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- <text id=90TT2358>
- <title>
- Sep. 10, 1990: World Notes:Eastern Europe
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
- Sep. 10, 1990 Playing Cat And Mouse
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 57
- World Notes
- EASTERN EUROPE
- Short Supplies, Short Tempers
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> Political reform does not necessarily put food on the table,
- as Bulgarians and Romanians are learning. In Sofia last week,
- several hundred rioters stormed, ransacked and torched the
- headquarters of the ruling Socialist Party, the former
- Communists. That triggered a protest by thousands of police,
- who demanded the resignation of incompetent commanders and a
- more independent force.
- </p>
- <p> The anti-Communist rioters' anger was sparked in part by the
- government's failure to remove the hated Communist red star
- from the roof of the party building, but the flames were stoked
- by the government's inability to cope with a depressed economy
- and the prospects of winter shortages. Admitted Socialist
- leader Alexander Lilov: "Radical reforms should have absolute
- priority before all other questions."
- </p>
- <p> In Romania demonstrations erupted against food and fuel
- shortages, amid calls for the resignation of President Ion
- Iliescu. In an apparent effort to deflect attention from its
- troubles, the government endorsed ceremonies marking the 50th
- anniversary of the forced cession of parts of Transylvania to
- Hungary in 1940. The maneuver may have worked in the short
- term, but at the price of increasing tensions between the
- region's 6 million Romanians and 2.3 million ethnic Hungarians.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
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