La 20 de ani de la caderea dictatorului Ceausescu, in decembrie 1989, o lege ii exclude pe fostii demnitari comunisti din viata publica, relateaza luni un site francez.

Deputatii au votat recent o lege a lustratiei: cei care au facut parte din forurile conducatoare ale puterii comuniste sau din aparatul represiv vor avea interdictie, timp de cinci ani, la anumite functii.

“Este un moment istoric, prima zi de normalitate a tarii”, si-a exprimat satisfactia Teodor Maries (foto), presedintele unei asociatii care solicita o astfel de reglementare, relateaza ouest.france.fr, care mentioneaza ca aceasta a facut o lunga greva a foamei pentru ca legea, asteptata inca din 2006, sa fie adoptata.

Aceasta dezbatere agita Romania de ani buni, relateaza presa franceza. Inca din anii ‘90 societatea civila solicita o epurare, in timp ce clasa politica, cu fostul presedinte Ion Iliescu in frunte, a refuzat sa ia astfel de masuri. Rezultatul este ca ruptura nu s-a consumat cu adevarat si numerosi fosti demnitari tin inca fraiele puterii.

Anumiti social-democrati, partidul cel mai vizat, denunta insa “un text aberant, prea tardiv” si o instrumentalizare politica. Partidul doreste sa atace constitutionalitatea textului, mai noteaza ouest.france.fr.

Luni, 24 Mai 2010, ora 15:49

Sursa: AGERPRES

Romania: ‘89 Revolution Files Will Be Declassified

The Defense Ministry will declassify 8,000 secret documents relating to the 1989 anti-Communist revolution. The ministry’s decision came after the European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that a copy of the whole revolution file should be handed over to an association of former revolutionaries. One revolutionary fighter, Doru Maries, said Friday that he hoped the documents would provide answers about who shot unarmed demonstrators during a revolt in which more than 1,100 people died. Twenty years after the revolution, in which the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was toppled and executed, only two people have been convicted.

Continua la battaglia civile di un ex-rivoluzionario del 1989 per la verità nel dossier sulla caduta di Ceausescu

di Anita Bernacchia

La lotta anonima ed eroica di Teodor Mărieş, presidente dell’Associazione 21 Dicembre, affinché i dossier della Rivoluzione del dicembre 1989 divengano accessibili alle vittime, ha registrato un successo notevole. Oltre il 95 per cento dei dossier si trova ora negli armadi dell’Associazione.

Lo scorso 16 ottobre Teodor Mărieş ha posto fine ad uno sciopero della fame durato 74 giorni. In virtù del suo impegno di lungo corso per rendere pubblico il “Dossier Rivoluzione”, con il suo gesto Mărieş ha ribadito allora la sua protesta nei confronti delle autorità romene, che hanno ripetutamente rifiutato di inviargli i file raccolti in questi anni sulle verità scomode della rivoluzione del dicembre 1989.

Il “Dossier Rivoluzione” contiene circa un milione di pagine, con tutte le dichiarazioni e gli ordini dati per iscritto dal Ministero degli Interni e dalle strutture di sicurezza nei giorni della Rivoluzione.
Ex-calciatore professionista, nel 1989 Mărieş trascorse l’intera giornata del 21 dicembre in Piazza dell’Università a Bucarest. Per lui, il momento più importante fu quando decise di prendere parte attiva agli eventi ed unirsi a coloro che urlavano “Abbasso Ceausescu!”. Il giorno successivo  Mărieş penetrò nella sede del Comitato Centrale insieme ad altri uomini armati, mentre Ceausescu aspettava sul tetto l’elicottero che lo avrebbe portato via da Bucarest. Il suo obiettivo, come ripete ancora oggi con passione, era quello di sparare al dittatore.

Non fu lui ad uccidere Ceausescu e a mettere fine al regime, ma Teodor Mărieş porta avanti da vent’anni una lotta personale per rendere pubblica la verità sulla rivoluzione, “per il bene delle future generazioni e per le famiglie di chi morì in quei giorni”.

“La Corte Europea dei Diritti Umani ha sentenziato all’inizio del 2009 che il governo romeno deve inviare una copia completa del Dossier Rivoluzione, cosa che, in un primo momento, non è accaduta. Grazie alla mia protesta la procedura si è sbloccata, e anche la nostra associazione ha ottenuto una copia dei file. L’ultima richiesta è che vengano riaperte le indagini, per trovare e processare i veri criminali dei giorni della rivoluzione”, dichiara Mărieş nel dicembre 2009.

L’11 gennaio 2010 Teodor Mărieş ha iniziato un nuovo sciopero della fame, al fine di ottenere il resto dei dossier, che le istituzioni tengono ancora, abusivamente, segreti.

La sera del 24 gennaio la televisione nazionale romena ha parlato per la prima volta dell’iniziativa solitaria di Teodor Mărieş, buon segno, questo, che la società civile romena interpreta come segnale di speranza.

Il fatto che il Presidente Traian Băsescu si mostri disponibile a non ostacolare il corso della giustizia romena rappresenta una grande opportunità per il buon esito dell’azione di Teodor Mărieş.

DANIEL McLAUGHLIN in Bucharest

Campaigners want an inquiry into the violence that followed the arrest of the communist dictator

TWENTY YEARS ago, Teodor Maries was on holiday in Bucharest when revolution gripped the city.

He was then a professional football player living close to Timisoara, the city that had erupted in protests against communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu on December 16th, 1989.

False word that thousands of people had been killed and injured there in clashes between demonstrators and security forces had ignited unrest across Romania, and it had reached Bucharest on December 21st, when a crowd jeered a speech by Ceausescu.

The next day, hundreds of thousands of Romanians defied an army crackdown and massed outside the headquarters of the Communist Party’s central committee, where Ceausescu was holed up with his wife and co-ruler, Elena, and senior allies.
Continue Reading »

On the anniversary of Ceausescu’s death, Daniel McLaughlin examines the questions that continue to trouble the country the dictator tyrannised.

Tomorrow, it will be 20 years since Dan Voinea helped send Nicolae Ceausescu before a Christmas Day firing squad.

But the anniversary of the climax to Romania’s revolution will not bring unalloyed joy to the prosecutor, or indeed to his compatriots, as they struggle to unearth the truth of what really happened in those extraordinary days, and to discover whether it was a vengeful people or a communist clique that really toppled the Romanian dictator.

Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, had been forced to flee Bucharest, after a wave of protests against their quarter-century of despotic rule swept across the country from the western town of Timisoara, reaching the capital on 21 December. The loathed couple fled the next day, flying by helicopter and commandeering cars on country roads on their wild dash for freedom, before finally being caught.

Mr Voinea was called to the provincial army base at Targoviste to make the case against the elderly, dishevelled couple before a hastily arranged court. The case for the prosecution had no lack of material or popular support.

Ceausescu, the son of a peasant, had crippled Romania economically, socially and morally. Having bankrupted the country paying off foreign debts to bolster his political independence, he was forced to export almost everything the country made, creating desperate shortages. Ration books and heating, lighting and hot water cuts were the daily norm.

As his 23 million people sank into poverty, Ceausescu strengthened the Securitate secret police to keep them in check. At least 700,000 people are believed to have informed for the Securitate, which bugged countless apartments, spied on every Romanian who had contact with foreigners, and ensured that no coherent dissident movement ever emerged.

Even as Mr Voinea was preparing his case, fresh blood was colouring the damning file on the Ceausescus, who had been running the country together in the late 1980s because of Nicolae’s deteriorating health.

Security forces loyal to the couple had killed dozens of protesters in the days leading up to their arrest, and reports and rumours at the time suggested that thousands of demonstrators had been massacred. “There were lots of coffins in Bucharest hospitals of people who had been shot on Ceausescu’s orders. I felt I was doing something to punish Ceausescu for all these murders,” Mr Voinea said in an interview.

“Everyone was against Ceausescu. The street demanded the trial to start even if we did not have time to produce a normal file on him. We had enough evidence that he ordered the security services to open fire on the demonstrators, and at that time we thought thousands may have died.” He requested the death penalty for his country’s rulers on the charge of crimes against humanity, and it was granted.

Valentin Ceausescu, the couple’s eldest son, had last seen his father on the night of 21 December. That night, Nicolae had delivered a speech, only to find it booed and jeered by the normally obedient Bucharest crowd.

His son remembers a man out of touch with his people, unable to countenance Romania undergoing the kind of change that had swept across the communist bloc during that momentous autumn of 1989, which had seen free elections in Poland, the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Prague. Romania’s revolution was to be the last – but also the bloodiest.

The next time Valentin saw his father it was on national television, lying dead in a crumpled heap beside his mother. Valentin had been taken to an army base where he watched footage of his parents’ execution. “I was there with the commanding officer and maybe another officer. I didn’t look at them,” Valentin, now 61, recalls. “I was ashamed. Ashamed of being Romanian… It’s not about how one treats one’s leaders, it’s nothing to do with that. It is hard to describe but I got this feeling when watching, that it was sort of a dirty thing… that it was shameful to watch this.”

Valentin – a nuclear physicist who was never involved in politics – was jailed for eight months and then released into a country that was already questioning the real nature of its revolution.

Along with many other Romanians, he believes it was in fact a group of communists opposed to his father and seeking personal gain who seized power, under the cover of the mass protests, having used army units to create bloody chaos around the country before presenting themselves as the “National Salvation Front”.

The most powerful member of the NSF was Ion Iliescu, who became Romania’s president after the convulsions of 1989 and dominated the country’s politics until 2004. While supporters credit Mr Iliescu and his allies with guiding Romania towards European Union and Nato membership, their many critics at home and abroad accuse them of presiding over a kleptocracy which did its utmost to conceal what really happened in 1989.

As Romania grapples with endemic corruption and an economic crisis, the successors to the communists remain hugely influential today: Mircea Geoana, the leader of the party founded by Mr Iliescu, lost out in this month’s bitterly fought presidential election by less than one per cent.

It was Mr Iliescu’s group that summoned Mr Voinea to act as prosecutor in the Ceausescu trial, and whom he obeyed, believing they had some legitimacy as leaders of the revolution. He now sees them as usurpers of the genuine people’s revolt that erupted in the west and then spread to the capital. “This group must take responsibility for all the killings that took place after the 22nd,” said Mr Voinea. About 1,000 of the 1,200 or so people killed in the revolution died after Ceausescu had fled.

“After the arrest of the Ceausescus, the state apparatus of repression continued to fight against the protesters. In the name of defending against ‘terrorists’ this [NSF] group seized all the major institutions. They portrayed themselves as Romania’s saviours and people believed them. The people were very easily deceived and were quickly persuaded to accept these men as leaders.”

Mr Voinea is now a member of the December 21st Association, which is seeking a full inquiry into the revolution, the release of all relevant files and the prosecution of those responsible for killing and injuring thousands of protesters.

The head of the association is Teodor Maries, a former professional footballer who was one of the first to break into Communist Party headquarters on 22 December, just as the Ceausescu helicopter was rising from the roof.

This year, Mr Maries lost 30 kilos during a 74-day hunger strike to demand a proper investigation into the events of 1989. He, like most Romanians, feels pride and pain when casting his mind back two decades to a revolution that he feels was stolen from the people.

“It is tragic and painful that we haven’t been allowed to present what really happened to the public… and that these files haven’t reached a judge’s table,” he said, opening cupboards in his Bucharest office piled high with copies of dossiers that officials sought to hide or destroy.

Mr Maries remembers how, after the Ceausescus had escaped, he came face-to-face with Iulian Vlad, the head of the Securitate, inside the communist central committee building as gunfire crackled around Bucharest. “He said to me: ‘Come outside and I will show you the betrayal – you have overthrown the dictator and are putting the communists in power’.”

Sursa: The Independent

http://it.euronews.net/2009/12/18/romania-dicembre-1989-alla-ricerca-della-verita/

“Denis Deletant este profesor de limba şi literatura romînă la Şcoala de Studii slavone şi est-europene din cadrul University College, Londra, pecum şi la Universitatea din Amsterdam.
A studiat în România în cadrul unei burse postuniveritare acordate de Bitrish Council în 1969 şi a vizitat apoi frcvent ţara până în 1988, cînd a fost declarată persona non grata ca urmare a comentariilor nefavorabile la adresa regimului Ceauşescu pe care le-a făcut în presa britanică. La sfârşitul lui decembrie 1989, a revenit la Bucureşti în calitate de consultant al BBC în perioada revoluţiei române. În 1990 a fost invitat să facă parte din comitelul executiv al British Guvernment’s Know-How Fund, implicându-se activ în aspectele româneşti ale activităţii acestuia. Pentru această contribuţie i s-a decernat Order of the British Empire (OBE) în 1995″

Domnul Dennis Deletant a fost invital în cadul conferintelor organizate de dl Ion Caramitru, la Tetrul Naţional Bucureşti, cu ocazia aniversării a 20 de ani de la Revoluţia Română.

Scuze pentru calitatea imaginii, îmi asum respunderea. Dacă găseam înregistări mai bune le postam.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The head of an association representing the families of young street protesters shot during the Romanian Revolution of 1989 has been on hunger strike for over two months over the refusal of authorities to heed a European Court for Human Rights demand that he be granted access to secret files about the events.

After 72 days on strike, Teodor Maries scored a small victory on Tuesday (13 October), when the Romanian public attorney started to hand over to him all the non-secret files of the violent events surrounding the fall of the Communist regime.

Back in December 1989, more than 1,200 people were killed and over 5,000 were injured and illegally arrested in Bucharest and other Romanian cities. The culprits have still not been put behind bars.

Mr Maries on Tuesday said he would not stop his protest until the secret services de-classify all the remaining files and give him copies, which he intends to make public.

According to the press office of the Strasbourg-based European Court for Human Rights, the Romanian authorities have a deadline of 30 October to grant Mr Maries access to all the “relevant” files in his case. An emergency procedure, the so-called Rule 39, was applied in his case due to the urgency of Mr Maries’ health condition.

The head of the “21 December” association, representing the families of the youngsters shot in the murky events of 1989, took Romania to the Strasbourg court for having failed, 20 years after the fact, to properly investigate and prosecute those who shot at people.

Part of the complaint is filed on behalf of a couple – Elena and Nicolae Vlase, whose 19-year old son was found dead with visible signs of torture on 27 December 1989. According to the death certificate, he was shot to death, but the military prosecutors failed to identify any other violence inflicted upon him. A military court ruled in 1994 that he had been killed “by mistake,” with no order to kill being issued, but rather due to the “stress, state of tiredness and fear of so-called terrorists the soldiers were subjected to.”

The Vlases filed an appeal and in 1999, another court ruled that the previous verdict had been wrong and tried to protect the culprits. A new investigation was opened, which is still ongoing 10 years later, and which is why the family of the victim sued Romania for taking too much time. The European Convention on Human Rights provides for cases concerning the right to life to be carried out with maximum speed.

Securitate still present

Declassifying the secret police files on the events of December 1989 would be a major breakthrough in a country where the former Securitate leadership had an easy life after the fall of Communism. Lustration laws – rules limiting the participation of former Communists and police informants in the post-revolutionary administration – were systematically watered down by the parliament, where former secret police chiefs still had a big say, either directly or through their political allies.

Nobel prize winner for literature Herta Muller, who was for decades followed by the Securitate in the city of Timisoara, where the “Revolution” started on 16 December 1989, recalled in an op-ed recently published in The Guardian the horrors of her experience.

“For me, each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were co-incidence and which were staged,” she wrote.

“This is why I have, in every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me that, under various pretexts, have invariably been denied me. Instead there is evidence that I am still under observation.”

Reading the group files on herself and other dissidents of German ethnicity is a “poisoned truth,” she said, as the former secret police has erased some of the information which would have compromised them, for instance the beating up of a German journalist who came to visit her or the “suicide” of one of her closest friends, which Ms Muller thinks was staged.

“This lacuna shows, too, that the secret service has deleted the acts of their full-time staff, so that no one can be held responsible as a result of file access – they have seen to it that the post-Ceausescu Securitate has become an abstract monster without culprits,” Ms Muller said.

Autor: VALENTINA POP
Sursa: EUObserver

Romania pushed to reveal secret revolution files

Politics
14.10.2009
by Euranet

Pressure on Bucharest to redress the wrongs of its Communist past is growing. A leading rights activist’s hunger strike has led to an emergency ruling demanding the authorities hand over classified documents detailing the events of the 1989 revolution during which 1,600 civilians were killed.

Teodor Maries, the leader of the 21 December association , which represents the families of people killed during the Romanian Revolution, has been on hunger strike for over two months demanding access to secret service files about the events of December 1989.

The European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg ordered Romania to give him all the relevant documents, but the authorities have been dragging their feet. Citing concerns about Mr Maries’s health if the hunger strike continues, the court has issued an emergency ruling giving Romania’s authorities until 30 October to comply.

Mr Maries is demanding that all the documents about the 1989 revolution are declassified and published, a step which is vital if those guilty of the killings are ever be brought to justice.

It seems as though the court ruling has finally got the ball rolling. On 13 October, the Romanian public attorney handed over the non-classified files concerning the weeklong riots and fighting that toppled the Ceausescu regime. The 21 December association says that the authorities have promised to hand over the remaining files, hopefully allowing Mr Maries to give up his strike.

Critics say that 20 years after the revolution, Romania has not settled accounts from its Communist past. Although many high-ranking Communist party officials, including Ceausescu’s son Nicu, were tried and given long prison sentences, all were eventually released on health grounds.

Many Communist-era secret police bosses and functionaries have successfully managed to avoid justice and even maintain senior positions, using their political influence and contacts.

The European Court for Human Rights is flooded by hundreds of requests from the families of the 1989 Romanian Revolution, asking for help in their protracted efforts to seek justice.

Sefan Puscasu, a member of the 21 December organisation, explained why it is so important for these documents to be made public:

http://www.euranet.eu/eng/Media/Audio/English-Audio/With-these-files-we-can-find-out-the-truth