneliu Diamandescu, to name just a few.



    The High Court’s decision follows the ruling, last September, by the European Court of Human Rights, that investigations should be reopened. The ECHR showed the Romanian state’s obligation to do justice to the victims of crimes against humanity, regardless of how long ago they happened. The media says the miners’ raid pushed Romania on the brink of civil war. Political analysts say in turn that that was a classic case of state crackdown on its own people. On May 20, 1990, five months after the fall of Ceausescu’s communist dictatorship, one of the former ministers in the 1970s, Ion Iliescu, seen as a revolution leader, won the first free presidential election with 85% of the votes. His party, a heterogeneous mixture of genuine revolutionaries and second-hand communists had in turn won two thirds of the seats in Parliament.



    In Bucharest, University Square that had been occupied, ever since April, by students and proclaimed ‘free of neo-communism’, was empty, as protesters had to comply with the result of the elections. Only several tens of hunger strikers that seemed unable to cope with the disastrous outcome of the elections were still in the square that had previously hosted tens of thousands of exuberant and peaceful people. On the night of June 13, the riot police cracked down on protesters with such disproportionate force that it evoked the violent repression during the Revolution.



    It is still unclear if those who reacted the next day by engaging in street fighting against the riot police and storming the offices of the Interior Ministry and the National Television had any real connection with the Square or not. Ion Iliescu called them ‘legionnaires’, an allusion to the interwar far right movement, and, in spite of the fact that the army had already reinstated order, he called on people to come and rescue democracy, which he said was endangered. The miners in the Jiu Valley, in South-Western Romania, answered the president’s call. For only two days, on June 14 and 15, they took control of the capital city and acted as supreme authority. Time enough for them to kill at least 6 people, injure another 700 and throw 1000 people behind bars.



    The miners devastated the Bucharest University building, the head offices of several parties and of several independent newspapers. In 2010, Laura Codruta Kovesi, the then general prosecutor, the current head of the National Anti-Corruption Directorate, admitted that the inquiry into the miners’ raid was one of the biggest failures in the history of the Public Ministry. Five years on, prosecutors seem to stand one more chance to shed light on that dark page in Romania’s history and do justice.