Land of burning hands:
Fleischman, Janet
REPORT FROM ROMANIA LAND OF BURNING HANDS NO REFORM WITHOUT REBIRTH More than any other country in Eastern Europe, Romania lacks the formal and informal insti-unions needed to lead reform or even...
...But where are the bodies of those killed...
...In Timisoara, for example, most people cite the figure of 3,000-4,000 killed in their city from December 17-22...
...In addition, it appears that a large number of those arrested in Timisoara-possibly as many as 170-were released due to insufficient evidence...
...They also claim that they want to stave off a witch-hunt, though it might also be an attempt to avoid implicating themselves...
...For example, one might expect the newly freed press to be digging around for its own answers concerning the number of those killed leading up to the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime...
...and second, the fear and intimidation that existed under the dictatorship has not disappeared entirely with the death of the Ceausescus...
...Based on our investigation, it seems that at least 32 are being held in Timisoara, and approximately 80 in Bucharest, although it is unlikely that all of them will be prosecuted...
...However, the press has no experience in investigative reporting, and it is not attempting to do any...
...The dozens of bodies found in the mass grave outside Timisoara, though not yet identified, could not have been killed in the fighting, because there was no evidence of gunshot wounds and because coroners have established that the bodies found died from three days to three weeks before December 17...
...REPORT FROM ROMANIA LAND OF BURNING HANDS NO REFORM WITHOUT REBIRTH More than any other country in Eastern Europe, Romania lacks the formal and informal insti-unions needed to lead reform or even conduct systematic inquiries into the casualties of its recent revolution, let alone the abuses of the past...
...Institutions that played a role in investigating abuses in other parts of the world-church groups, local human rights monitoring groups, and families of the victims-are not yet functioning in any organized fashion in Romania...
...As to the question of where are the bodies of those killed in Timisoara, a few theories have been advanced...
...The issue of the society's complicity in the abuses of the Ceausescu regime makes investigations into the recent events more difficult...
...At the Timisoara Central Hospital, 26 deaths were recorded by December 22...
...He continued: "We must extend forgiveness in order to survive...
...Even though there is now an opportunity to analyze and publicize the events of December-undoubtedly the most blatant excesses of the regime's power-there is a troubling lack of initiative...
...It has been suggested that the families and friends of those killed should have come forward with inquiries about their whereabouts, which would help lead to some accounting of the dead...
...Similarly, the number of Securitate agents currently in detention is not known...
...During a recent mission for Helsinki Watch, our investigation indicated that the casualty figures were indeed high, but that the numbers had probably been inflated...
...But two factors have impeded this: first, no system has been established to encourage those with such information to come forward...
...Military and civilian officials claim not to know how many have been arrested, how many released, and how many are being investigated...
...Finally, there is speculation that the bodies were cremated at a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of the city...
...The entire nation is guilty...
...JANET FLEISCHMAN Janet Fleischman is research associate of Helsinki Watch, a New York-based human rights organization...
...Neither the local nor the national governments have made the investigation of those killed a priority, on the grounds that they have more pressing issues to deal with...
...We would have to put half the nation before the firing squad...
...Local army commanders deny this charge, claiming instead that regular trucks may have been involved...
...If Romania is to overcome Ceausescu's legacy, it must begin by accounting for his victims...
...The institutions that might be expected to investigate these events and begin to implement democracy-such as the courts, the press, and the government-are unprepared, and often unwilling, to move forward...
...So I should start with myself, and, frankly, I don't feel like it...
...Where those bodies came from and under what circumstances they died is still a mystery...
...One editor of a leading newspaper recently defended his paper's lack of aggressive reporting as "a censorship of consciousness-not out of fear, out of responsibility...
...In addition, since ambulances were not permitted to circulate in the areas where there was fighting, some reports allege that army vehicles collected the dead bodies...
...One group of doctors reported that the city's hospitals recorded a total of some 260 people killed throughout the city on the evening of the most intense violence, December 17...
...Our hands still burn from the forced applause...
...I'm guilty too...
...On at least one occasion, on the evening of December 19, some fifty corpses were stolen from the local morgue, apparently by the Securitate...
...Doctors at one city hospital-one of ten with surgical units in Timisoara-reported that from December 18-21, one or two people died per day in their hospital from gunshot wounds...
...The military tribunals that will try the suspected Securitate officers and political leaders are no substitute for a public investigation of the system that enabled such atrocities to be committed in the first place...
...I've been prostituting myself for seventeen years...
Vol. 117 • February 1990 • No. 3
