Many feel the hasty killing of Ceausescu and his wife left a dark stain on the birth of modern Romania, writes DANIEL MCLAUGHLINin Bucharest
TOMORROW MARKS two decades since prosecutor Dan Voinea helped send Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to the firing squad.
Voinea was called from Bucharest to the provincial Targoviste army base to make the case against Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, who had been arrested after a wild dash for freedom, flying by helicopter and commandeering cars on country roads before finally being run to ground.
Romania was in chaos after anti-Ceausescu protests rippled across the country from the western town of Timisoara, reaching Bucharest on December 21st and forcing the loathed Ceausescus to flee the capital the next day, ending almost 25 years of increasingly despotic rule.
When the elderly, dishevelled couple came before the hastily arranged court in Targoviste barracks on Christmas Day, the case for the prosecution did not lack material or popular support.
Ceausescu had bankrupted the country and made food rationing and reductions in heat, light and hot water the daily norm, while also creating a secret police, the Securitate, that was perhaps the largest and most pervasive in the communist bloc.
As Voinea prepared his case, fresh blood was colouring the damning file on the Ceausescus, who in the late 1980s effectively ran Romania together as Nicolae’s health deteriorated.
Security forces loyal to the couple had killed dozens of protesters in the days leading up to their arrest, and reports and rumours at the time suggested thousands of demonstrators had been massacred. Voinea requested the death penalty for his country’s rulers, and it was granted.
“I was familiar with the situation. There were lots of coffins in Bucharest hospitals of people who had been shot on Ceausescu’s orders. I felt I was doing something to punish Ceausescu for all these murders,” says Voinea. “Everyone was against Ceausescu. The street demanded the trial start even if we did not have time to produce a normal ‘file’ on him. We had enough evidence that he ordered the security services to open fire on the demonstrators, and at that time we thought thousands may have died.”
Face-to-face with the Ceausescus, Voinea was unimpressed by the couple who had ruined his country, and who refused to accept the legitimacy of their trial and the prosecutors.
"They behaved like people lacking character and culture," says Voinea, speaking to The Irish Timesin Bucharest.
“They looked down on everybody, as was demonstrated by the fact that other east European leaders understood the need for change in 1989, but Ceausescu ordered his people to be shot.”
Voinea’s moment in history’s spotlight is now an ambivalent one for himself and his compatriots.
Voinea agrees with many Romanians that what started as a people’s revolt was “stolen” by a clique of Ceausescu’s communist enemies who went on to dominate the country after 1989.
With future Romanian president Ion Iliescu at their helm, these men formed the so-called National Salvation Front (NSF). According to their many critics, they seized power by posing as the only group who could save Romania from the widespread and indiscriminate violence that they had instigated.
“This group must take responsibility for all the killings that took place after the 22nd,” says Voinea. About 1,000 of the 1,500 or so people killed in the revolution died after the Ceausescus had been arrested.
Voinea believes the group decided to kill Ceausescu several days before his trial, but insists he knew nothing about their plan when they summoned him to act as prosecutor.
He still believes it was right to execute the Ceausescus, despite a widespread feeling that it robbed the nation of proper justice and left a dark stain on the birth of modern Romania.
“People were being killed in Romania then, and Ceausescu was not worth any more victims. It was a time of strange events and strange thinking . . . but justice has to be brave,” says Voinea.
“For the dictator’s crimes against humanity, the verdict of capital punishment was justified.”