TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010190/01019004.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.5 KB | 240 lines

                M%~                                                          WORLD, Page 34

Slaughter in The Streets


A massacre triggers the downfall of the tyrannical Ceausescu,
but civil war erupts across the land

By Bruce W. Nelan


    Let them hate. So long as they fear.  -- Caligula

    In the end, all dictators govern by fear. Long-suffering
citizens obey orders only because they are convinced that a
single individual has no hope of opposing the overwhelming
forces loyal to the state. A dictator falls when fear changes
sides, when individuals coalesce into crowds and defy him.
Emboldened by the discovery that they are not alone, they take
to the streets and squares to protest, and they learn -- though
sometimes at great cost -- that no tyrant can kill or arrest an
entire nation. At that point, despots lose the special
combination of visible authority and legitimacy that the Chinese
call "the mandate of heaven." In 1989 it happened all over
Eastern Europe, where the accelerating pace of reforms gave
birth to the observation that Poland took ten years, Hungary ten
months, East Germany ten weeks, Czechoslovakia ten days.

    The people's overthrow of President Nicolae Ceausescu's
paranoid dictatorship last week seemed to take ten hours. On
Thursday night the megalomaniacal leader and his wife Elena
were ensconced in the presidential palace in Bucharest; by
Friday morning, they were gone. But unlike the bloodless
revolutions in the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries, the
Rumanian convulsion was soaked in blood. The number of
casualties is still not known, but if the estimates of thousands
killed turn out to be correct, Ceausescu's name will be
indelibly linked to one of the largest government-inflicted
massacres since World War II. Ceausescu fled his grandiose
palace only after the army refused to shoot demonstrators and
many troops switched sides, joining them.

    Hundreds of thousands of Rumanians took joyously to the
streets, running, jumping, riding on tanks. "The army is with
us!" they shouted. "We are the people!" Crowds stormed
Ceausescu's palace and rushed to the state television studio to
put out the message "We won. The dictator has fallen."
Ceausescu's son Nicu, party chief in the Transylvanian city of
Sibiu (pop. 173,000), was captured and paraded before the
cameras. His face was bruised, and his eyes flicked in terror
from side to side, as if seeking a way to escape.

    But the country's joy quickly turned to dread.
Progovernment forces staged a fierce comeback in Bucharest and
other cities, plunging the country into civil war. In the heart
of the capital, troops of the well-equipped 180,000-member
security forces, the Securitate, battled army units for control
of the fire-gutted presidential palace. At one point, members
of the security forces reportedly burst into a meeting of
demonstrators at the Opera House and sprayed the room with
submachine guns. The violence assumed its own macabre rhythms.
Whenever the fighting lessened, citizens would flood into the
streets to celebrate Ceausescu's downfall; when the fighting
began again, they would flee for cover.

    The death toll soared, with hundreds of bodies lying in the
streets. There were even unconfirmed reports that Syrian and
Libyan mercenaries were aiding the pro-Ceausescu forces. As the
fighting intensified, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev offered
to send medical aid to the anti-Ceausescu forces, and Western
diplomats suggested that the growing bloodshed might even lead
to direct Soviet intervention on the side of the
revolutionaries.

    In the confusion, Ceausescu and his wife vanished. First
reports said that they had helicoptered from their palace to
the airport, where they boarded a plane heavily laden with loot.
Then they were reported to be traveling by car. There was
speculation that they had fled abroad, but if so, only three
countries seemed likely to accept them: China, which also sends
tanks against its own people; North Korea, where dictator Kim
Il Sung maintains a cult as extravagant as Ceausescu's; and
Iran, where the Rumanian despot last week placed a wreath on the
Ayatullah Khomeini's grave. At week's end Rumanian TV said the
Ceausescus had been captured.

    The country's new political leadership is likely to rise
from ad hoc coalitions of intellectuals, students and workers
similar to the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia and the New Forum
in East Germany. In Bucharest a group called the Front for
National Salvation announced that it was assuming power. The
organization is headed by Corneliu Manescu, a former Foreign
Minister, who said he would act as President until free
elections are held in the spring. Once a confidant of
Ceausescu's, Manescu, 73, had a falling-out with the President
during the 1970s, and has been banished to an apartment outside
the capital since last March, when he and five other former
senior officials released a letter criticizing Ceausescu for
destroying the economy and trying to isolate Rumania from the
rest of the world.

    The new head of the Communist Party is Ion Iliescu, 59, who
studied at a technical institute in Moscow in the early 1950s
and became a close friend of Gorbachev's. As a regional party
secretary, he earned a reputation as an idealistic communist
reformer. Since both Manescu and Iliescu held high posts in the
now discredited party, however, they are likely to be
transitional figures.

    As the crescendo of toppling communist dominoes shook
Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, 71, vowed that reform would come to
Rumania "when pears grow on poplar trees." He ignored warnings
from Gorbachev that he should begin easing up before it was too
late to avoid violence. After 24 years of ruling by fear,
Ceausescu rejected the idea of change.

    But change did not require Ceausescu's permission to enter
Rumania. The country's 23 million citizens had a long list of
grievances, from shortages of food and fuel to crushing
boredom, but the proximate cause of the civil explosion was the
Securitate. When its officers tried to arrest an ethnic
Hungarian clergyman in the western city of Timisoara (pop.
309,000) for his outspoken opposition to the government and to
the policies of his own Hungarian Reformed Church, a vigil
outside his house erupted into an antiregime riot. Angry mobs
smashed shopwindows, burned Ceausescu's books and portraits, and
besieged party headquarters and police stations. About 60,000
of the country's 1.7 million Hungarians live in the city, but
the rioters included Rumanians as well.

    Eyewitnesses who spoke by telephone with Vladimir
Tismaneanu, a Rumanian specialist at the Foreign Policy Research
Institute in Philadelphia, said that army units in Timisoara
refused to fire on the protesters. The Securitate summarily shot
three army officers for disobeying orders, then sent in troops
from its Special Assignment Brigade. After a barrage of warning
shots, the security forces mowed down a line of children
standing in front of the crowd before shooting the adults. The
scene was so bloody that witnesses compared it with Tiananmen
Square in Beijing, where the Chinese army crushed pro-democracy
demonstrators last June. At least 2,000 men, women and children
were killed, they said. In fact the carnage may have been worse.
Garbage trucks were seen hauling corpses out of the city; after
Ceausescu's fall, searchers in a nearby forest uncovered three
mass graves that they said may contain as many as 4,500 bodies.

    Fed-up Rumanians had ignited riots before, but they had
been stifled quickly. Not this time. Three days after the
massacre in Timisoara, demonstrators shouting "Give us our
dead!" filled the city's bloodstained streets. As word of the
killing spread, marchers turned out in towns throughout the
country. Because of the government's total control of travel and
communications, rumors often replaced information. East European
news agencies such as Yugoslavia's Tanjug and, in the new world
of glasnost, even Moscow's TASS and East Germany's ADN, became
important sources of news. They reported that Rumanian army
troops had joined in some of the protests, that more soldiers
had been executed by the Securitate for refusing to fire into
crowds, and that striking workers were threatening to blow up
their factories.

    In Bucharest, Ceausescu appeared before a contrived
propaganda rally outside the presidential palace. Thousands of
workers had been assembled to applaud and wave flags on cue as
he called for unity and tried to blame the riots on Hungarian
"revanchists" bent on recapturing Transylvania. His rasping
voice was rising to a shout when the crowd suddenly drowned him
out with boos, jeers and demands for the truth about Timisoara.
Visibly astonished by this face-to-face encounter with
rebellion, Ceausescu froze. He quickly ended the rally and
darted into the palace.

    As he did so, the crowd of protesters in the square poured
into nearby Magheru Boulevard and swelled to thousands. Shouts
of "Freedom!" and "Down with Ceausescu!" rang out. Tanks, troops
and helicopters herded the marchers into University Square,
ringed by the University of Bucharest, the National Theater and
the 22-story Intercontinental Hotel. A tank rolled over two
demonstrators, and as others ran to help them, they were shot
down by automatic-weapons fire. At least 13 were killed, the
American embassy reported. The streets did not clear, however,
and more people were shot during the night.

    At the same time, East European agencies reported,
Ceausescu's fall was sealed at a meeting with his security
chiefs. Defense Minister Vasile Milea apparently said that his
troops would refuse to fire on their countrymen. There seemed
to be a split among the Securitate commanders, with only some
favoring a continued crackdown. Party spokesmen claimed that
Milea then committed suicide, but it was more likely that he was
shot by Securitate men. Next morning an unidentified general
appeared on television to say, "I am very sorry that my friend
the Minister died. It is a lie that he committed suicide." With
his defenses crumbling, Ceausescu fled.

    Of all Warsaw Pact party chiefs, only Ceausescu dared to
order his security forces to shoot after Gorbachev had made it
clear that the Soviet army would not back them up. But then
Ceausescu for many years had set himself apart from his East
bloc brethren. He was cheered by the West as the "maverick" of
the Pact and praised for his refusal to allow Soviet troops on
his soil, to participate in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968 or to support the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

    Washington, Paris, London and other capitals chose to
overlook Ceausescu's steel Stalinist hand at home, where he
enforced a shameless cult of his own personality. He tolerated
neither dissent among citizens nor a difference of opinion
inside the party. He appointed his wife to the Politburo, his
sons to high party and government rank and more than 30 other
relatives to official positions. He basked in such honorifics
as the Genius of the Carpathians and the Danube of Thought while
treating the Rumanian people with extraordinary cruelty.

    To repay his $10 billion foreign debt, he halted imports,
exported food, rationed electricity and impoverished the
population. He wasted scarce investment funds on giant party
office buildings and decided to bulldoze thousands of villages
and force farmers into high-rise apartment buildings. His
go-it-alone stubbornness in foreign policy was only one more
sign of his determination to depend on no power but his own. As
it turned out, that was not enough.

    Though Ceausescu is out of power, he still casts a black
shadow over his country's future. Rumania has no history of
democratic government and Ceausescu permitted no institutions
to develop outside his control. The Communist Party, if it is
not completely discredited in the eyes of the people, will have
to enter negotiations with nascent political organizations, if
they can take solid shape. With security men still fighting
desperately to avert a reckoning with the nation they
brutalized, the regular army will play a stabilizing role.

    The European Community has already dispatched planeloads of
food and medical supplies to Bucharest. Gorbachev and the
Soviet parliament have passed a resolution of "support for the
just cause of the people of Rumania." In the days ahead, the
people of Rumania will need all the help they can garner from
both East and West if they are to recover from their bloody
rebirth.