Rumania Unfinished Revolution

By Bruce W. Nelan

Over and over, as if to exorcise the evil of Nicolae Ceausescu's ironfisted 24-year reign, national television last week replayed the taped record of his final ignominious hours. Haggard, wrapped in a fur-lined overcoat, his hair in tangles, he sat with his wife Elena behind two folding tables pushed together to form a makeshift dock.

He had been so confident of his power: only a week earlier, he had ordered his security forces to fire on demonstrators in the city of Timisoara, near the border with Yugoslavia, as he flew off for an official visit to Iran. Now, under arrest and facing a military tribunal, he did not seem to understand or accept his defeat. He raged at his judges, who were not shown on the tape, insisted that he would answer only to the "working class" and refused to address the prosecutor's charges that he had destroyed Rumania. Within a bare two hours, the Ceausescus were found guilty of genocide, with "more than 60,000 victims," and of gross abuse of the power of the state.

At dusk on Christmas Day, wearing their overcoats, he and Elena, the second most powerful figure in the country, were executed, without blindfolds, before a barracks wall at the Boteni army camp outside Bucharest. There had been 300 volunteers for the three-man firing squad, a military spokesman who had been present said later, and the actual execution was not filmed because some of the soldiers began shooting as soon as they faced the Ceausescus.

The ashen face of the dictator, eyes open, blood oozing from his head, leaped almost instantly onto TV screens in Rumania and around the world. Many Rumanians wept or cheered in relief. Soviet viewers saw parallels with the Bolshevik Revolution and the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family. In Paris editorial writers recalled the French Revolution and suggested it was 1789 in Rumania -- with some of the same ambiguities of that upheaval.

Others were chilled. In China the Rumanian revolution was read as a cautionary tale of what could have happened in Beijing last year had the army not crushed the pro-democracy movement -- and what might still come to pass. Communist Party officials in Beijing put out a directive telling their cadres how to interpret the revolution that swept across Eastern Europe last year, the result of the subversion of socialism by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. In the Arab world several newspapers pointedly reminded oppressive regimes that tyranny could not be maintained forever and that strongmen in the region should take heed.

Comparisons with 1789 and 1917 are not out of place. The old order in Rumania has passed, but the bloodshed is not over, and the shape of a new order is not yet discernible. Euphoria collides with the reality of post- Ceausescu life: unrelenting poverty, political confusion, ethnic tension. Rumanians may be jubilant, but they are also fearful of the uncharted world into which they have been pitched. Ceausescu is gone, but the real revolution is just beginning.

In the capital and other parts of the country, several days of heavy fighting between the army and holdout members of the Securitate, Ceausescu's omnipresent secret police, were followed by sporadic sniping and skirmishing. In front of the all-seeing television cameras at Bucharest's national TV studio, where tanks and troops had beaten back several determined Securitate assaults, a self-appointed 60-member National Salvation Front took charge of the country and named a transitional government until free elections, promised for April, could be held. In short order, demonstrators stormed back into the streets to oppose the inclusion of former senior party and government officials in the administration. "No more communists," they chanted, "no more Ceausescus."

New political parties -- the first rivals to communism in 45 years -- were being formed. The caretaker government set out to erase the most despised features of Ceausescu's Big Brother regime, but the only cohesive organization left to enforce the new decrees seemed to be the army, whose turning against Ceausescu and his Securitate had rescued the revolution from failure.

Even before the Ceausescus were executed, civilians had moved to assert authority over the army as well as the country. Television, which once beamed | out only the glory of Ceausescu, then helped topple him, became the heart and voice of the new government. The National Salvation Front gathered at the studio to announce that the revolution had triumphed -- and set about trying to steer it into calmer channels. The Front ordered all those who had seized or been issued firearms to turn them in and instructed revolutionary committees that had sprung up around the country to be "immediately subordinated" to it.

Two days later, a 37-member provisional government threw out some of the most odious of Ceausescu's laws. It abolished the Securitate and canceled the so-called systematization in the countryside, under which thousands of villages were to be destroyed in the name of progress and peasants forced to move into high-rise apartment complexes. It legalized abortion, which had been prohibited by Ceausescu in an effort to increase the labor force in a country that now has a population of 23 million. It ended food rationing, provided enough power to allow citizens to turn up the heat in their houses and apartments, and made it illegal to refuse medical treatment to the elderly, a policy Ceausescu had enforced to keep the population young. No total overhaul of the economy would be undertaken until after elections, but the caretakers canceled food exports and took steps to improve distribution and relieve widespread shortages.

Rumania is potentially a prosperous country, but Ceausescu's compulsion to pay off a $10 billion foreign debt led him to sell most of the country's oil and food production abroad and ration everything at home. Last week supplies his regime had hoarded for export -- and for the old communist elite -- were rushed into empty stores, and shoppers were dazzled to find meat, oranges, coffee and chocolate, the kind of goods that had not been available to them for years.

All that was popular, but not enough to win universal support for the narrowly based provisional government. Rumanians are troubled by some of the men who assumed control. Several of the leading figures are communists -- dissident and reformist communists of the Gorbachev variety, to be sure, but still tainted by membership at one point or another in Ceausescu's machine. The President, Ion Iliescu, 59, is a former Central Committee Secretary who was demoted in the early 1970s after complaining to Ceausescu about nepotism in the party. Vice President Dumitru Mazilu is also a lifelong communist whose career ground to a halt after he clashed with the dictator. ^ The same is true of General Nikolai Militaru, the Defense Minister. Should old bosses, even if disgraced under Ceausescu, run the country's affairs?

Student demonstrators, who triggered the revolution, said no -- and emphatically so. They poured into Palace Square only hours after the caretaker government was announced. In the shadow of the burned-out, bullet-pocked presidential palace and Communist Party Central Committee building, they marched over the refuse of the struggle, crunching through broken glass, lost shoes, burned wood and ash. "We are not leaving!" they yelled. One young man in the crowd told Western correspondents, "We don't want more communists. We want freedom." Valentin Gabrielescu, a 68-year-old lathe operator standing at the edge of the demonstration, agreed. "I do not believe in good or bad communists, just communists. They are all crooks," he said.

Most Rumanians associate communism with tyranny and deprivation, and are not likely to trust even its reformers for long. Like Gorbachev, some of the postrevolution leaders hope to rebuild the Communist Party, not abolish it. Others are uncertain. Newly appointed Prime Minister Petre Roman, for example, admitted last week that the party might not have a future. "I don't know if it will survive," he said. Vice President Mazilu went further. "Rumania is no longer a communist country," he said. "Rumania is a free land, and we will create a real democracy."

Yet even if the party is destined for the trash heap, not all its members -- 3.8 million before the revolution -- can be ruled out of public life, and some may in time prove their worth. In any case, practicality demands that the government retain at least part of the old bureaucracy in the interest of survival. "What can we do?" asked Corneliu Bogdan, the Deputy Foreign Minister. "There is no question of vengeance." But, he added, "we hope gradually to weed out all the top officials who supported Ceausescu." That kind of compromise made many newly liberated Rumanians uneasy about a potential alliance between the army and the bureaucracy -- and a possible new dictatorship in the making. Said Doina Cornea, a longtime dissident and a founder of the National Christian Peasant Party: "We don't need central control anymore."

But lack of central control was an obvious problem last week. Under Ceausescu's paranoid purges and the vigilance of his secret police, no significant resistance movement was able to form. The explosion that ended his reign resulted from spontaneous combustion, and the people who powered it were only beginning to get organized. Nobody had a plan for the revolution; the participants only knew what they were against. Said Iliescu: "It was not the movement that led to the overthrow, but the overthrow that created the movement."

That organizing process got haltingly under way last week. Citizens' committees in provincial cities such as Timisoara, where the revolt ignited in mid-December, refused the call to "subordinate" themselves, and demanded a role in the National Salvation Front. Workers who joined students in the streets of Craiova, a southwestern industrial town, for example, had no more coherent a plan than the warning "Beware of the wolf in sheep's clothing."

Nor could the caretaker government be certain of security. It appealed "for an end to acts of revenge," but Securitate gunmen sniped intermittently from Bucharest's rooftops; others were believed to be hiding out in a maze of tunnels and secret passages Ceausescu had constructed under the capital's streets. Fighting around the city's international airport forced the frequent interruption of flights. There were ongoing firefights in Timisoara, Arad and Brasov.

With Securitate agents still at large, an absence of fighting did not necessarily mean that they had gone away. Some were killed or captured, but the organization had begun the struggle with 180,000 well-equipped and highly trained agents, and no one seemed to know where most of them were. The provisional government issued an ultimatum: "If they surrender voluntarily with their weapons, they will be tried and the death penalty will not be applied." If they did not, they would be "tried and condemned" by special tribunals. Few secret policemen accepted the offer. With thousands of them, armed and perhaps defiant, unaccounted for, it remained unclear whether they would vanish in the general confusion or carry on some form of guerrilla warfare against the shaky government.

There were persistent rumors last week that mercenaries from Libya, Iran and the Palestine Liberation Organization had been taken into the Securitate and were conducting urban guerrilla raids around the country. At the Foreign Ministry, Bogdan said he had received "denials to our satisfaction from these Arab governments." But in Washington, Silviu Turcu, a high-level Rumanian intelligence official who defected to the U.S. a year ago, said up to 500 Arabs, mostly Palestinians, could have been involved in the fighting.

When Ceausescu left for Iran on Dec. 18, he believed that Securitate had the uprising in Timisoara in hand. "They tortured everyone, young and old, to frighten the city," a young army officer recounted last week. But Timisoara's young refused to be cowed. "It was a revolt by the kids, a young revolution," said Gabriela Vlad, 24, a doctor in the Timisoara hospital. One of her patients, a 13-year-old girl named Suzana who was shot during a demonstration, explained, "We marched because we had nothing to lose here. We are tired of hearing 'No, no.'

Returning from Tehran, Ceausescu found that demonstrations had flared throughout the country and into Bucharest, where he came face to face with rebellion in Palace Square, outside his office. At a rally called to prove his popularity, he was silenced by students shouting "Ceausescu, assassin!" Visibly shocked, he froze, and television transmission was cut off for three minutes. He ordered the Securitate to shoot, but at that point the army switched allegiance -- and that was the beginning of the end for Ceausescu, who fled with his wife. TV newsreaders in Bucharest claimed last week that 80,000 people or more were killed in the struggle that began with the slaughter in Timisoara; Western diplomats thought the death toll was far smaller -- perhaps thousands, but not tens of thousands. Bernard Kouchner, France's Secretary of State for Humanitarian Affairs, who visited Bucharest last week, said the Rumanian Ministry of Health could confirm only 746 deaths and some 1,800 wounded. An exact figure may never be learned.

The nepotism of the house of Ceausescu had put more than 30 of the dictator's family into high offices. By the time he was executed, many of them, including his two sons, his daughter, his sister and two of his brothers, had been arrested and would probably be put on trial. Ceausescu's son Nicu, who directed security troops in a bloody battle in the city of Sibiu, was expected to be executed. A brother, Marin Ceausescu, 74, was found hanged in the Rumanian embassy in Vienna, where he had headed the trade delegation and was widely believed to have been the conduit through whom Nicolae allegedly transferred millions of dollars into Swiss bank accounts. The provisional government notified Switzerland that it would request the assistance of the courts there to try to recover the funds.

Governments East and West cheered the overthrow of Ceausescu, but there were murmurs of distaste at the secret trial and execution of the 71-year-old dictator and his wife. "We would have preferred it if there had been a public trial," said White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater. Nevertheless, like other Western countries, the U.S. speedily recognized "the new legitimate government" and offered its support. Said the British Foreign Office: "Although one may regret a secret trial, at the time it was not really surprising." Gorbachev congratulated Iliescu on taking charge "at a difficult moment when Rumanian patriots resolutely came out to save the nation from forces of despotism and terror." Beijing, a Ceausescu supporter to the end, fretted privately but said only that "we respect the choice made by the Rumanian people."

Prime Minister Roman defended the swift execution, claiming that Ceausescu loyalists were about to attack the military base where the dictator was being held in an attempt to free him. "We were in a situation that did not allow us to wait," Roman said. "Perhaps it was a mistake. But it is too early to judge." At least as real as an impending rescue attempt was the Salvation Front's fear that Ceausescu as a prisoner would give the Securitate a reason for fighting on. Some members of the Front may have thought it a good idea to offer the Rumanian people some blood quickly in order to head off wider vengeance directed against communists in general. "A long trial," said Deputy Foreign Minister Bogdan, "would only have led to more useless carnage."

Rumania now enters a perilous new phase of its revolution. The tyrant has been overthrown, but a power vacuum has been left behind. The National Salvation Front is ruling by televised announcements; no authority is in full control anywhere. Weeks are likely to pass before anything resembling an effective government emerges.

In the meantime, the only national institution with authority and legitimacy is the army. While the military has promised the Front its support, the ad hoc alliance faces the task of ending civil strife and imposing law-and-order on a country flooded with weapons and a thirst for retribution. Says a Western military attache: "Proper law-and-order can be restored only when the army takes all excess weapons out of circulation. But it can do that only when it has won the confidence of the population."

Thus the near future contains more questions than answers. Will the National Salvation Front win popular loyalty in spite of its domination by communists? Will the army lose patience with squabbling civilians and simply take over? Can peace be restored so that Rumanians can cooperate in constructing a freer political system? Does democracy stand a chance?

The U.S., the Soviet Union and the European Community have all pledged to help Rumania mend its wounds and have dispatched shipments of food and medicines. But even with the best of will, there is little outsiders can do beyond providing emergency aid until the transition government, or the one to follow it, manages to grasp firm control. In an attempt to achieve that and broaden its base, the Front at week's end expanded from 60 to 145 members. Among the newcomers were representatives of some ten nascent political parties and local action committees and citizen militias from around the country. Once a solid coalition is in place, its biggest task will be to organize and carry out Rumania's first free elections since 1928.

In a country with no tradition of pluralism and democracy, the creation of parties, of programs, of an electoral system is a daunting enough assignment -- even without post-revolutionary confusion and chaos. There have been suggestions that the balloting should be postponed beyond April. But Rumanians, who have shed much blood to win the right to choose a representative government, are not likely to allow anyone to keep them from doing so.

With reporting by Kenneth W. Banta/Timisoara, William Mader/London and James Wilde/Bucharest