Timisoara began the drive against eastern Europe's most oppressive regime but some feel the revolution was stolen, writes DANIEL MCLAUGHLIN
THE ROMANIAN city of Timisoara today marks 20 years since it sparked the revolution that toppled dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and the most oppressive regime in the communist bloc.
But pride mingles with pain in Timisoara and across the country, when Romanians recall how the revolution was “stolen” by a coterie of former communists who quickly seized power and stymied efforts to investigate the bloody events of December 1989.
The wave of peaceful change that had swept across eastern Europe in autumn of that year seemed unlikely to overwhelm the grim monolith of Ceausescu’s Romania. Living conditions in Romania were probably the worst in Europe, and most of its 23 million people were used to daily shortages of heat, light, hot water and food, and to seeking black market provisions to supplement the meagre fare provided by their ration books.
But Ceausescu was as adept at stifling dissent as he was inept at running the economy. As life in Romania deteriorated, Ceausescu expanded the Securitate secret police to keep a lid on any unrest, until it employed more than 10,000 agents and maintained a network of an estimated 700,000 informants.
Apartments and telephones were routinely bugged, and people of suspect loyalty were sacked from their jobs, forcibly relocated far from their homes and jailed.
Ceausescu was particularly wary of the large Hungarian minority in central and western Romania, and it was here that a cowed people finally took a stand against the dictator.
On December 16th, 1989, hundreds of Timisoara’s Hungarians gathered outside the house of Laszlo Tokes, a Protestant clergyman who had received orders to leave the city and move to a remote rural parish for criticising the Ceausescu regime.
Their drive to save Tokes from eviction quickly spiralled into a full-scale anti-Ceausescu rally, as thousands of Romanians joined the ethnic Hungarians to march around the city chanting slogans denouncing communism and demanding democratic reforms.
“We did not rebel because we were particularly courageous,” recalled Timisoara doctor Zoltan Balaton. “The situation was such that we either accepted it, shamefully, and stayed slaves. Or we accepted the struggle.”
On the night of the 16th, that struggle turned violent. Ceausescu ordered the army and Securitate to crush the demonstrators, as they had to brutal effect on a few other, rare occasions of popular protest during his 24 years in power.
Tanks and soldiers sealed off Timisoara and it was subjected to martial law, while inside the city a tense stand-off between protesters and security forces was punctuated by spasms of intense violence, as the army and Securitate opened fire on the unarmed crowd.
Dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured, their blood spattering the main square. But the protesters refused to go away. Workers whom the authorities had hoped would beat the demonstrators ended up joining them, and the horror of bloodshed only steeled Timisoara’s defiance, and its determination to finally be rid of Ceausescu.
Timisoara’s spark ignited similar protests around Romania and, when they gripped the capital Bucharest on December 22nd, Ceausescu and his wife Elena fled. They were captured and executed on Christmas Day.
“Without the people of Timisoara, the events of 20 years ago would not have been possible,” Tokes told a recent conference on the revolution. “There was no room for stepping back. We had to answer the challenge of that vile regime.”
The regime fell, but it was replaced by ex-communists whose ceaseless efforts to block inquiries into 1989 led many Romanians to believe that the people’s revolution that began in Timisoara was quickly turned into a murderous putsch.