From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   In Romania, the Traumas of a Bloody Revolution Still Cast a Long Shadow   
   By Andrew Higgins, Sept. 25, 2023, NY Times   
   Of all of the revolutions that swept across East and Central Europe in 1989,   
   Romania’s was the most violent and muddled. Afterward, many of those who had   
   served the country’s deposed dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu — executed on   
   Christmas Day 1989 —    
   not only stayed in power, but also enjoyed expansive opportunities for   
   enrichment for themselves and their families.   
      
   The despair that pushed Ms. Negru, a 66-year-old widow, to suicide flowed from   
   forces existing across Eastern Europe — unresolved traumas left by the   
   epochal changes of three decades ago, when Communism gave way to capitalism,   
   and dictatorship to    
   promises of democracy.   
      
   Catalin Giurcanu, a friend of Ms. Negru’s, recalled how as a “romantic   
   16-year-old” he had joined street protests against Mr. Ceausescu in December   
   1989 and how he lost his father, who had come to look for him, in a hail of   
   gunfire from still    
   unidentified gunmen, almost certainly members of Romania’s dreaded   
   Communist-era secret police agency, the Securitate.   
      
   When Mr. Ceausescu was three days later put before a firing squad with his   
   wife, Elena, after a show trial, Mr. Giurcanu celebrated what he believed was   
   a new dawn.   
      
   “Everyone thought the Communist era was over and everything would start   
   anew,” he said. “But there was no new start. There was no real rupture.   
   And we are still living with the consequences.”   
      
   Even though some state institutions are working to track the killings of   
   protesters in 1989, and to provide support for the families of victims, many   
   servants of the Ceausescu regime, particularly former Securitate officers and   
   a vast network of    
   informers, still cast a long shadow.   
      
   In July, Romania’s highest court acquitted two Securitate officers over the   
   1985 death of a dissident, Gheorghe Ursu, who died from beatings while in   
   their custody. A panel of three judges ignored testimony from former   
   dissidents who described being    
   tortured, and sided with witnesses from the security services who claimed,   
   against all evidence, that detainees were never subjected to violence.   
      
   Andrei Ursu, the dissident’s son and an author of two books on the 1989   
   revolution, said the judgment fit a rewriting of history long promoted by   
   former Securitate agents — and helped explain why Ms. Negru had so much   
   trouble getting justice for her    
   dead son, Florin.   
      
   Ms. Negru, in a 2006 interview for a Romanian documentary, recounted how she   
   last saw Florin alive on Dec. 21, 1989, when, fearful that he might join   
   snowballing protests against Mr. Ceausescu, she left him and his younger   
   sister in the care of their    
   grandmother before going to work.   
      
   When shooting erupted in Brasov, she was thankful “that the kids were safe   
   at my mother’s.”   
      
   Florin was not. He had gone into the streets and disappeared.   
      
   A day later, Ms. Negru found him: He was lying on a winter jacket at a   
   military hospital piled with corpses. He was, she recalled, “wide-eyed,   
   smiling,” but ice-cold. When she reached down to hug him, she said, “my   
   hands entered his back.” His    
   spine had been blown away.   
      
   “It was empty,” she said. “It was a hole, a hole.”   
      
   The nature of Florin’s wounds, said Mr. Ursu, who has studied the case as   
   part of his research, indicated that the boy had been hit by an expanding   
   dumdum bullet, to which only the Securitate had access in Romania.   
      
   But when Ms. Negru appealed to military prosecutors in Brasov in the 1990s to   
   investigate, she was told “that my son was a terrorist,” according to an   
   account she later submitted as part of efforts to press the authorities for a   
   full investigation.   
      
   She was blocked by a narrative promoted by the Securitate that the 1989   
   revolution had come under threat from “terrorists” working for foreign   
   powers and had been saved by patriots in the security apparatus.   
      
   “There were terrorists. They existed,” Mr. Ursu said. “But they were   
   Securitate officers.” When he put forward that view in a book last year and   
   presented documentary and other evidence, he was fired from his job as   
   research director at the state-   
   funded Institute of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989.   
      
   “Killers have been turned into patriotic defenders of the nation and victims   
   into terrorists,” he said by telephone from Chicago, where he now lives.   
      
   For Mihai Dodu, who heads a government department responsible for helping   
   anti-Communist protesters from 1989 and their families, a “mix of   
   bureaucratic stupidity and deliberate sabotage” had prevented Ms. Negru and   
   many others from finding out how    
   their loved ones were killed.   
      
   Nearly 1,300 protesters died in December 1989, and more than 3,000 were   
   wounded. Nobody has been held responsible for a single specific case of murder.   
      
   Mr. Dodu, whose father was killed in 1989, met Ms. Negru in Bucharest, the   
   capital, a few days before her death and was helping her with a tangle of   
   bureaucratic problems. She was, he recalled, “in a very delicate emotional   
   state.”   
      
   “I identified with her,” Mr. Dodu said, “I saw my mother in her eyes.   
   There was a terrible, yawning sadness,” he added. “She told me I could   
   have been her son.”   
      
   Like Ms. Negru’s son, Mr. Dodu’s father was killed by a type of bullet   
   used exclusively by the Securitate on the night of Dec. 22, 1989. Mr.   
   Ceausescu, fearing for his life after the military went over to the side of   
   protesters, had just fled    
   Bucharest. His successors, hijacking the popular revolution on the street,   
   presided over a period of wild bloodshed blamed on “terrorists” as they   
   consolidated their grip on power.   
      
   Romania’s new leader after Mr. Ceausescu’s capture and execution was Ion   
   Iliescu, a Communist apparatchik who served two terms as Romania’s first   
   post-Communist president. He gave immunity to Securitate agents and for years   
   blocked the release of    
   their archives.   
      
   Even after files began to dribble out in the late 1990s, said Germina Nagat, a   
   member of the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives, a state   
   body that collects documents and exposes past crimes, Mr. Iliescu ensured   
   “impunity for all    
   former Securitate officers — he protected them.”   
      
   “This is a cancer that has spread into the bones of the system,” she said.   
      
      
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