TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021290/0212007.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 117 lines

                M                                                              WORLD, Page 36

RUMANIA

Hooray! Traffic Jams at Last


Returning to the land still haunted by Ceausescu, a TIME
correspondent discovers the exhilaration -- and pain -- of
chaos

By KENNETH W. BANTA/BUCHAREST


    Like more than half the traffic lights in Bucharest, this
one on the busy corner of Boulevard Nicolae Balcescu is dead.
In the freezing fog, sputtering Rumanian-made Dacia sedans are
lurching every which way, horns honking. On the sidewalk,
pedestrians slog through ankle-deep mud and slush past an
armored personnel carrier, guarded by shivering young soldiers
fingering the triggers of their Kalishnikov rifles. At a kiosk
nearby, 50 customers jostle for the meager pile of Romania
Libera newspapers. Two doors away, a line of more than 100
shoppers shuffles toward a butcher's counter offering only
hamburger. "One hour, maybe two, to wait," says a housewife
bundled into a shabby parka. "That is, if any is left."

    Westerners might wonder how things could get worse. But
returning to the city I knew all too well under the iron hand
of Ceausescu, I understand why Rumanians feel that they've
never had it so good. They revel in their traffic jams;
Ceausescu all but banned cars to save fuel for export. After
24 years of state-sponsored terror, martial law by young
soldiers who defeated the Securitate thugs in the Christmas
revolution is a relief. "I like waiting for a newspaper," Ion,
a Bucharest undergraduate, said last week. "For the first time
here, there's news worth reading." And food lines? At least the
queues are for food, say Rumanians, savoring their first
beefburgers in memory. Ceausescu drove his subjects to
fisticuffs over rations of offal and chicken feet.

    Food and freedom have in many ways restored the soul to
Bucharest, whose soot-covered older buildings and hideous
concrete towers bear witness to how hard Ceausescu tried to
kill the city's spirit. The dimly lit cafes in which couples
two months ago whispered fearfully over mugs of ersatz tea now
ring with gossip over cups of real coffee. Rumanians who once
shied in terror from contact with foreigners besiege me as soon
as I open my notebook. In the vast plaza of Piata Unirii,
crowds that would once have been swiftly dispersed by Securitate
goons argue the merits of 30 new political parties, then race
home to watch Rumania's hot new television show: taped excerpts
from the trial of Ceausescu's top henchmen. In the final
episode last week, the four defendants were found guilty of
complicity in genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment.

    But that trial, engineered by the ruling National Salvation
Front as a means of officially burying the Ceausescu regime,
instead symbolized how Ceausescu's legacy may yet poison
Rumania's future. When a huge mob stormed the Front's
headquarters last week shouting "Out with the Communists!,"
they were voicing the growing fear that the Front's leaders,
who are almost all ex-lieutenants of Ceausescu's, may have
renounced the dictator but not his methods. Now fledgling
opposition parties to the Front are asking why it has mounted
a Ceausescu-style show trial and why, if Ceausescu's old
cronies are under indictment, ex-Communists in the Front should
be exempted.

    Already, walls in the city center that last month were
scrawled with FRONT=DEMOCRACY bear such slogans as STALINISM,
NAZISM, FRONT-ISM. Aside from tainting virtually all possible
national leaders with participation in his totalitarian
machine, Ceausescu ravaged Rumania's broader political culture.
"Everyone hates communism as he hates the devil," says Sorin
Botez, the executive secretary of the newly re-established
Liberal Party. "But little by little Ceausescu's people dripped
lies into the population, destroying democratic thinking."

    In that climate, freedom has unleashed a hurricane of wild
rumors and fear. Its eye is the brasserie of the Hotel
Intercontinental, where prostitutes and black-market currency
dealers whispering "Change, change" have been augmented by
political rabble rousers. In one hour I learn: that the
Securitate has bugged the offices of the National Front; that
the Front has bugged the Peasant Party; that the television is
controlled by the Soviets; that the Liberals give a bottle of
French champagne and a $150 bill to anyone who signs on. "All
these rumors! All these parties! Who can tell what to believe
and who to vote for?" says Dana, 55, a housewife sipping a
midmorning beer. "We still don't know if we can trust our own
neighbors."

    Ceausescu's legacy of grass-roots corruption and account
fiddling augurs ill for a regulated economy. With the arrival
of more than 1,000 journalists to cover the revolution and now
hundreds of West European businessmen to cut deals, the main
result so far appears to be an immense black-market boom.
Waiters at the major hotels sell pilfered hotel caviar for $20
a tin. Prostitutes' rates have soared from $100 to $200, and
Rumanians who used to bribe salesclerks with half a kilo of
coveted coffee beans to get their hands on a TV now have to
produce hard currency.

    Ironically, that boom, coupled with Rumanians' freedom to
travel to the West, may help lever Rumania's consumer economy
out of its reliance on the barter of goods and services in
return for Kent cigarettes, long the only real tender in the
country. Explains Silviu, 21, a tour guide: "Now we can travel,
and for that we need dollars, not Kents." If only Rumania's
more vexing ills had such simple solutions.