APPEAL FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNATION OF THE
CRIMINALITY AND ILLEGITIMACY OF COMMUNISM

Sorin Iliesiu


Dear  all,

In the name of all the victims of communism, I hereby request that you lend your support to the Appeal for the International Condemnation of the Criminality and Illegitimacy of Communism.

The Appeal (and the signatories of the Appeal) is published on the web-site
http://www.libertates.com/en/index.php of the prestigious movement of ideals "Comitatus pro Libertatibus" / "Freedom Committees", President: Vladimir Bukovsky.

In order to come to fruition, the Appeal requires as many signatures as possible from the ranks of those whom I might name the potentially beneficial elite of a world adrift. After the list has reached these hundreds of supporters genuinely representative of the entire world (as soon as possible), I shall re-send the Appeal to all the addressees, including the names of all the prestigious signatories.

In January-February 2007, I shall re-launch the same appeal, appending as an invincible argument the official Report towards the condemnation of the communist regime in Romania as illegitimate and criminal (it will be published in Dec.2006), currently being elaborated by the Romanian Presidential Commission chaired by Vladimir Tismaneanu.

With my wholehearted trust,

Sorin ILIESIU, initiator of the Appeal for the Condemnation of the Crimes of Communism in Romania, as well as the Provisory Report towards condemnation of the crimes of communism in Romania, Vice-President of the Civic Alliance, one of the billions of indirect victims of the crimes committed by communist regimes – for this is what our lives were under communism.

Romania, Bucharest, November 2006

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P o s t s c r i p t . 
I annex:

I.  APPEAL FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNATION OF THE CRIMINALITY AND ILLEGITIMACY OF COMMUNISM

Open letter to:
THE UNITED NATIONS
THE PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY OF THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE
THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES

II.  Unofficial REPORT towards the condemnation of the communist regime in Romania (1945-1989) as illegitimate and criminal.

III.  Appeal to the President of Romania, Traian Basescu, for the condemnation of the communist regime in Romania (1945-1989) as illegitimate and criminal -
published in The National Review, USA, July 26, 2006.

IV.  A Press Review about our civic initiatives in Romania (in 2005 and 2006), taken from the Romanian newspaper "Ziua".

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I.

APPEAL FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNATION
OF THE CRIMINALITY AND ILLEGITIMACY OF COMMUNISM

O p e n   l e t t e r   t o :

THE UNITED NATIONS
THE PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY OF THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE
THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES

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Up to now, the Appeal has been supported and signed by:

I.  COMITATUS PRO LIBERTATIBUS / FREEDOM COMMITTEES, General President -   
VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY

II. The Board of THE ASSOCIATION OF ROMANIAN FORMER POLITICAL PRISONERS,  President - Constantin TICU DUMITRESCU

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1. Sorin ALEXANDRESCU, professor, University of Amsterdam, member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania
2. Vlad ALEXANDRESCU, professor, University of Bucharest
3. Liviu ANTONESEI, writer, Iassy, Romania
4. Ioan Sorin APAN, physicist, writer, Brasov, Romania
5. Teodor BACONSKY, diplomat, writer, Romania
6. Cristian BADILITA, researcher, writer, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin
7. Vasile BAGHIU, writer, Romania
8. Victor BIRSAN, researcher, president of “The Action for the Human Rights Defence”, Romania
9. Octavian  BJOZA, engineer, former political prisoner, Romania
10. Ana BLANDIANA, poet, creator of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and anticommunist Resistance - Sighet, president of Civic Academy Foundation, Romania
11. Alex P. BOTI, engineering manager, Louisiana, USA
12. Lidia BRADLEY, president, Aspera Foundation, Boston, USA
13. Cosmin BUMBUT, photographer, Romania
14. Constantin BURLACU, Ph.D., former political prisoner in Romania, president of The League of National Defense, New York, USA
15. Vladimir BUKOVSKY, writer, former Soviet dissident and political prisoner ("he spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labour camps and in psikhushkas, forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals used by the regime as special prisons"- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Bukovsky)
16. Gheorghe CALCIU DUMITREASA, priest, former political prisoner - 21 years in Romanian prisons, USA
17. Magda CARNECI, writer, vice-president, Romanian Cultural Institute, Paris
18. Gary CARTWRIGHT, political scientist, journalist, Brussels, Belgium.
19. Ioana Bogdan CATANICIU, researcher, The Institute for Archaeology and History of the Arts, Cluj, Romania
20. Smaranda CAZAN-LIVESCU, professor, president - "Athenaeum" Romanian-American Cultural Centre, Atlanta, USA
21. Manuela CERNAT, professor  - The National University for Theatre and Film, Romania
22. Rasvan CERNAT, conductor, Romania
23. Mircea CINTEZA, president of Romanian College of Physicians
24. Adrian CIOROIANU, historian, Euro-observer, Romania
25. Octavian CIUPITU, architect, Stockholm, Sweden
26. Nicolae COANDE, writer, Craiova, Romania
27. Denisa COMANESCU, writer, editor, Bucharest, Romania
28. Daria Craita COMSA, medical physicist, Canada
29. Mihail CONSTANTINESCU, film director, former political prisoner, Romania
30. Nicolae CONSTANTINESCU, member of the Academy of Medicine, Romania
31. Silvia CONSTANTINESCU, journalist, Stockholm, Sweden
32. Rodica and Flavia COPOSU, the sisters of CORNELIU COPOSU (1914-1995) – “The Moral President of postcommunist Romania”, symbol of the Romanian anticommunist fight
33. Andrei CORNEA, writer, philosopher, Romania
34. Doina CORNEA, writer, symbol of the Romanian anticommunist dissidence, Cluj, Romania
35. Gheorghe CRACIUN, writer, professor - Transylvania University, Brasov, Romania
36. Ovidiu CREANGA, writer, Toronto, Canada
37. Radu Calin CRISTEA, journalist, writer, Romania
38. Mircea A. DIACONU, writer, professor, University of Suceava, Romania
39. Dan DIMANCESCU, journalist, writer, Boston, USA
40. Bernád DÉNES, engineer and author, Canada
41. Aurora-Silvia DUMITRESCU, professor, former political prisoner - 6 years, Romania
42. Constantin TICU DUMITRESCU, president of the Association of Romanian Former Political Prisoners, former political prisoner – 23 years. Member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania.
43. Cristinel DUMITRESCU, engineer, former political prisoner - 14 years, Romania
44. Florian DUMITRESCU, jurist, former political prisoner - 25 years, Romania
45. Paul DUMITRESCU, technician, former political prisoner - 2 years, Romania
46. Sisila DULDURESCU-IONESCU, vice-president – The World Union of Free Romanians, Paris, France.
47. Dan L. DUSLEAG, M.D., assistant professor, Indiana University, USA
48. Lucia DUSLEAG, paediatrician, Toronto, Canada
49. Eugenia DUTA, musician, France
50. Smaranda ENACHE, president, Liga ProEuropa, Targu-Mures, Romania
51. Yuri FEDOROV, former Soviet political prisoner, USA
52. Dario FERTILIO, journalist, writer, Italy
53. Radu FILIPESCU, former political prisoner, symbol of the Romanian anticommunist dissidence, president of the Group for Social Dialogue. Member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania.
54. Ion FILOTTI, computer scientist, Paris, France.
55. Serban FOARTA, writer, Timisoara, Romania
56. Silvestru FOCIUC, engineer, former political prisoner - 3 years, Romania
57. Angela FURTUNA, writer, journalist, Suceava, Romania
58. Anneli Ute GABANYI, political analyst, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin
59. Tom GALLAGHER, professor of Ethnic Conflict and Peace, Bradford University, United Kingdom
60. Adelina GEORGESCU, professor of applied mathematics - University of Pitesti, Romania.
61. Gabriel GHERASIM, journalist, New York, USA
62. Teofil GHERCA, political analyst, Romania
63. Andre GLUCKSMANN, philosopher, France
64. Andrew P. GRIGORENKO, president of General Petro Grigorenko Foundation
65. Peter GROSS, director, professor, The University of Tennessee, USA
66. Cristian HADJI-CULEA, director, general manager of the National Theatre, Jassy, Romania 
67. Otto R. HOFFMANN, writer, France
68. Petre IANCU, journalist, Deutsche Welle, Bonn, Germany
69. Doru ILIESIU, architect, New York, SUA
70. Petru ILIESU, writer, president - ”Timisoara ’89” Foundation, Romania
71. Victor ILIESIU, architect, Romania
72. Miltiade IONESCU, physician, former political prisoner - 15 years, Romania
73. Afrodita IORGULESCU, mathematician, professor -  Academy of Economic Studies, Romania
74. Anastasia IORGULESCU, medical student, former political prisoner, forced work for all the life, Romania
75. George IPATE, former political prisoner - 3 years, Romania
76. Mircea IVANOIU, professor, University of Brasov, Romania
77. Doina JELA, writer, journalist, secretary – the Association of Independent Journalists, Romania
78. Count KALNOKY Tibor, physician, Sfantu-Gheorghe, Romania
79. Charles KERCEA, former political prisoner - 7 years, Romania
80. Eduard KUZNETSOV, writer, journalist, former political prisoner, Israel
81. Carol LEBORG, political analyst, Canada
82. Michael LEDEEN, writer, USA
83. Dmitry LENKOV, scientist, USA
84. Gabriel LIICEANU, philosopher, writer, Romania
85. Alexander LITVINENKO, former KGB-FSB officer lieutenant-colonel, political prisoner, writer, United Kingdom
86. Lucian I. LIVESCU, president - “Youth For a Better World”, Atlanta, USA
87. Traian LUSCAN, office worker, former political prisoner - 10 years, Romania
88. Silviu LUPESCU, general manager – Polirom publishing house, Jassy, Romania
89. Giorgio LUPU, architect, vicepresident - Nadel Architects Inc., Los Angeles, USA
90. Nistor MAN, professor, former political prisoner, Romania
91. Sorin MARCULESCU, writer, Romania
92. Mihai MARIN, office worker, former political prisoner - 8 years, Romania
93. Mircea MARTIN, professor, University of Bucharest
94. Constantin MARTIAN, vicepresident of the Civic Alliance, Romania
95. Claude  MATASA, professor, scientist, Chicago, USA
96. Serban  MIHAILEANU, cardiologist, Paris
97. Emanoil MIHAILESCU, architect, former political prisoner - 5 years, Romania
98. Florian MIHALCEA, president – Societatea Timisoara, Romania
99. Christian MITITELU, president of the Civic Alliance, Romania
100. Dumitru MOSOIU, office worker, former political prisoner - 4 years, Romania
101. Alexandru MUNTEANU, professor, Transylvania University, Brasov, Romania
102. Carmen MUSAT, journalist, director - “Observator cultural” review, Romania
103. John NANDRIS, archaeologist, Oxford, United Kingdom
104. Ana Maria NARTI, member of Swedish Parliament (Liberal Party)
105. Radu NICOARA, film director, dean of the National University for Theatre and Film, Romania
106. Ecaterina NICULESCU, former political prisoner - 2 years
107. Andrei OISTEANU, writer, president of the Romanian Association for the History of Religions
108. Stejarel OLARU, hostorian, general manager - The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania
109. Marius OPREA, historian, president - The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania. Member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania.
110. Dan OTTULESCU, engineer, former political prisoner - 10 years, Romania
111. Ion Mihai PACEPA, general, author: "Red Horizons "(1987), "The Black Book of the Securitate” (1999), USA
112. Octavian PALER, writer, Romania
113. Vasile PARASCHIV, former political prisoner, symbol of the Romanian anticommunist dissidence, Ploieşti, Romania
114. Horia-Roman PATAPIEVICI, writer, president of the Romanian Cultural Institute. Member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania
115. Cristina PETRESCU, historian, expert of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania
116. Dragos PETRESCU, historian, member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania
117. Dusan PETROVICI, poet, Dusseldorf, Germany
118. Andrei PLESU, writer, Romania
119. Ilie POPA, dean – University of Pitesti, Romania. President - Fundatia Culturala Memoria, Arges
120. Nicolae PRELIPCEANU, writer, journalist, Romania
121. Delia PRVACKI, sculptor, Singapore
122. Constantin RADUCANU, engineer, former political prisoner - 7 years, Romania
123. Constantin RAUTA, scientist, Centre of Excellence, College Park, Maryland, USA
124. Victor REBENGIUC, actor, former rector of the National University for Theatre and Film, Romania
125. Cristina RHEA, poet, journalist, Romania
126. Luís RIBEIRO, historian, Portugal
127. Sorin ROSCA STANESCU - journalist, general manager  of the journal “Ziua”, Romania
128. Marilena ROTARU, TV filmmaker, Romania
129. Romulus RUSAN, writer, manager of the International Centre of Studies about Communism - Civic Academy Foundation, member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania
130. Ileana SAMOILA, former political prisoner - 8 years, Romania
131. Eugen SERBANESCU, writer, Romania
132. David SATTER, writer, former Moscow correspondent, USA
133. Valerian SAVA, film critic and historian, Romania
134. Armando de SIMONE, journalist, writer, author: "The Black Book of Italian communism", Italy
135. Eliot SOREL, professor, George Washington University, USA
136. Lavinia STAN, director, Centre of Post-Communist Studies, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada
137. Teodor STANCA, engineer, former political prisoner, Romania
138. Marian STAS, chairman, Codecs Foundation for Leadership, Romania
139. Cristache STEFANESCU, physician, former political prisoner - 20 years, Romania
140. Gheorghe Mihai STEFANESCU, engineer, former political prisoner - 10 years, Romania
141. Cristiana I. STOICA, lawyer, Romania
142. Petre STOICA, writer, Jimbolia, Romania
143. Valeriu STOICA, professor - University of Bucharest
144. Stelian TANASE, writer. Member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania
145. Alin TEODORESCU, sociologist, Romania
146. Vladimir TISMANEANU, chairman and co-ordinator of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania. Professor of political science, University of Maryland, USA
147. Cristina TOPESCU, TV journalist, Romania
148. Cristian TOPESCU, TV journalist, Romania
149. Florin TUDOSE, psychiatrist, professor - "S.Haret" University, Romania
150. Florin TURCANU, historian, professor, University of Bucharest
151. Lucian TURCESCU, professor - Concordia University, president - Canadian Patristics Association, Canada
152. Petr VANCURA, chairman, The BELL - Association for Freedom and Democracy, Czech Republic
153. Ion VARLAM, bank expert, former political prisoner, 8 years, Romania
154. Cristian VASILE, historian, scientific secretary of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania
155. Anca VASILIU, philosopher, scientist - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
156. Varujan VOSGANIAN, writer, vice-president of The Writer Union of Romania
157. Smaranda VULTUR, professor – Western University, Timisoara. Expert of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania
158. Dinu ZAMFIRESCU, president - National Institute for the Memory of Romanian Exile, Romania
159. Florin ZAMFIRESCU, rector of the National University for Theatre and Film, Romania
160. Vlad ZOGRAFI, writer, Romania
161. Serban RADULESCU ZONER, historian, ex-president of the Civic Alliance, former political prisoner, Romania
162. Georges ZOUAIN, UNESCO expert, France
163. Alexandru ZUB, historian, academician, former political prisoner, member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania

The list of signatures is in alphabetical order.
THE LIST REMAIN OPEN. If you agree to sign, please contact the initiator - Sorin Iliesiu: <vmvd@ong.ro> <soriniliesiu@yahoo.com>  Subject: APPEAL FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNATION.  Please mention your profession etc./country.  Thank you.

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M O T T O :

Sorin Iliesiu (the author of the present appeal): “Communist Romania was like
a huge political prison, from which there was no escape, a gigantic penitentiary in which twenty-three million
innocent people endured a criminal and absurd sentence handed down by the fatality of history.”
“Communism seemed to have been installed definitively and irrevocably.  Its collapse seemed possible only theoretically, in a much too distant future.  Nevertheless, we dared to dream, at least for the future of our future grandchildren.  Only our dreams eluded the omnipresent censorship, because they could neither be controlled, nor denounced, nor even subjected to self-censorship. 
But unlike dreams, our hopes were conscious and lucid,

and thus inevitably subject to self-censorship.  This is why we did not have very high hopes.”

George W. Bush, Riga, May 7, 2005: “The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition
of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated,
the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.  Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom
for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions
in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.”  

Excerpt from page 7 of the report attached to this letter: “Victims were transformed into executioners; prisoners were tortured by their own friends, by their fellows in suffering.  The purpose: “re-education” through physical and psychical destruction, the transformation of young people into atheists, into informers on their friends.  Examples of psychological torture: a) On Easter Night, prisoners who refused to make a total self-denunciation (to tell everything that they were supposed not to have declared during Securitate interrogations) are forced to take a ‘holy communion’ of faecal matter; b) Those suspected of having concealed information about participants in anticommunist actions have their heads thrust by their torturers into chamber-pots full
of urine; c) Prisoners are forced to spit in the mouth of their anticommunist leader, in order to force him
to revenge himself by unmasking them;  d). On Christmas Day, a prisoner is forced to go to stool on a bedpan,
to ‘symbolise’ the nativity of Christ, while the other political prisoners are forced to kneel and cross themselves before him.  (…)  The Pitesti experiment is regarded as unique in the panoply of methods designed to destroy the human person.  In his celebrated book The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn refers
to the Pitesti experiment as the ‘most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world’”.

Sorin Iliesiu: “In the end, communism fell into its own trap, deluding itself that the total lie
could function even against human nature and – why not – even against God Himself, Who, obviously,
had to be replaced by something and somebody.  What and who could be a replacement for God? 
At the same time as they negated Him, the communist dictators attempted to take His place.”

André Malraux: “The Twenty First Century will be religious or not at all.”

 

“Universal history is nothing more than the recurrence of catastrophes in the expectation of one final catastrophe”, wrote Emil Cioran, reflecting, probably, on the apocalyptic death toll of the catastrophes that occurred last century: ten million victims in the First World War; fifty-five million victims in the Second World War; ten million people murdered in the name of Nazism; one hundred million people murdered in the name of communism.
We must make it impossible for such catastrophes to reoccur.  Nazism has been condemned in just and exemplary fashion.  Communism and its crimes must similarly be condemned.  This will only be possible through knowledge of the whole truth.  Due to lack of knowledge, or superficial knowledge, at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 25 January 2006 many parliamentarians of the highest European forum for the defence of human rights and the rule of law voted against the motion to condemn communism, ignoring the arguments put forward by Mr Göran Lindblad, the initiator of the motion.  We are convinced that only when the whole truth is known can such a vote be just.
In this highly necessary motion, Mr Göran Lindblad referred to the figure of one hundred million people killed in the name of communist ideology.  However, as well as those murdered, there were also billions of victims of other crimes against humanity.  In the communist bloc, human rights were concealed precisely in order to be flagrantly and systematically violated.  In Lenin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Ceausescu’s Romania, communism signified continual, indirect murder for the majority.
In the name of all the victims of communism, we solicit that the United Nations, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Congress of the United States of America should firmly condemn the crimes and illegitimacy of communism as soon as possible and should take decisions that will ensure that such crimes will never again be possible.
I propose that the representatives of civil society in the former communist countries should solicit from national and international authorities the firm condemnation of the crimes and illegitimacy of communism.  The official arguments necessary for such international condemnation can be obtained by following the most natural path, in the same way as we have proceeded in Romania.  Thus, as representative of civil society, I launched an appeal for the official condemnation of the crimes of communism in April 2005.  The President of Romania, Traian Basescu, affirmed that he would condemn these crimes on the basis of an official report.  In October 2005, I presented him an unofficial report (of 11 pages), attached to the present letter.  Subsequently, my Appeal was signed by hundreds of prestigious intellectuals and by leading civic organisations.
In response to the Appeal, the President of Romania decided to establish a presidential committee in order that an official report might be drawn up.  Of course, this report will be much more comprehensive than the one I have drawn up, inasmuch as it will benefit from access to still secret archives, as well as the competence of the twenty members of the committee, co-ordinated by the prestigious Vladimir Tismaneanu, professor of political science at the University of Maryland (USA).  Thus, at the end of this year, Romania will be the first country in which there will take place, in full knowledge of the facts, an exemplary condemnation of the illegitimacy and criminality of communism.
I consider that the whole world should recognise the extreme forms taken by the criminality of the communist regime in Romania.  Here are two examples: 1) Relative to the size of the population, Romania had the highest number of victims subject to extermination; 2) during the anticommunist revolution of December 1989, unarmed and panic-stricken masses of people were massacred: more than 1,100 dead and over 3,300 wounded, whereas in other communist countries the totalitarian regimes collapsed with no (or almost no) victims.  It was not by chance that, four months after the revolution, the longest anticommunist meeting in history took place in the capital of Romania (fifty-two days and nights without interruption), a demonstration that was repressed with unprecedented brutality.
I should underline the fact that, fifteen years after the fall of communism, while researching for the unofficial report presented to the President of Romania, I discovered terrible things of which I had previously known almost nothing.  I could not believe that so many and so terrible atrocities had been possible. Most of them were hidden from us.  Some horrors we experienced personally, of others we were aware only partially.  We knew only little about the whole.  Our parents hid the truth from us precisely because they feared for us: any form of protest could have been fatal.  Today, young people know nothing or virtually nothing about these horrors.
Ultimately, all these horrors will be rigorously analysed and summarised in the future official document for the condemnation of the communist regime in Romania.
We therefore propose that the representatives of civil society in the former communist countries should follow the example of civil society in Romania, so that the entire world might recognise the whole truth about the crimes of communism, in order that they will never be possible again anywhere.
We ask that the United Nations should demand that each former communist state should present, as soon as possible, its own country report regarding the illegitimacy and illegality of communism. The international condemnation must take place in full knowledge of the facts, within a global conference. 
In symbolic fashion, such a conference might take place in Romania, in the huge palace built by Ceausescu, the last Stalinist in Europe.

Romania, Bucharest, 17 May 2006

Sorin Iliesiu,
initiator of the Appeal for the Condemnation of the Crimes of Communism in Romania and author of The Unofficial Report towards Condemnation of the Crimes of Communism. Member of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania. Vice-president of the Civic Alliance, member of the Group for Social Dialogue.
Postscript: I was one of the 4,000,000 former supernumerary members (i.e. one of the bit-part players) of the Romanian Communist Party.  In the world, there were billions of supernumerary members of the former communist parties.  These people were also victims of the crimes committed by communist regimes.  For the overwhelming majority of people, life under communism meant an indirect and continual crime. Through my Appeal, I wish to represent inclusive the billion former bit-part players members of the former communist parties.

N.B.: The Appeal, the signatories list and the annexe, are published on the web-site http://www.libertates.com/en/index.php of the prestigious international movement of Ideals "Comitatus pro Libertatibus" / "Freedom Committees", President -Vladimir Bukovsky.

Translated by Alistair Blyth

Sorin ILIESIU
E-mail: vmvd@ong.ro   Fax: +40-021.3156358
Postal address: 60 Ruschita Str., Sector 2, 021949 Bucharest, Romania

 

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II.


Unofficial REPORT towards the condemnation of the communist regime in Romania         (1945-1989) as illegitimate and criminal

 

Report presented to Traian Basescu, President of Romania, by Sorin Iliesiu* in October 2005.
Text updated in January 2006 and expanded in March 2006.


This report is necessary in order that the criminality of communism might incontestably be condemned in full knowledge of the facts, as has been the case in the condemnation of the Holocaust, with an extremely large number of human beings having been exterminated in both these instances of genocide.
This report comes in response to the appeal by the President of Romania, Traian Basescu, that the communist regime in Romania should be condemned on the basis of a report elaborated by a scientifically validated commission.  This unofficial report is a summary of objective, documentary evidence, which has been rigorously gathered by a team of historians, under the guidance of the foremost specialists in the history of global and Romanian communism.
 
This text, for the most part, represents an extremely concise summary of the documentary materials elaborated since 1994 by the Civic Academy Foundation’s International Centre for the Study of Communism.  The research council comprises Thomas Blanton (National Security Archives, George Washington University, Washington D.C.); Vladimir Bukovski (Cambridge University); Stéphane Courtois (Centre National de Récherches Scientifiques, Paris), Dennis Deletant (University of London); Helmut Müller-Enbergs (Federal Office for the Study of STASI Archives, Berlin); Serban Papacostea (Academician, Bucharest); and Alexandru Zub (Academician, A.D. Xenopol Institute, Jassy).  Part of the documentary material has been drawn from the Memorial to the Resistance and the Victims of Communism at Sighet, founded by Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan in 1993.  Arguments as to the objective and rigorously scientific character of this report towards condemnation of communism as criminal, whose material has been specifically taken from the Sighet Memorial, are as follows.  In 1995, the Memorial was taken beneath the aegis of the Council of Europe.  In 1997, the Romanian Parliament declared it a site of national interest.  In 1998, the Council of Europe declared it to be one of the three most important sites for the preservation of memory in Europe, alongside the Auschwitz Memorial and the Memorial to Peace in France.  At the 2004 international seminar in Weimar, it was recognised as the most objective and scientific of all the memorials existing in the former communist bloc.

* Sorin Iliesiu is Vice-President of the Civic Alliance; member of the Group for Social Dialogue; initiator of the Appeal for the Condemnation of Communism in Romania as Criminal, addressed to the President of Romania and signed by more than 500 leading intellectuals and by the foremost non-governmental and union organisations (10 March 2006).

 

I n t r o d u c t i o n

The references made by the President of the United States and the President of Romania to the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 and the Yalta Summit of 1945

At Yalta in 1945, three months before the close of the Second World War, the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain, represented by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, established an unofficial agreement with reference to future spheres of influence.  At Riga in May 2005, sixty years after the Yalta summit, George W. Bush, the President of the United States, affirmed what hundreds of millions of people in the countries occupied by the Soviet Union had waited to hear for six decades: “The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.  Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.  Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable.  The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history“.  “We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability.  We have learned our lesson.  No one’s liberty is expendable.  In the long run, our security, and true stability, depend on the freedom of others.”
In the spirit of the affirmations made by the President of the United States concerning the pact between Hitler and Stalin, the President of Romania published the following press communiqué, one month later (in June 2005): “Sixty-five years after the Soviet ultimatum to the Romanian authorities, the President of Romania, Traian Basescu, firmly condemns the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that led to the annexation of Bassarabia and Northern Bukovina by the USSR.  President Basescu considers that Romania cannot ignore the suffering endured by our brothers over the Prut as a result of grave historical injustices.  The President of Romania inclines respectfully to those people who had to learn to live with daily suffering, from that of being separated from family to that of being severed from language and nation.”

Quotation from the testimony of Corneliu Coposu (1914-1995), the anticommunist leader and leader of Christian democracy in post-communist Romania

 “The Romanian people was alone among the peoples occupied by the Soviets, in South Eastern Europe, in not capitulating but rather protesting by withdrawing to the mountains and forming resistance groups.  The Romanian people did not give up the fight after all the nations around us had resigned themselves to the communism imposed by the occupying Soviet Army, namely: Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany.  From our party alone (the National Peasants’ Party) 272,000 members were arrested, of whom a third died in prison.  This was the true Romanian resistance.  The victims of that resistance were the Romanian intellectual elite, Romanian army officers, the entire superstructure of the Romanian nation, headed by party leaders, all former ministers, former heads of schools, philosophical thinkers, and achievers in every field.  Not one of them escaped communist persecution.  Hundreds of thousands of people perished, dying in the fifty places of incarceration, in the concentration camps, the labour camps, at the Danube - Black Sea Canal, and in all the repressive institutions that hunted down everything in the Romanian people that stood for lucidity, thought, and the desire for independence.  The communist regime concentrated, with the evident purpose of extermination, all those whom it regarded as representing the spearheads of anticommunist resistance.  Prison did not even have the purpose of conserving detainees, but on the contrary provided a substitute when the regime hesitated to use the bullet.  This is why there were so few survivors.  Certainly, the goal was ninety per cent achieved.  In any case, we were living witness to the Romanian proverb, Let God not give man as much as he can bear.  Man can bear an extraordinary amount, well above the limit that one might allow oneself to imagine.”  (N.B.: these excerpts have been taken from the interview Corneliu Coposu gave to Lucia Hossu-Longin.)

The communist regime in Romania (1945-1989)

was illegitimate and criminal in the light of the following:

Preamble: presentation of historical events during the period 1917-1944, as relevant to the illegitimacy of the communist regime in Romania

  • December 1917: in Jassy, the Bolsheviks try to overthrow the Romanian government and drive out the future founders of Greater Romania – King Ferdinand and Queen Maria (the most celebrated queen of the epoch, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England and Tsar Alexander II of Russia; the last Tsar, Nicholas II, the cousin of Queen Maria, was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918).

  • March 1918: in Chisinau (Kishinev), the Parliament of Bassarabia (a Romanian province which had declared independence from the Bolshevik state) votes for the Union of Bassarabia with Romania.

  • November 1918: at Cernauti (Czernowitz/Chernovtsy), the National Council of Bukovina (a former province of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire) votes for the Union of Bukovina with Romania.

  • 1 December 1918 (the national day of post-communist Romania): at Alba Iulia, the National Assembly of Transylvania votes for the Union of Transylvania and the Banat (both former provinces of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire) with Romania.  Thus, the union of Romanians within a single state was effectively achieved prior to the Paris Peace Conference that was later to recognise it.  During the interbellic period, Romania (the surface area of Greater Romania was 295,042 square kilometres) becomes a powerful and prosperous state.

  • August 1919: the Romanian army occupies Budapest and liberates Hungary from the Soviet regime installed in March 1919 by Bela Kun (at the initiative of and supported by Lenin).  Bela Kun had striven for the Sovietisation of Transylvania.

  • 1921: at the initiative of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Romania is founded and will be controlled exclusively from Moscow.  In comparison with the other communist parties of interbellic Europe, the Communist Party of Romania has the fewest members.

  • 1924: in accordance with directives from Moscow, the Communist Party of Romania launches a Bolshevik revolution, with the aim of overthrowing the Kingdom of Romania and making Romanian territory part of the Soviet Union.  The Romanian Communist Party is outlawed due to its anti-national and anti-state activities.

  • 1939: the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact is signed by Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia; the pact includes a reference to Soviet “interest” in Bassarabia.

  • June 1940: by ultimatum of the Soviet government, which threatens immediate armed invasion, Romania is forced to cede not only Bassarabia but also northern Bukovina and the Hertza region, although the latter two territories have never been part of Russia.  The Romanian populace will be subject to repression, terror and massacres, and the anti-Soviet elite will be exterminated.

  • June 1941: the government led by Marshal Ion Antonescu declares war on the Soviet Union and liberates the territories lost the previous year.  The Romanian army will subsequently fight for three years alongside the Germans against the Soviet Union.

  • August 1944: by order of King Michael, Marshal Antonescu is arrested.  Romania declares war on Germany, joining the Allies and lending them Romania’s entire military and economic might until the end of the war.  The Romanian Army begins to liberate its own country, which has been occupied by German troops (liberation will be complete by 25 October 1944).

  • October 1944: Stalin and Churchill unofficially agree on future spheres of influence (insofar as Romania is concerned, Stalin demands ninety per cent influence).  At the same time, the Romanian army liberates the north of Romania (north-west Transylvania was ceded to Admiral Horthy’s Hungary in 1940, through the Dictate of Vienna).  While the Romanian army is liberating its own country from Nazi occupation, the Soviets occupy Romania, declare themselves “liberators” and install their own government in Bucharest, in the form of the Armistice Control Commission.

N.B.: Most of the data above have been taken from the official web site of the Romanian Presidency, respectively from the section on the history of Romania, elaborated by historian Ion Calafeteanu.

1). Betrayal of Romania’s interests by the communist-dominated government imposed by Stalin in March 1945.  The unjust and forced annexation of Romania by the Soviet empire, commencing 1945. 

  •  In February 1945, the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain, represented by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, participated at the Yalta Conference.  Among the unofficial accords agreed upon was the ninety per cent “influence” of the Soviet Union in Romania, a percentage imposed by Stalin on Churchill in Moscow four months previously.  At the same time as the sacrifice of Romania was sealed at Yalta, the Romanian army continued its campaign against Nazi occupation, liberating Hungary, Czechoslovakia and a part of Austria.  It should be emphasised that, thanks to Romania, the Second World War was shortened by at least six months.  In the war against Nazi Germany, the Romanian army lost more than 100,000 soldiers, with Romania thus ranking fourth in the world in terms of losses, after the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain.  It should also be pointed out that Stalin imposed on the Romanian Army a military strategy that was tantamount to partial extermination (at the maximum limit possible).

  • On 6 March 1945, immediately after the Yalta accord and in accordance with its unofficial provisions, Stalin imposed on Romania a puppet government, dominated by communists (led by Petru Groza, a pro-Soviet bourgeois politician).  This government began Sovietisation of the country, eliminating democracy in order to establish communism and thus betraying the interests of Romania.  A period of terror commenced: arrests, purges, deportations, and the internment in concentration camps of political prisoners.  Censorship was imposed.  One of the official charges of the puppet government was to organise “free and fair elections”.

2). The illegitimate and forcible imposition of a communist regime through massive fraud in the 1946 elections.
In the conditions of terror imposed by the communists, the elections of November 1946 were won with a massive majority by the anticommunist opposition, who obtained between seventy and ninety per cent of the vote, according to documentary evidence and eye-witness accounts.  However, the communists merely reversed this result, giving themselves seventy per cent of the vote.  The massive rigging of the elections constituted a crime against the Romanian people, through theft of the nation’s will.  After the elections, the pace of Sovietisation was intensified.

3). Betrayal of fundamental Romanian interests by the communist regime through acceptance of the unjust conditions of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947.
N.B. The premises are presented in the historical preamble of this report, as well as in the preceding two paragraphs.

  • Within the framework of the 1946-1947 Paris Peace Conference and through the signing of the Peace Treaty of 10 February 1947, the communist regime in Romania, respectively the puppet government controlled by Stalin, was guilty of having accepted that Romania not be recognised as a participating ally in the fight against Nazism, but rather as a nation defeated by the Soviet Union.  It should be mentioned that Romania fought for three years against the Soviet Union and for almost one year (at the end of the war) on the side of the Soviet Union against Germany.  The communist power (in Romania) ignored the fact that Romania shortened the war by at least six months when it joined the Allied side in August 1944, with the Romanian Army sacrificing more than one hundred thousand soldiers on the front and thus ranking fourth, after the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain, in terms of loss of life.

  • Within the framework of the Peace Conference negotiations, the communist regime (in Romania) ignored the illegitimacy of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Hitler and Stalin, as well as the illegitimacy of the Soviet occupation of the Romanian territories of Bassarabia, North Bukovina and the Hertza region in 1940.  The fact that Bukovina and Hertza had never belonged to Russia was not invoked, nor was the fact that Bassarabia had freely chosen to become part of Romania in 1918.  Similarly, there was no invocation of the fact that Romania had legitimately entered the war in 1941 in order to liberate its own territories.  By accepting the conditions of the Peace Treaty, the communist regime (in Romania) was thereby guilty of ceding to the Soviet Union the territories of Bassarabia, North Bukovina and the Hertza region, with a surface area of 44,000 square kilometres and a population of 3,200,000, the majority ethnic Romanians.  Subsequently, the population were subject to forced denationalisation, ethnic persecution, deportation (including to Siberian labour camps), mass murder and other forms of extermination.  The Romanian territories ceded by the communist regime were massively colonised by allogenous peoples. 

  • Similarly, the communist regime agreed to pay the Soviet Union reparations of 300,000,000 dollars and accepted that Romania continue to be occupied by Soviet troops for a further ninety days.  The occupying Soviet Army was to remain in Romania until 1958, at a cost of two billion dollars in maintenance.

  • Additional mention should be made of one merit of the Treaty and implicitly the communist power: restitution to Romania of the territories in north-east Transylvania that had been ceded to Horthy’s Hungary in 1940 through the Vienna Dictate. 

4). Destruction of multiparty democracy through liquidation of the democratic opposition and the replacement of democracy with a single party dictatorship (1947).
By destroying the three traditional Romanian parties (the National Peasants’ Party, National Liberal Party and Social Democratic Party), the communists made the transition from multiparty democracy to single party state, in form of the Romanian Workers’ Party, subsequently renamed the Romanian Communist Party.

5). The forced abolition of the monarchy (1947)
After 23 August 1944, when the country sided with the Allies against Hitler, sacrificing more than one hundred thousand lives, Romania was transformed by the Soviets into a satellite state.  Of all the nations that were to be Sovietised, Romania was the only country which had a king loved by the people.  The King was thus regarded as the final obstacle to the imposition of communism.  After having been recognised as instrumental in ending the war and decorated by the Russians and Americans, King Michael was forced to abdicate by the communists, and a Soviet-style republic was established.

“The military action begun on 23 August 1944 against Hitler’s forces was one of the vital turning points of the European front in the Second World War.  This action was undertaken by the Romanian Army at the initiative and order of its supreme commander, Michael I.  After August 1944, King Michael was the mainstay and hope of the overwhelming majority of the people, who rejected communist domination.  On 30 December 1947, Michael I was made to abdicate under threat of force and bloody reprisals against one hundred youths who were being held under arrest.”  Historical commentary by Academician Dinu C. Giurescu.

6). The forced and total Sovietisation of Romania (1948)
In 1948, the communists, who had already obtained absolute power through terror and fraud in previous years, began to impose their own economic and social system, in accordance with that already developed by Lenin and Stalin.
In 1948, practically all state institutions were re-established according to the Soviet pattern: the judiciary, education, the Academy, religions. 
On an even greater scale, the communists continued their mockery of the judicial system, through political show trials, and subjected citizens to propaganda based on untruth, with the object of consigning the truth to oblivion.  Mockery of justice and subjugation of citizens through propaganda can be counted as permanent features of the communist regime.
The constitution of a people’s republic was adopted.  The Romanian Workers’ Party was founded as “the sole party of the working class” and the supreme ruling organ of the state (the party-state).  The leaders of the main religions were replaced (with the object of total subjugation of the Orthodox Church) and the Graeco-Catholic (Uniate) Church was outlawed.  It was decreed that all means of production be nationalised (everything from the steel industry to the humblest cobbler’s workshop).  In the countryside, the Soviet system of obligatory crop quotas was copied, as well as the division of peasants into the categories of “poor”, “middling” and “kulaks”.  Thousands of arrests were made among anticommunist youth, but also in the ranks of the Communist Party (targeting those members inconvenient to Stalin or Dej, respectively the Patrascanu group).  The free press was liquidated.  The Romanian Academy was replaced en masse with proteges of the communist regime.  Old members of the Academy were entirely excluded.  Only a fraction of them were later readmitted, while the majority were arrested, with some dying in detention.  Study of the Russian language became compulsory in schools, as well as study of the Bolshevik Party and the geography of the Soviet Union.  The teaching of religion was outlawed.  Participation in communist parades became obligatory (sometimes even at Easter), and in schools icons were replaced with pictures of the communist leadership.

7). Premeditated extermination of citizens through the actions of the Securitate, as well as other forms of repression (1948 – 1989)

  • In the 1950s, the Securitate sought, at the orders of the Party, to liquidate all potential adversaries of the regime.  Thus was invented “administrative detention”, without arrest warrant, investigation or trial.  Under the pretext of “re-education through labour”, hundreds of thousands of persons were sent to various labour sites, where they became victims of mass extermination through hunger, exhaustion and deprivation.  Arrests were made on political grounds: plotting or propaganda against the regime, machination against the social order etc. 

  • After 1965, the Securitate claimed to appeal, preventatively, to citizens’ conscience.  By this was meant an increase in the number of informants, who undertook in writing to signal any “dangers that threatened the homeland”. 

  • In the 1980s, the Securitate conceived a systematic programme of mass indoctrination and manipulation, through rumour, intrigue, frame-ups, provocation, creation of conflict between different segments of the population, censorship, and repression of the even the slightest hint of independence on the part of intellectuals.  The scars of this violation of the national consciousness persist even today in the public mindset.

8). The premeditated extermination of political detainees (1945-1989)

  • The number of political detainees is estimated at between 500,000 (the minimum figure) and 2,000,000 (the maximum figure).  During the Ceausescu regime, the number of political detainees as such was in the mere hundreds or thousands, since the real figures were deliberately camouflaged as common criminals or patients in psychiatric hospitals, the latter of whom were treated with electric shocks and mind-altering drugs.

  • In Romania there were over 230 places of political detention, a figure that includes interrogation and sorting areas, places of incarceration proper (prisons), as well as forced labour camps.  If Securitate headquarters are included, where detainees were brought after arrest and subjected to interrogation, then this figure increases by more than 100.  There were at least fifteen psychiatric hospitals employed for political ends, where detainees were subject to “re-education” treatment.  In recent years, more than ninety execution sites, places where battles took place between the Securitate and partisans, and mass graves have been discovered.

  • The penitentiary regime for political prisoners was one of slow extermination, primarily through starvation, cold, various forms of torture, total lack of sanitary care, lack of hygiene, etc.  Before arriving in prisons, political prisoners were regularly tortured using methods of extreme cruelty during Securitate interrogation.  Many died during interrogation.  In prison, the torture continued in other forms.  Prisoners regarded as recalcitrant were isolated in total darkness, chained to a ring in the centre of their cells.  They were incarcerated naked and barefoot.  Food rations were reduced by half.  In darkness and cold, starving, they were forced to stand all day and night.

We quote from the testimony of Corneliu Coposu (excerpted from the interview accorded to Lucia Hossu-Longin): “I passed through seventeen prisons.  I went to prison weighing 112 kilograms and came out weighing 51.  The cold was permanent.  The temperature was almost unchanged from winter to summer because of the thickness of the walls.  The food was extermination rations, approximately 400 to 500 calories per day: a biscuit made from a mixture of maize flour and broom-seed flour.  I was beaten with sandbags, with wet towels in the showers… not to mention being suspended from an iron hook in order to be beaten on the soles of the feet.  When I came out of prison…  I had forgotten how to speak.  Of course, each inmate, being alone, was excluded from any conversation.  Communication with the occupants of the other cells was, for a long time, carried out through Morse code, by tapping on the walls, until the system was discovered, resulting in severe punishments.  After that, communication was made through Morse coughing, which was extremely tiring, exhausting, especially given the extreme weakness to which the detainees had been reduced.  Belief in surviving the communist holocaust was the foundation of resistance.”
In the labour camps, detainees were exterminated through superhuman physical effort, slow starvation (between 500 and 1000 calories per day, compared with the 2000 to 2,500 calories of a normal diet), lack of medication, and inhuman standards of accommodation.  All this was usually combined with torture if work quotas were not met.
After completing their sentences, many detainees were sent into internal exile, in conditions of extreme hardship; after two or three years, a new conviction often followed, signalling a resumption of torture until almost inevitable extermination.
There follow a number of examples of torture whose object was extermination (examples taken from the studies of Cicerone Ionitoiu): beatings with iron bars, spades and shovels, with some victims dying from their injuries and others remaining crippled for life; the denial of medical treatment to sick detainees, who were forced to continue working, contrary to medical prescription, resulting in many deaths; unclothed and even naked prisoners were kept in cells exposed to the elements during winter; detainees were trampled under horses’ hooves; detainees were forced to work unclothed during winter and punished by being made to stand until noon in freezing water; the burial alive of detainees; some detainees committed suicide in order to escape torture, while others went insane as a result of the psychical and physical pressures to which they were subjected.

  • The Pitesti phenomenon (1949-1952)

Between 1949 and 1951, the destruction of society’s elite was almost complete: intellectuals, diplomats, priests, officers, magistrates, policemen, and politicians of the “bourgeois-landowner regime” were in prison; the most industrious peasants had been deported to forced labour camps.  Collectively and individually, they were all labelled “enemies of the people”.  It now remained to annihilate the unpredictable social force of youth.  For the latter, the Pitesti experiment was invented (termed “re-education” by the Securitate).  The most barbarous methods of psychological torture were applied to “recalcitrant” young prisoners, with the object of making them reciprocally humiliate each other, physically abuse each other and mentally torture each other.  Victims were transformed into executioners; prisoners were tortured by their own friends, by their fellows in suffering.  The purpose: “re-education” through physical and psychical destruction, the transformation of young people into atheists, into informers on their friends. 
Examples of psychological torture: a) On Easter Night, prisoners who refused to make a total self-denunciation (to tell everything that they were supposed not to have declared during Securitate interrogations) are forced to take a ‘holy communion’ of faecal matter; b) Those suspected of having concealed information about participants in anticommunist actions have their heads thrust by their torturers into chamber-pots full of urine; c) Prisoners are forced to spit in the mouth of their anticommunist leader, in order to force him to revenge himself by unmasking them;  d). On Christmas Day, a prisoner is forced to go to stool on a bedpan, to ‘symbolise’ the nativity of Christ, while the other political prisoners are forced to kneel and cross themselves before him. 
Ultimately, the majority of those “re-educated” ended up by admitting that they deserved all manner of abjection and that they could only be partially rehabilitated, they themselves becoming the torturers of new inmates.  For the slightest hesitation, they were subjected to torture once more.
This diabolical operation of depersonalisation and moral assassination commenced in December 1949 at the Pitesti Penitentiary, and was continued, at a lower intensity, at the Gherla and Targu-Ocna penitentiaries.  The Pitesti experiment is regarded as unique in the panoply of methods designed to destroy the human person.  In his celebrated book The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn refers to the Pitesti experiment as the “most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world”. 

  • Forced labour

Forced labour – that is, the use of political detainees as labour in mines or on various construction projects – was widely used during the communist period and had mass extermination as its object.

The most notorious construction project was the Danube - Black Sea Canal, begun in 1950 and stopped in 1953.  The labour force was provided by “reactionary elements”, the majority of whom had been “administratively detained”, which is to say without trial.  The canal was nicknamed the “grave of the Romanian bourgeoisie”.  According to the most conservative estimates, over 40,000 detainees were held in concentration camps in 1950 alone.  Another 20,000 were designated “voluntary workers”. 

  • Women in prison

There were a number of prisons reserved exclusively for women: Mislea, Margineni, Miercurea-Ciuc, Dumbraveni and Arad.  Birth and maternity assumed wholly different dimensions in prison.  Mothers were often tragically separated from their children.

9). Extermination of groups of partisans representing anticommunist resistance in the mountains (1945-1962)
Resistance against communism began to manifest itself immediately after the communists seized power.  Not only those who directly opposed communism were arrested, interrogated, tried and condemned, but also their relatives, siblings, and parents.  Confronted with this massive wave of aggression, those targeted took refuge in the mountains of Romania.  The majority organised into groups of partisans, scattered throughout the mountains.  Thus, between 1945 and 1959, there were groups of partisans in the eastern and central Carpathians (in Fagaras, Retezat, and Semenic), in the western Carpathians, in Bukovina, in the forests of Babadag, and in the Gutai Mountains.  The partisans were armed with weapons salvaged after the Second World War.  The groups of partisans, averaging between ten and forty members, did not represent a serious threat to the communist regime.  They consisted of young and old, men and women (sometimes even pregnant women or women with small children), peasants, former army officers, lawyers, doctors, students and workers.  They were of all ages and social and political backgrounds, aided by peasants, who provided them with food, clothing and often shelter.  Communist propaganda labelled the partisans “bandits”.  The terrorisation by interrogators of the families and relatives of those in the mountains, the expulsion of their children from school and the use of brutal methods against them determined many partisans to surrender rather than have their loved ones be subjected to torture.  They were given long prison sentences and had all their property confiscated, for the “crime of machination against the social order”.  Most were killed.  The last partisans were captured as late as 1962.  The anticommunist resistance of the partisans lasted between fourteen and seventeen years and was a spontaneous phenomenon, without, it seems, any co-ordination at a national level between the different groups.

10). Repression against the Church.  The arrest or extermination of those who opposed communism (1948-1989)
The communist regime sought to uproot religious belief and impose atheism.

  • In the case of the Romanian Orthodox Church, the hierarchy were replaced in 1948, some of them dying in suspicious circumstances, others being arrested and placed under “house arrest” in monasteries.  Throughout the period, around 2,000 priests were arrested.  Moreover, a large number of monks and nuns were also arrested.  In 1959, the Securitate and the Department for Religions reduced the number of monasteries and monks by two thirds, on the grounds that monastic establishments sheltered partisans and reactionary elements.  Some monasteries were evacuated at gunpoint.  Between 1959 and 1960, hundreds of priests were arrested on the grounds that they disseminated mysticism, preached against dialectical materialism or opposed the socialist system.

  • The Graeco-Catholic (Uniate) Church, the second-largest national denomination, with 1.5 million Romanian worshippers, was outlawed in 1948.  A small number of priests signed declarations of conversion to Orthodoxy.  Those bishops and priests who refused were arrested and exterminated.  For example, Graeco-Catholic Bishop Iuliu Hossu – who at Alba Iulia had read the proclamation during the Great Assembly of 1 December 1918, when Transylvania united with Romania – died in captivity. 

  • The Roman Catholic Church was regarded as a “den of imperialism”, a “nest of spies and traitors” etc. because of its “foreign ties”.  A series of political trials resulted in convictions or expulsion.  As in the case of the other denominations, Roman Catholic schools were abolished, and “reactionary” priests were removed and arrested.

  • Protestant and neo-protestant denominations were similarly persecuted, on the grounds that they were “controlled from abroad”.

11). The arrest, murder, political detention or deportation of peasants who resisted collectivisation (1949-1962)
In the spirit of the “class struggle”, peasants were divided into three categories: “poor”, “middling” and “kulaks”.  Fighting against “vacillating” “kulaks” and “middling peasants”, the poor had to be “enlightened” as to the benefits of collectivisation.  Peasant resistance was strong: in the years following the Romanian Workers’ Party Plenary Meeting of 1949 (at which collectivisation on the Soviet model was decreed), activists sent to the countryside were chased away, while in many villages there were uprisings and battles against the militia, resulting in deaths, wounded victims, arrests and deportations.  According to Romanian Workers’ Party data, more than 80,000 peasants were arrested between 1949 and 1952, with 30,000 prison convictions.  Many peasants also lost their lives or liberty in the revolts between 1959 and 1962.  The revolt at Vadu Rosca (in the Galati region), during which nine peasants lost their lives, was repressed by Nicolae Ceausescu personally.  In other villages, cannons were discharged in order to intimidate and “enlighten” the peasants.  By 1962, 96 per cent of the arable surface area of Romania and 3,201,000 families had been included in collectivist structures, according to the results announced by Gheorghiu-Dej.

12). Deportations with the object of extermination.  Ethnic repression.  The “sale” of Jews and Germans

  • In January 1945, more than 75,000 ethnic Germans were deported to the Soviet Union in order to “reconstruct” the war-devastated economy.  Twenty per cent of them died.  The survivors were able to return to Romania only in 1949-1950.

  • During the night of 18 June 1951, one of the most extensive deportations in modern Romanian history took place, second only to that of January 1945 against the ethnic German population.  Around 45,000 persons were taken from their homes and deported to the Baragan steppe.  These were Romanians, Germans, Serbs, Bulgarians, refugees from Bassarabia and North Bukovina, and Aromanians.  They were taken in cattle trucks under armed guard and then, after a journey of between ten and fourteen days, left in the middle of the steppe, where they were forced to build themselves dwellings from mud bricks, with straw or reed roofs.  The majority of the deportees were detained in eighteen such settlements until 1956, although others remained permanently.

  • After the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the Hungarian community in Transylvania was subject to persecution and numerous arrests.

  • Through the trials of Zionists in the 1950s, persecutions against the Jewish community in Romania were perpetrated.

  • The majority of Romanian citizens of ethnic German or Jewish origin left Romania in the 1970s and 80s, through a humiliating form of “sale”, respectively payment of substantial foreign currency fees in exchange for approval of the request to leave communist Romania permanently.  This constituted a crime from the cultural and spiritual point of view, committed against people who, living for centuries on Romanian territory, had made an extremely important contribution to the culture and civilisation of the Romanian people.

13). Repression against culture.  The arrest of protesting intellectuals (1945-1989)
As soon as the communist regime came to power, the Party imposed a pro-Soviet, ‘proletcult’ orientation in all fields of culture.  Libraries and bookshops were purged of titles that were politically undesirable (over 8,000 titles).  Nothing could be published or performed without approval.  Measures were taken to eliminate anything that was linked to European or national traditions.  The history of Romania was falsified.  National traditions were replaced with the culture of “socialist realism”.  Numerous people of culture were thrown into prison, while others were forbidden to publish their works.  This was a veritable cultural genocide, whose scars still deform the public consciousness.

14). Repression of student movements in 1956.  The arrest of protesting students
The year 1956 saw the repression of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet troops.  The echoes of this anticommunist movement were felt in all the countries of Eastern Europe.  In Romania, those who reacted were students.  In a number of university centres, there were protests followed by numerous arrests and ex-matriculations.  The most well organised student movement was that in Timisoara, where there were three hundred arrests.  However, organised groups were also formed in Bucharest and Cluj, where there was an attempt to link up with the anticommunist movement in Hungary.  The reaction of the authorities was swift: students were arrested, courses suspended, teachers purged, and student associations set up to supervise the activities of students. 

15). Repression of the workers’ movements in the Jiu Valley (1977) and Brasov (1987).  The arrest and deportation of protesting workers
In 1977, a strike involving thousands of miners in the Jiu Valley was repressed.  Some of the miners, who were protesting against living conditions, were arrested and sent to prison, while most were forced to move to other parts of the country, in a form of camouflaged deportation.  In 1987 in Brasov, a revolt against living conditions involving thousands of protesters, mainly workers, was repressed.  Hundreds of participants were arrested and brutally interrogated.  Many were forced to change their jobs and move to other parts of the country, as a masked form of deportation.  The workers’ movements in the Jiu Valley and in Brasov represent proof that the communist party was contested even by the working class, in whose name it claimed to govern.  After intellectual and student resistance had been annihilated in the 1950s and 60s, in the 1970s and 80s even working class protests were crushed.

16). Repression of opponents and dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.  The arrest and assassination of dangerous opponents
In 1979, the Free Union of the Working People of Romania came into being (SLOMR), an organisation parallel to official ones.  The founders of the new union and those registered as members were arrested and interned in psychiatric institutions to be re-educated.  The SLOMR; the Paul Goma movement; the courageous actions of Doina Cornea, Vasile Paraschiv and other opponents of the regime from various towns and backgrounds; the “propaganda against the socialist order” undertaken by dozens of young people, including Radu Filipescu; engineer Gheorghe Ursu, murdered by the regime; diplomat Mircea Raceanu, condemned to death by the regime; and the clandestine newspaper “Romania”, published by a group of courageous journalists, including Petre Mihai Bacanu, were all exceptional cases in a country that had been reduced to silence and submission.

17). Destruction of historical and cultural heritage through the policy of demolition in the 1980s.  The forced eviction of a part of the Romanian population from their homes
The demolitions carried out in Bucharest in the 1980s involved large-scale destruction of historic and cultural heritage.  The core of this project was to be a presidential palace, surrounded by ministries and other public institutions.  To this end, as well as for other purposes, 29 churches and monasteries were destroyed, some more than three hundred years old, as well as numerous family homes, blocks and public buildings.  Other churches were moved or left hidden from view behind the new buildings.  The most notorious and unjustified demolition was that of the Vacaresti Monastery complex (dating from the eighteenth century) situated at the edge of the capital.  Similarly, the historic centres of other towns were demolished to make way for “civic centres”.  Demolitions were also carried out in villages, with a view to “systematisation”.

18). Criminal consequences of the “demographic policy” (1966-1989)
With the official object of increasing the population, from 1966 until the December 1989 Revolution abortions were forbidden, following a decree made by Ceausescu.  Women of childbearing age were subjected to obligatory gynaecological examinations in order for them to be registered in the case that they were pregnant or to determine whether they had been using contraceptives.  Women who did not wish to keep pregnancies resorted to rudimentary and extremely dangerous forms of clandestine abortion.  It is estimated that up to ten thousand women died as a result of such attempts to terminate pregnancies.
Many children unwanted by parents were born with serious health problems.  Infant mortality increased during this period; in order to decrease the official figures, births could be registered only after a two-week delay.  Often, unwanted children were abandoned in hospitals immediately after birth, later being placed in Orphanages and Children’s Homes.  Due to health problems and inadequate conditions, many of these children (probably a few thousand) died at an early age.
In 1987, doctors detected the first cases of AIDS among children, but these were not officially recognised and, consequently, not treated accordingly.

19). The intentional and unjustified obligation of the Romanian population to live in conditions of extreme poverty, particularly in the 1980s
A few examples of the causes by which the general health of the populace was gravely affected:

  • Starvation of the populace through “rationalisation of alimentation” and rationing of basic foodstuffs (meat, flour, eggs, butter, sugar, oil etc.)

  • Frequent failure to accord urgent medical assistance to the elderly

  • Deliberate heating cuts and chronic lack of hot water in blocks of flats

  • Deliberate electricity, gas and water cuts.  As a rule, these cuts were frequent, came without warning and lasted for unpredictable periods.  Similarly, resumption of gas supply also caused serious cases of poisoning (some fatal).

  • Moreover, during the 1980s, street lighting was wholly, or almost wholly, suspended.

20). Communist conceptualisation of fear and of material and moral poverty as instruments for the retention of power.
All the forms of physical and psychical repression, all the forms of material and moral poverty explicitly or implicitly referred to above were instruments designed to crush human dignity, humiliate, dishonour, debase, degrade, and terrorise.  All of them implanted in the Romanian psyche a mistrust of self and others, generalised fear, despair, exasperation, a feeling of futility, and fear and suspicion of others – colleagues, neighbours, friends and even relatives.  All of them represented systematic means of perpetuating the communist regime and subjugating the people of Romania.

21). The massacre of civilians during the anticommunist Revolution of December 1989.
In contrast to all the other former communist countries of Europe, where communism fell without claiming any victims (or almost no victims), Romania was the only country where communism was overthrown at the cost of bloodshed.  Unarmed civilians were massacred: more than one thousand dead and over four thousand wounded.  The number of victims speaks for itself as to the criminality of the communist regime in Romania.

N.B.:
Special thanks to Romulus Rusan, Director of the Civic Academy Foundation’s International Centre for the Study of Communism.
A number of ideas were suggested by Vladimir Tismaneanu, professor of political sciences at the University of Maryland (USA), as well as by Prof. Serban Mihaileanu (Paris).
A number of sentences have been excerpted from “The Gulag in the Romanian Awareness”, by Ruxandra Cesereanu (Jassy: Polirom, 2005).

Translated by Alistair Blyth

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III.

Appeal to the President of Romania, Traian Basescu,
for the condemnation of the communist regime in Romania (1945-1989) as illegitimate and criminal

 

National Review
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Yzg0MDM1NWNlNGM4MzIxZTU1Y2Q4MTQ2OWIyYjcwZWE=
July 26, 2006
Condemning Communism
Right and wrong

Editor’s note: This is the translation of a petition circulated by movie director Sorin Iliesiu. Read the real thing on the website (http://gds.ong.ro) of the Group for Social Dialogue.

APPEAL TO THE PRESIDENT OF ROMANIA, TRAIAN BASESCU

Sixteen years since the Timisoara Proclamation, which consecrated the ideals of the anticommunist Romanian Revolution of December 1989, we firmly demand that, in a solemn declaration before both chambers of Parliament, the communist regime in Romania should be condemned as illegitimate and criminal. This demand has been voiced by civic society since 1990 and is in consensus with Resolution 1481, adopted on 25 January 2006 by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, regarding the necessity for a condemnation of the crimes committed by the totalitarian communist regimes.

These crimes must be condemned not merely in order to respond to a recommendation by the Council of Europe, but in order to respond to the will of the Romanian people as manifest since the very first hours of the anticommunist revolution. Since 1990, civic society’s condemnation of communism has become concrete within a huge volume of testimonies and documents: thousands of studies and works by historians; thousands of books of eye-witness accounts; hundreds of documentaries and films of eye-witness accounts; tens of thousands of hours of audio recordings; and countless texts published in newspapers, magazines and on the Internet. Since 1990, the Association of Former Political Prisoners in Romania has denounced the crimes of the Securitate through court actions, initiated the projects for the Law to declassify the Securitate (1993) and the Law of Lustration (1994), and at the same time erected monuments to the victims all over the country. We make mention of the fact that Romania is the first country to have a Memorial to the Victims of Communism, created by the Civic Academy and established at Sighet in 1994. The Memorial has since been taken under the aegis of the Council of Europe and declared a site of national interest by the Romanian Parliament. In 1998, the Council of Europe declared it to be one of the three most important sites for the preservation of memory in Europe, along with the Auschwitz Memorial and the Memorial to Peace in France. The former communist countries that today make up part of the European Union have long since condemned the illegitimate and criminal nature of their former communist regimes. Romania suffered a political regime of an extreme criminality. Relative to the size of its population, our country suffered the greatest number of victims of extermination. In all the other former communist countries, the totalitarian regime collapsed without, or almost without, any victims, while in Romania unarmed and peaceful masses of people were massacred: more than 1,200 dead and more than 4,000 wounded. It would have been natural for Romania to be the first to condemn the crimes of communism officially. However, this has yet to happen. Genuine moral reform of Romania has thus not been possible.

Under communism, almost all human rights were flagrantly and systematically violated, in spite of the fact that the Romanian State had undertaken to respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when it was admitted to the United Nations in 1955.

Official condemnation of the crimes of communism should occur as soon as possible, ideally on 22 April, the date we commemorate the beginning of the University Square anticommunist demonstration, the longest anticommunist demonstration in history (fifty-two continuous days and nights). Condemnation of the criminality of communism should occur simultaneous to a presentation of the crimes of communism. It defies belief that so many and such horrendous crimes could have been perpetrated. Many of them were not even concealed. Some we experienced ourselves, while of others we were only partially aware. A majority of Romanians knows only very little about all this. The young know nothing or next to nothing.

We regard it as absolutely necessary that the Government should decide upon the establishment of an Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism in Romania. We regard as welcome the recent proposal of the Foreign Minister to organise an international conference in Romania on the subject of the crimes committed in the name of the communist ideology. In this context, we make mention of the statement by President George W. Bush regarding the forced imposition of communism: “The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history” (Riga, 7 May 2005).

By condemning the criminality of the communist regime, you will demonstrate that you have the political will to do an deed of historic justice, a starting point for national reconciliation, such as has been demanded by civic society since 1990.

Bucharest, 10 March 2006
-------------------------------------------
Sorin Iliesiu’s note (august 2006):

The Appeal was signed by more than three hundred intellectuals (the up-dated list can be accessed at the web-sites of the Group for Social Dialogue: http://gds.ong.ro and of the Aspera Foundation: www.memoria.ro)
including:
The Group for Social Dialogue, the Timisoara Society, the Association of Former Political Prisoners in Romania, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, the Civic Academy Foundation, the Civic Alliance, the Pro Democracy Association, the 21 December 1989 Association, the National Bloc of December 1989 Revolutionaries (134 organisations), the Managing Board of the Romanian Writers’ Union, the Romanian Federation of Former Political Prisoners and Anticommunist Fighters (10 organisations), the Association of Revolutionaries without Privileges, the National Institute for the Memory of Romanian Exile, the Foundation for an Open Society, the Icarus Foundation, the Timisoara Memorial to the Revolution, the Brasov 15 November 1987 Association, the Memory Foundation, the “Timisoara ’89” Foundation, the “Gheorghe Ursu” Foundation, the Pro Europa League, the Romanian Academic Society, APADOR–CH, the Centre for the Monitoring and Combat of Anti-Semitism in Romania, the League for the Defence of Human Rights, the Aspera Foundation, the Association of Independent Romanian Journalists, the Romanian Press League, the Romanian Institute of Recent History, University Solidarity, the PEN Club of Romania and the PEN Club of the Republic of Moldavia (branches of the global writers’ organisation), the “Pro Bassarabia and Bukowina” Cultural Association, the Timisoara-Rearguard Civic Workshop, senior members of the University Square 1990 student leagues, the “21st Century” Cultural Foundation, the Romanian Foundation for Democracy, the Association for Civic Education, Action for the Defence of Human Rights, the “Romania Third Millennium” Foundation, the Time Cultural Foundation – Jassy, the General Association of United Graeco-Catholic Romanians, National Trade Union Confederacy (circa 1,000,000 members), the Trade Union Federation of Metallurgical Workers in Romania (more than 10,000 members), the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism in Romania.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorin Iliesiu’s note
(august 2006):
The Appeal (initiated an elaborated by Sorin Iliesiu, launched by the Group for Social Dialogue) was signed by the intellectual elite of Romania, as well as by the most prestigious non-governmental organisations in Romania.  President Traian Basescu promptly responded by setting up the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, which “has been formed in response to a request from the President that the communist regime in Romania should be officially condemned on the basis of a rigorous and comprehensive document, drawn up by public figures recognised and acknowledged for their contributions to research into the communist phenomenon.  The Head of State has underlined that he will declare the Commission’s report as an official document of the Romanian State. […]  Vladimir Tismaneanu, a professor of political science at Maryland University and author of essential studies on Romanian communism, is president of the commission.  Here are the members of the commission: Sorin Alexandrescu, Mihnea Berindei, His Holiness Nicolae Corneanu, Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu, Radu Filipescu, Virgil Ierunca, Sorin Iliesiu, Gail Kligman, Monica Lovinescu, Nicolae Manolescu, Marius Oprea, Horia-Roman Patapievici, Dragos Petrescu, Andrei Pippidi, Romulus Rusan, Stelian Tanase, Cristian Vasile, Alexandru Zub.” - cited from the Presidential Communiqué of 20 April 2006.


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IV.

A Press Review about our civic initiatives in Romania
in 2005 and 2006, taken from the Romanian newspaper "ZIUA".

ZIUA
http://www.ziua.ro/display.php?id=175201&data=2005-04-30&kword=Iliesiu
30 April 2005 ,  In Brief

Proclamation for Romania


Sorin Iliesiu is member of GDS (The Social Dialogue Group) and founder of the Civic Academy Foundation. He appeals that a Civil Society for Romania (SCR) should be founded in order to handle the moral reform. The project must be founded on the principles in the Proclamation of Timisoara written in March 1990 and updated for 2005. The New Proclamation will have to ask for: a Trial on Communism, the truth about the coal miners' strikes and the Revolution, and the elimination of corrupted, ex activists, Communist Secret agents from the Justice system, as well as for a radical fight of corruption and mob. SCR would ask that a Law on Lustration should be adopted at once in its best version, elaborated by Ticu Dumitrescu. Iliesiu propounds the new Proclamation should have public launch in late May 2005 by meetings in Bucharest, Timisoara, Brasov, Cluj and Iasi.

ZIUA
http://www.ziua.ro/display.php?id=175442&data=2005-05-05&kword=Iliesiu
5 May 2005

Support for the Proclamation


Yesterday in news conference PPCD (the Popular Christian-Democrat Party) leader Gheorghe Ciuhandu outlined the need to promote a new Proclamation of Timisoara, the same document dating from 15 years ago in updated version. Ciuhandu expressed his "full support" to the project of Iliesiu, who had recently appealed for the founding of SCR (the Civil Society for Romania). The latter's main mission would consist in moral reform. Iliesiu is one of the members who founded the Social Dialogue Group. He is also author of a project to be based on the updated Proclamation of Timisoara. The renewed Proclamation of Timisoara will have to demand trial on communism, as well as the truth about the coal miners' attacks and the Romanian revolution and the elimination of corrupted, former activists and members of the Communist Secret Service from the Justice system. SCR would also ask that the Law on Lustration be adopted at once. Iliesiu also suggests that the new Proclamation should be released by the end of this month and accompanied by simultaneous support demonstrations in Bucharest, Timisoara, Brasov, Cluj and Iasi. (O.B.)


ZIUA
http://www.ziua.ro/display.php?id=187207&data=2005-10-24&kword=Iliesiu
24 October 2005 ,  In Brief

Trail on communism


Sorin Iliesiu wrote an open letter to Romanian president Traian Basescu, asking the head of state to allow Romanian Presidency to establish a commission to handle communism crimes. The author claims that such a scientific document would make grounds for convicting communism and the president would thus be allowed to come in front of the Parliament and sentence communism, such as in the case of the Holocaust. This initiative is not the only of the kind that Iliesiu has proceeded to. He is co-author of film "University Square-Romania". In May he appealed to the Parliament of Romania so that the institution would see to the start of a trial on communism in Romania and to arrange a new Yalta Conference. Sorin Iliesiu asked the Parliament of Romania to take the Parliament of Latvia as example and sentence communism along with everything that brought communism to Romania against the Romanian people's will. Iliesiu is also author of "The Proclamation for Romania", a document including a set of measures meant to reform the Romanian society morally. Iliesiu has been a member of the Group for Social Dialogue since April 1990. He is also a founding member of the Civic Alliance and of the Academic Civic Foundation. (A.H.)


ZIUA
http://www.ziua.ro/display.php?id=196999&data=2006-04-01&kword=Iliesiu
1 April 2006

Basescu can condemn "the red plague"

CISC report confirms communist crimes

Sorin Iliesiu, vice president of the Civic Alliance, wrote a letter to Romanian president Traian Basescu yesterday, asking that the latter's initiatives meant to condemn communist crimes should take into account the report elaborated by the historians in the International Center for Research on Communism. The latter is part of the Civic Academy Foundation, supervised by a scientific council made up of several personalities specialized in Romanian and world communism.
In his letter Iliesiu explains that due civil society the report the president demanded has been elaborated in a perfect scientific version. Iliesiu mentions the document took 12 years, with a team of historians working on it.
Iliesiu is member of the Social Dialogue Group and initiator of appeal for condemning communist crimes, publicly expressed in March 10. In his letter he mentions as well that the respective documentary is partly included in the "Memorial of Communist Victims and Resistance" in Sighet, which Ana Blandiana, member of the Civic Academy Foundation, initiated in 1993. (...)
The author of the letter persuades the president of Romania in the end: "Mr. President, by condemning communist crimes you will prove political will to do historical justice, which is the start of the national reconciliation civil society has been asking for since 1990." (V.D.)

ZIUA
http://www.ziua.ro/display.php?id=198340&data=2006-04-21&kword=Iliesiu
21 April 2006

Report on communism to become official state document


The presidential commission to analyze the communist dictatorship in Romania was established to meet Romanian president Traian Basescu's request that the communist regime in Romania should be officially condemned on grounds of a rigorous and coherent document, elaborated by specialists famous for their contribution to the research on communism. Vladimir Tismaneanu, a professor of political science at Maryland University and author of essential studies on Romanian communism, is president of the commission.
In yesterday's meeting the president of Romania explained he wanted the commission to draw a thorough report that would allow him to condemn the 50 years of communism in Romania officially . The head of state outlined he would declare the future report to be an official document of the Romanian state. (...) Basescu opined Vladimir Tismaneanu was the only personality entitled to train the competence of the recently made commission and thanked him for accepting it.
The president said the deadline for the report was up to the commission, but he expressed wish that the final document should be "a clear, precise and rapid solution." He told commission members they had all his support with view to access to the archives of institutions in possession of documents needed for writing the final report.
In the end the head of state expressed hope that the commission would be a "decent" structure as far as public relations were concerned and outlined it was desirable that none of the members should try to attract capital by means of future activity in the commission. The head of state chose Vladimir Tismaneanu to become spokesman of the presidential commission. The latter is therefore allowed to publicly provide information about the commission's activity.
Here are some members of the commission Vladimir Tismaneanu is head of: Sorin Alexandrescu, Sorin Antohi, Mihnea Berindei, His Holiness Nicolae Corneanu, Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu, Radu Filipescu, Virgil Ierunca, Sorin Iliesiu, Gail Kligman, Monica Lovinescu, Nicolae Manolescu, Marius Oprea, Horia-Roman Patapievici, Dragos Petrescu, Andrei Pippidi, Romulus Rusan, Stelian Tanase, Cristian Vasile and Alexandru Zub. (...)
The commission is going to elaborate a synthetic report on the connection between communist practices and ideology in Romania. It is to be handed in to the president of Romania by the end of October and then be used to condemn communism. The report is to have about 100 pages and some annexes. It is going to be an accessible document so that the citizens of today's Romania and future generations will know and understand the repressive nature of the communist dictatorship, at both social and individual level. (...) (C.E.)

ZIUA
http://www.ziua.ro/display.php?id=198340&data=2006-04-21&kword=Iliesiu
14 November 2006

President to condemn communism

Basescu to speak to MPs in December 18


The President of Romania Traian Basescu sent letters to the two Parliament Chambers yesterday announcing his wish to deliver a speech to MPs in December 18, on the conclusions of the final report drawn by the committee analyzing communist crimes, headed by political analyst Vladimir Tismaneanu. Committee members are expected to recommend that the President should condemn communism, official sources say.
In the President's official letters to the Parliament there is mentioned that his request is grounded on articles 88 and 65 in the Constitution and article 1 in the regulation on common parliamentary sessions. The letter is to be analyzed in the first reunion of the two Chambers' officials.
Ever since the President's mandate started civil society representatives have been demanding him to condemn communism. More than 250 oustanding personalities of Romanian culture and NGOs wrote an appeal asking for it early this year. (...)
(...)
Anca HRIBAN