Former Romanian President Faces Trial for Crimes Against Humanity
Last Friday, Romania’s president Klaus Iohannis approved a request to prosecute a former president and prime minister on charges of crimes against humanity for their roles in the country’s bloody revolt against its communist dictatorship.
Ion Iliescu, who served as Romania’s president from 1989 to 1996 and again from 2000 until 2004, former prime minister Petre Roman, and former deputy prime minister Gelu Voican Voiculescu were in charge of the Council of the National Salvation Front when anti-regime protests turned violent. Yesterday military prosecutors formally indicted Iliescu and Roman for crimes against humanity during the 1989 revolution, which left more than 1,000 dead and 2,500 wounded.
Romania’s violent revolution in December 1989 resulted in the hanging of president Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena on Christmas Day. It was only after the non-violent overthrow of the communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall in that same year that Romanians dared to take to the streets and demand for the must-hated communist dictator to step down.
The 1989 revolution and its aftermath have been clouded in controversy. Not only was Romania’s the last and only violent revolt in otherwise peaceful transitions in the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe — the sequence and actors involved in the downfall of Ceauşescu and the role of former second-rank communists like Iliescu has made many wonder if the revolution was not simply a coup d’état. On several occasions between 1990 and 1992 miners marched on Bucharest to violently quell opposition to Iliescu’s government.
Earlier attempts to hold Iliescu and others to account for violently suppressing opposition have failed so far. In 1990, the Bucharest Military Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal investigation into the events of December 16–31. Yet this investigation has been halted and reopened four times since then.
Iliescu faces charges of crimes against humanity for the second time. In June 2017, the Supreme Court indicted Iliescu and other former senior officials for their role in a violent crackdown on protesters in Bucharest’s University Square on June 13–15, 1990, which left at least four dead and over 700 wounded. This trial is still ongoing.
The new trial of former president Iliescu for crimes against humanity could not only bring justice to the many victims, but will hopefully also finally shed more light on the events that led to the violent downfall of Ceauşescu and the neo-communist government headed by Iliescu that stayed in power for many years after him.
Originally published in Muftah Magazine on April 17, 2018.
