Plight of Romania’s ‘horror’ care homes recalls orphanages scandal

Romanians are reeling from revelations that care homes kept elderly people in squalid conditions, failing to feed or tend to them for months, in a scandal reminiscent of that faced by the country’s orphanages in the 1990s.

In one particularly disturbing case that emerged as investigations unfolded 11 elderly people were transported in bedsheets and abandoned at a construction site in a Bucharest suburb, said Raed Arafat, head of Romanian emergency services. They had been left there out of fear that an imminent raid would discover overcrowding at the care home they lived in, he said.

After months of complaints from human rights groups and neighbours, police last week raided several nursing homes near the capital, where they found malnourished elderly people who had not showered in weeks and bore bruises and other signs of physical abuse.

In recent days authorities have reviewed the management of more than 400 retirement homes and on Monday forced the temporary or final closure of two dozen institutions where residents had been beaten, forced to work, denied medication or left suffering in insect-infested rooms.

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The images from what Romanian media dubbed the “horror care homes” have prompted comparisons with the infamous orphanages scandal of the 1990s when children were discovered to have been locked up, neglected and malnourished in state-run institutions.

Exposed in the years after communism fell, the plight of those children became a stumbling block to Romania’s bid to join the EU and resonated even after the country became a member in 2007.

A Romanian member of the European Parliament on Tuesday asked the European Commission to look into human rights abuses such as the ones in the retirement homes. “The tragic situation leads us to think of the children’s homes in the communism times in Romania that horrified the international society,” MEP Vlad Botoș wrote to the commission. “Those people have rights as human beings and have the right to be protected as European citizens.”

Romanian prime minister Marcel Ciolacu called for an immediate investigation and promised a crackdown on the people responsible.

“I have no mercy for the scoundrels who created these asylums of horror,” said Mr Ciolacu after the scandal broke last week, adding that the problem was systemic and pointed to corruption.

“Such villains, such cruelty, totally dehumanised people...let’s [find the] complicit civil servants, who, instead of siding with these people, sold out to these scoundrels,” he said.

Romanian president Klaus Iohannis, when asked about the situation at the Nato summit in Lithuania, called it a “national disgrace”.

“The measures that will be taken must cut the evil from the root,” Iohannis said. “Guilty are all those who knew and did nothing, did not notify, did not intervene.”

The Centre for Legal Resources, a Bucharest-based NGO, said it had flagged the inhumane conditions in the care homes several months ago, only to have its access to those homes blocked by labour minister Marius Budai. The NGO has called for Budai to be sacked.

Budai told local media that the question of his resignation “doesn’t matter...what matters is what we’re going to do from now on”.

Another government member under fire is family affairs minister Gabriela Firea, who is married to the mayor of Voluntari, a town where two of the homes raided last week are located. She denied any knowledge and responsibility for the mistreatment of the elderly. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023