Thirty years after the fall of the communist regime under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the dramatic and bloody events of December 1989 are to be reviewed in court. Attorney General Augustin Lazar said that the indictment of Ceausescu’s former president and successor, Ion Iliescu, and two other senior ex-politicians had been completed and forwarded to the court.
In the year of the revolution in 1989, protests against communist rule had come to Romania, which finally spread to the capital Bucharest. On December 22, Ceausescu escaped angry demonstrators, but was arrested by revolutionary forces later that day. Three days later, he was sentenced to death by a military tribunal with his wife Elena and executed immediately.
Nine days in December
The trial is about clarifying why even after Ceausescu’s escape by December 30, 1989, a total of 862 demonstrators were killed by security forces. The now 89-year-old Iliescu was accused of deliberately provoking chaos these days and accepting casualties in order to legitimize his own power.
The investigation had begun in 1996. Since then, the procedure has been discontinued over and over again. Most recently, the Romanian Public Prosecutor’s Office was forced to resume its mandate in 2016 by a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (ECtHR). The ECtHR had sentenced Romania to pay large compensation payments to 17 Romanians whose relatives had been killed during the bloody turn.
The former head of state has so far not commented on the indictment. But his view is known. In 2016 Iliescu had called himself innocent and referred to revolutionary circumstances. His later successor in office, today’s President Klaus Iohannis, welcomed the charges. The crimes of the revolution should not go unpunished, he said.
