23/2/90

Impressions of a Revolution

A few weeks after Romania's black epoch, revolution is still fresh in the air - but now, it is a revolution of mind over madness. The Post's Sam Orbaum visited Romania last week to  gauge the winds of change

"I THINK I will vote for one of the centrist parties." These innocuous words, this astounding thought spoken softly by 44-year-old engineer Constantin Danciu of Bucharest, crackled with fantastic implications in revolutionary Romania. To think, to vote, to choose, to opine, to politic - freely and fearlessly to a foreigner - and to be quoted by name: each act would have been deadly stupidity only seven weeks earlier.
    Danciu spoke his mind to me last week while waiting in line with many hundreds of other bundled-up Bucharest residents. A blocks-long queue such as this was sourly reminiscent of the country up to last December 22, but with one difference: instead of returning to his family triumphant with a pathetic scrap of meat, Danciu was about to go home the dizzy owner of a home.
    Revolutionary Romania. The blood of the dead has seeped into the soft earth faster than the grime-covered snowbanks could melt on the roadside. Ceausescu's black epoch is over, but the dead are still dead and the remnants of evil not yet so.
    I was taken to a new cemetery in Bucharest where 400 revolutionary victims are buried in shallow graves. The fresh mounds are graced with flowers and wreaths, and black and yellow candles flicker in front of each uniform wooden cross bearing a name and sometimes a photograph.
    The small cemetery is squeezed in between the older Bellu cemetery and a busy thoroughfare. The traffic noise seems almost muffled by the stolid silence of Romanians paying tribute to loved ones as well as strangers. I am embarrassed by the intrusion of my camera at this sanctified place, but no one is offended. They want everyone to know.
    Stepping between the graves, I come across one and stop, stunned. "Toma Ghezzo," the martyr is identified; "1970-1989." Under his name, crudely painted on the cross, is a Star of David.
    Three days later I returned to Ghezzo's grave and found that, in front of the cross, a plain wooden marker had been planted with the Jewish symbol more carefully imprinted upon it.
    (In Jerusalem a few days later, at a film-processing shop, a young clerk asked to see my photographs, explaining that he was a recent immigrant from Romania. When he saw the photo of Toma Ghezzo's grave, he froze. He knew Ghezzo; they were the same age. He said that Ghezzo had been in the choir of the Bucharest Synagogue.)

BUT BUCHAREST is not dwelling on death; rather, it is celebrating a new joie de vivre. In its few bars and night clubs, in the streets, in shops and even in queues, Romanians animatedly avenge the savage repression of 25 years of Ceausescu and of the stifling communism imposed since 1944.
    Before - everything in Romania is "before" the December 22 revolution and "after" - it was rare for one Romanian to trust another enough to exchange thoughts and opinions. One tour guide had worked together with a driver for 15 years before they actually spoke to one another in January for the first time. Now, there's no stopping them.
    Throughout Bucharest people come together and discuss, debate, argue, complain, revel. A large crowd can be identified with basic geometry: a line is a queue, a circle is a debate, a roughly definable rectangle is a demonstration.
    In one particularly large circle facing the former CC (Central Committee) Centre - where Ceausescu made the public appearance that directly brought about his downfall - two generations wagged fingers at each other, the youth charging the oldsters with responsibility for allowing the conditions "before", and the elders counselling the youngsters patience lest they destroy what has been achieved "after".
    Nowhere else but in Bucharest could a traffic jam be so good-humoured. Before, the paucity of petrol kept traffic thin; traffic on Sundays was further curbed by a law allowing only half the cars on the road. On this Sunday "after", a bona fide fender-to-fender crunch formed apparently because the traffic lights had not yet been reprogrammed to handle so many cars.
    Queues for food and basic goods were short, but an immense line formed outside a bookshop selling precious copies of a book by political cartoonist Mihai Stanescu, who recently returned from exile. In today's Romania, that is a basic commodity.
    Quality of life has already improved in many ways in these few weeks, and anticipation is rampant for what is to come. Romanians now have nearly 40 political parties to choose from (in the five days I spent in Romania, the list grew from 32 to 38); they have edible bread, matches that produce fire, newspapers that report.
    Octavian Andronic is the editor of Libertatea, a Bucharest daily with a circulation of 300,000. Like many of Romania's new emerging leadership he is young (43) and inexperienced - only two weeks in the position, though he had been a political cartoonist for 20 years.
    "This is the first time we feel like journalists. Before, we worked only to make a living," he told me. "We feel like we'd been starved and now that we have food in front of us, we don't know where to start eating."
    Journalists feel bad about their role in the dissemination of disinformation "before", but now "we write against anyone," he said. Romania's new obsession for truth is evident in the fact that Libertatea has not had a single returned copy since December 22.

HITLER'S EVIL was perpetrated against so-called foreigners; Ceausescu's was against his own people.
    Horror stories abound. One that was only recently revealed has such remarkable political implications that no one would name the culprits. A top-secret agreement, named the "Z-Z Document", provided Ceausescu with a promise from five Arab states that in the event of an uprising, they would invade Romania and kill as many people as necessary to rescue him. Nobody would name those five countries. There was little need.
    The talk of Bucharest one day last week was a story in the Adevarul newspaper claiming that 10 million homes had been bugged by the Securitate.
    I was taken to see Ceausescu's obscenely magnificent new palace in Bucharest. The complex includes a richly embellished wide boulevard built to glorify Ceausescu and named, ridiculously, "Victory of Socialism Street". Beneath this massive area is a network of secret tunnels and passageways. Everyone who had worked on the underground network, I was told, was shot.
    The speedy trial and immediate execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu seemed to most of the world like bitter retribution, but that was not so, according to Ion Mihai, a 37-year-old Romanian lawyer. Mihai, an urbane, worldly and intelligent official of the Youth Tourism Bureau, said that the Ceausescus' execution was indeed a legal travesty, but there was an extraordinary circumstance that justified it.
    Mihai had hoped for a proper public trial, "like Eichmann's," but during the trial the prosecutors became alarmed by a curious Ceausescu twitch: they noticed that the dictator kept checking his wristwatch, and feared he was expecting the imminent arrival of the Securitate despite the trial's secret venue.
    "There was incredible pressure on the army to stave off the Securitate," Mihai told me, "and it would have been disastrous had they found him still alive." The decision to execute him immediately was fortunate, Mihai said: later, they found a transmitter in Ceausescu's wristwatch and the autopsy revealed a minuscule microphone implanted in his tooth.

ROMANIA'S NIGHTMARE is being both obliterated from sight and emblazoned into common knowledge. Above the CC Centre, in large letters, are the words "Traiasca" (long live) and "Romania", with a large gap between them. In that gap had been the words "the Socialist Republic of" before they were hacked off.
    Near the capital's Inter-Continental Hotel is a shoe shop bearing the graffito "The shoemaker is dead. Hurrah!" It refers to Ceausescu's past profession. Shoemakers in Romania are particularly defensive about their trade these days, protesting in newspapers that this one has given them a bad name.
    At City Hall in Brasov, the country's second-largest city 170 km. north of the capital, a hole in the wall directly above the mayor's chair seemed to illustrate accounts of the heavy fighting around the municipality building. A bullet-hole? No, chuckled Mayor Florin Crizbasan, that was where the picture of Ceausescu was hanging before it was yanked off the wall. Alongside the hole is a poster now that reads: "God is with the heroes of Free Romania", with the heroes depicted as the army, the workers and the youth.
    In a hotel in Poiana Brasov, a lovely mountain resort outside of Brasov, a map of the country still had the words "Map of the Socialist Republic of Romania." When this was brought to the attention of the hotel manager, he blanched and ordered the offending words covered up. The only other symbol of the past I saw was a giant statue of Lenin in front of Bucharest's newspaper centre. "We've been busy," an embarrassed taxi driver said, "but we'll bring that down, too."
    The most stirring obliteration is to the very flag of Romania. In the centre of some of the blue, yellow and red flags, in place of the Socialist symbol, is now a crudely cut hole.

BUCHAREST IS still a desperately grey city, but grey is, after all, the colour of hope. Romanians know the future is unclear. "Brace for May 20" - the national elections. The National Salvation Front is favoured to win in May, but debate rages over whether the Front is a front for the past, and whether it is sincere about democracy.
    Meantime, there is great gusto in the day-to-day revolutionary right to be happy. And Romanians are, for now, very happy. Even when they are entangled in ferocious debate, they are happy at the chance to yell at each other.
    Taxi driver Gheorghiu Romulus fears the future; he doesn't believe the elections will be fair, and stridently insists that "there is still not democracy." Romulus survived the carnage of December 22. He was part of the great crowd jeering Ceaucescu at the CC Centre on that fateful day, and then joined the surge to Televiziunea Romana, where the uprising swelled to unstoppable power.
    He of little faith wasted no time when the smoke cleared: the following day he hastily assembled his brother and a friend, armed themselves with guns, picked up his girlfriend - and got married. He didn't even bother to shave; he still hasn't, and wears his beard as his scratchy symbol of freedom. "I will probably shave it off after May 20," he pondered pessimistically.
    Whatever happens on May 20, Romania faces a tough task. Everything - but everything - has to progress from square one.
    The time to accomplish may well be right now, at square one. At this time, between the old regime and the one to come, a period of subdued anarchy is encouraging achievement unfettered by the clog of bureaucracy.
    Brasov, perhaps taking advantage of the rare opportunity to sidestep the system, is attempting to build its own television and radio networks. Mayor Crizbasan said that because of poor communications, the outside world, including even nearby Bucharest, had not heard of any fighting in Brasov and had deduced that the city was spared. But fighting was indeed heavy, as were the casualties.
    Crizbasan related that the revolution came to his city a day before Bucharest, on December 21, "just as our Jewish community was preparing for Hanukka." Brasov's 500 Jews are centered near what was then the Securitate's Brasov headquarters, but the community was spared because, recalled Ray Iunius, a young Brasov Jew, "defenders were despatched to protect us during the two or three days of semi-siege."
    Iunius said he is planning to immigrate to Israel, but for now he is settling for Zionist activism in Brasov. A Romania-Israel Friendship Association is being formed with Mayor Crizbasan as honorary president, and Iunius wants to see the twinning of his city with Haifa "because of the physical similarities and the cities' strong polytechnic institutes."
    Crizbasan, a professor of foundry technology, is another young (49) and inexperienced new-generation leader (a mere five days on the job when we met), but he knows his priorities. Topping the list are free and responsible media, and "political and economic education. We must train businessmen." That is critical because, he stressed, "I want to tap experience, not opportunism."
    For all of Romania, experience is the crux. The country has for so long been shielded from the dynamics of free enterprise, from globalism and the march of progress. "We need to earn hard currency from tourism to send Romanians abroad. They must learn from the rest of the world," said lawyer Mihai.
    He conceded, however, that the task of rebuilding is daunted by a poor work ethic. "Romanians are not hard-working, but that is understandable. Communism has hardly encouraged them." That may change, he felt, through the rewards brought by capitalism and free enterprise.
    But as the May 20 elections loom, Romanians are in the absurd situation of only having themselves to learn democracy from. Some see it as boiled-down, unconstrained freedom. One man in Bucharest, rather excited about the prospect, shouted out his expectations: "I want democracy! I don't want to work anymore!"