WORLD, Page 34Slaughter in The StreetsA massacre triggers the downfall of the tyrannical Ceausescu, butcivil war erupts across the landBy 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
