Death in Bucharest
On Friday June 19, 2020, a high-ranking Iranian mullah was found dead in a Bucharest. That morning, Gholamreza Mansouri, 52, had visited the Iranian Embassy on the stately Lascăr Catargiu boulevard, 700 meters from his hotel. He then paid his hotel bill and packed his suitcases. Mansouri, a former judge who had arrived in Romania from Germany a week earlier, was wanted by the Tehran regime for corruption, including accepting € 500,000 in bribes. However, a Romanian judge ruled that Mansouri could not be extradited to Iran until it was determined that his rights would not be violated. The next hearing had been scheduled for July 10. Meanwhile, Reporters sans frontières had requested the Romanian authorities to arrest Mansouri because he allegedly was responsible for the arbitrary detention, prosecution and torture of at least twenty journalists in Iran.
The investigation by Romanian Public Prosecutor’s Office into the causes of the death of the former judge is still in progress. Was it an accident? Suicide? Murder? Preliminary findings rule out the accident and circumstances suggest that suicide is unlikely. So murder?
First republic
Romania has a rich history of political killings. Although it was not until 1878 that the Treaty of Berlin officially recognised Romania as an independent state, the Romanian provinces of Moldova and Wallachia had been united since 1859 — after the Crimean War — under Alexander Ioan Cuza, prince of the Romanians. Cuza had played a prominent role in the 1848 revolution in Moldova. Under the elected Cuza, who officially reigned as Domnitor from 1862–1866, Romania for the first time had a parliament and an elected government after all principalities approved the nomination of Cuza. On January 21, 1862, Cuza appointed conservative Barbu Cartagiu as the prime minister of the country’s first unitary government. Characteristic of those troubled times was that Cartagiu had been prime minister for less than four months when he was assassinated on June 11, 1862, during the celebration of the 14th anniversary of the revolution of 1848. Although the exact reasons for the assassination have never been clarified, Catargiu was a victim of mounting tensions between the left-wing political reformers of the National Liberal Party and the Conservative Party he led.
Still, the clashes in the early decades of the Romanian republic were mainly verbal and not physically violent. Only under the influence of revolutionary anarchists, who adopted political violence as a new tactic to undermine the state, new targeted killings were carried out at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The most spectacular political assassination was the bombing of the Senate on December 8, 1920 — killing Justice Minister Dimitrie Greceanu and two senators, Spirea Gheorghiu and Demetriu Radu, and injuring Senate President Constantin Coandă. The bomb was placed by the anarchist and communist Max Goldstein. Goldstein managed to escape to Bulgaria, but was arrested for a year. In the aftermath of the attack, dozens of communists were arrested, including Alecu Constantinescu, a leader of the left wing of the Socialist Party. The government also banned all political activities of the communists. Goldstein (1898–1924) had attempted to assassinate the Interior Minister Constantin Argetoianu, a rabid anti-communist, three weeks earlier. The attack failed, however, because the bomb under Argetoianu’s train car destroyed the empty half of the car.
The Interbellum and the Iron Guard
The onslaught on the Senate was a prelude to two decades of political assassinations, instigated primarily by, or in response to, the ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic, anti-communist, and Orthodox “Legion of the Archangel Michael” led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu until he himself was murdered in 1938. The Iron Guard was the paramilitary branch of this movement of “legionaries”, banned by Liberal Prime Minister Ion Duca in 1933. The ban was followed by a period of arrests and twelve legionaries were murdered by the police. The Iron Guard retaliated on December 29, with the murder of Duca on the Sinaia train station.
In the December 1937 elections, the Legion became the third party, with 15.5% of the vote, behind the National Liberal Party and the National Peasant Party. King Charles II was strongly opposed to the Legion and disbanded the government to subsequently declare a monarchist dictatorship. Codreanu accepted the autocratic regime, yet Interior Minister Armand Călinescu had him arrested in April 1938. On the night of November 29–30, Codreanu and some of his supporters were strangled “on the run”.
Călinescu, now prime minister, became himself the next victim: on September 21, 1939, he drove his Cadillac in ambush in Bucharest by members of the Iron Guard, led by the exile Horia Sima, Codreanu’s successor. The assassination had the approval of Nazi Germany, which hoped Romania would join the Axis powers. Călinescu’s replacement Gheorghe Argeşanu further increased repression against the Iron Guard. The perpetrators were executed and their bodies hanged in the square where Călinescu was murdered. A sign was placed near the site that read “De acum înainte, aceasta va fi soarta trădătorilor de ţară” (“From now on, this will be the fate of those who betray our country”). Pupils from a number of secondary schools in Bucharest were even obliged to visit the scene of the disaster.
It was of little use. A year later, the Iron Guard, now in a government led by Marshal Ion Antonescu, took revenge: Argeşanu, former Justice Minister Victor Iamandi, Interior Minister Gabriel Marinescu and 61 other political opponents were executed during a massacre in Jilava prison, south of Bucharest, on November 26, 1940.
Murders ordered by the state
Whereas in the Interbellum political opponents were eliminated by oppositional movements, under communist rule it was the state that eliminated (internal) opposition. The first victim was Stefan Foriș, Secretary General of the Romanian Communist Party of 1940–1944. He was killed at the behest of party leaders Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej and Ana Pauker, shortly after the communists solidified their control of Romania after the November 1946 elections.
The social democrat Ioan Flueraș died in 1953. The fate of Flueraş — who in 1945 turned down the position of Minister of Labour remarking, “I can never cooperate with a government under Soviet occupation. I cannot trade one dictatorship for another. Forgive me” — was typical for the many political competitors and opponents eliminated under communism. Arrested in the fall of 1948, he was subsequently starved to death in captivity, tortured and subjected to a brutal “re-education” process in the infamous Gherla prison. Apparently this was not enough of a reassurance for party leader Gheorghiu-Dej (1946–1965), because after five years in prison and forced labour, Flueraş was murdered.
Under Gheorghiu-Dej’s successor Nicolai Ceaușescu, the regime for political prisoners was somewhat softened. Instead, the intelligence agencies took on a more prominent role in smothering opposition, resulting in many unsolved attacks on dissidents, primarily abroad.
Explanations for political violence
American sociologist Arie Perliger conducted large-scale research into political murders. Based on an extensive dataset covering the period 1945–2013, he concludes that “political assassinations are more probable in countries that suffer from a combination of restrictions on political competition and strong polarization and fragmentation”. Although legislators are most often victims of political violence, they are hardly ever targeted in democracies. In Iran, however, no fewer than 34 legislators were murdered in 1981 when the new revolutionary regime consolidated its control over the country. Also, murders of legislators are seldom committed to promote specific policies or to access the political process; it should be seen more as protest against an existing political order than as political actions designed to achieve specific political goals.
Transition and organised crime
The above observations also seem to apply to Romania in the 21st century. “In general, physical violence in Romania is rather limited, which explains the lack of political violence,” says political scientist Silvia Marton in an interview. Professor Marton is affiliated with the University of Bucharest and is the author of La construction politique de la nation: la nation dans les débats du Parliament de la Roumanie (1866–1871), among others. “In Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia political killings are more frequent. Romania’s political system is somewhat stable. Political parties behave like cartels. Elections guarantee that parties can regain their cartel. There is no insurgence or movement from outside the main political parties that challenge them seriously or violently. A cartel-like political system dilutes political opposition.”
In the aftermath of the violent revolution in Romania in December 1989, in which Communist dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu was executed after a brief improvised trial, the security forces were still very influential and entangled with the emerging capitalist economy and politics. “General A.”, director of the Ministry of Interior’s foreign affairs and passports department, died in 1995 in a mysterious car accident, after which his bodyguard made a career in the so-called “European hypermarkets” in Bucharest.
“In those days of transition from communism, Romania was still a non-aligned country with ties to countries like Iran,” explains Marton. The early capitalists of the new free market economy were in fact tied to the old communist nomenklatura and doing business with similar non-aligned states with the approval of the Securitate, Romania’s infamous secret service. The first major fortunes were made with these networks. In the early 1990s, Romania was a smuggling paradise and organised crime flourished.
In the 1990s, miners were called upon to resolve political disputes — the mineriad of 1990 and 1992 — but professor Marton says this was an exception. Since those early days of the post-communist era, Romania has been transformed into a fully-fledged democracy. It joined NATO in 2004, which has, among other things, improved civilian-military relations. Romania also became a member of the European Union in 2007. Membership requirements included guarantees regarding the rule of law, including the independence of the judiciary.
Foreign dignitaries
Back to the tragic fate of Gholamreza Mansouri, the Iranian cleric and judge suspected of both corruption and crimes against journalists. “These kinds of accidental deaths of foreign dignitaries, they are not a domestic type of assassination, not related to the Romanian political system as such,” says Marton.
Mansouri is not the first prominent Iranian citizen to have died in Romania since the fall of communism. In November 1994, Mohammed Ali Assadi, an alleged monarchist opposition leader, was murdered after applying for asylum in the United States. At the time, the Romanian police claimed that Assadi had been involved in “illegal matters” and had been murdered by rival Iranian criminals in Romania. The Iranian Embassy in Bucharest also claimed that Assadi was a criminal and that his murder was not politically motivated. Still, Evenimentul Zileireported at the time that the victim had accompanied a former Shah’s cousin during his visit to Romania, although Iranian opposition groups in London told Reuters news agency that they had never heard of Assadi. The Romanian police reportedly arrested three Iranian suspects.
“If Romania indeed has some criminal networks or gangs operating, Romanian intelligence services would try to stop them as they have done in the past,” says Eliza Gheorghe, assistant professor of international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in an interview.
Therefore, if Gholamreza Mansouri was actually murdered, the perpetrators probably have to be found outside Romanian political and criminal networks.
