Romania Watch

...H ow then to explain the landslide victory of, as one television report loosely put it, "the closest thing to a Communist option" on the Romanian ballot...

...An American visitor saw it as Hyde Park, Romanian-style...

...That it would be outdated before ever appearing in print was, itturns out, foreshadowed by a postelection conversation that took place in Bucharest between Garrey Carruthers and Ion Iliescu...

...But whether speaking, singing, or doing parody impressions of their late, despised dictator, all performed with the unleashed energy of young people who've had to bottle it up over the years, under penalty of death or worse...

...In short, the NSF didn't have to rely on coercion and fraud to win the May 20 election...

...To the extent that this second option might offend the civil sensibilities of a visitor, let it be said that it reflects not so much a cruel national temperament as it does the legacy of a quarter-century of Romania's systematic brutalization by a Marxist Caligula who preferred to maim rather than kill his victims...

...only to draw a complaint from Iliescu to the effect that the four stations the country already had were bad enough...

...Some sang original revolutionary songs, others delivered comedy routines...

...the second is that, trial or no trial, they should have been dispatched in slow, painful stages...

...The frequently heard line is that they cast ballots in their country's first free election in forty-five years...

...Beaten in her own home so that she and others will learn that no place is safe for people who Victor Gold national correspondent for The American Spectator, was a member of the official White House team sent to observe the recent Romanian elections...

...Someone in the crowd shouted a response and the crowd picked it up...

...In a democracy, added New Mexico's governor, criticism goes with the territory...

...Eighty-three parties were listed on the ballot, adding to the confusion of those participating in their first free election...

...This is our guide...

...But given the spirit of freedom I saw in the streets of Bucharest and Timisoara in May, miners or no miners, I wouldn't bet a plugged leu that the neo-Communist thug who walked in Nicolae Ceausescu's footsteps in June will be running Romania come December...

...O f the impressions I brought back after traveling to Romania as an election observer, the strongest was that the revolution begun there last December was not yet over...

...which is to say that not all of the speakers stuck to somber polemics...

...They queued up in lines often two blocks long, then turned in their identity cards in exchange for official rubber stamps to mark their ballot choices...

...Was Romania's May 20 national election free and fair...

...Compounding this failure, the opposition leaders challenging Iliescu for the presidency—Liberal candidate Radu Campeanu and Peasant party leader Ion Ratiu—were no match for the wily Iliescu when the opportunity came to reach a nationwide audience in a two-hour televised debate during the final days of the campaign...

...There are two regnant theories of sidewalk justice that prevail when the fate of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu is mentioned...

...News accounts told of voter coercion and fraud in some areas, but based on what our observer team saw and heard, I'd sayit was a valid election, applying generally accepted standards of what constitutes a free-and-fair vote...

...After voting, they returned the stamps to election officials to get back their identity cards...

...President," Carruthers replied, "in our country, when a candidate wins in a landslide, he lets bygones be bygones...

...Hitler, relishing scratchy film of his enemies hanging lifeless from meathooks, had something to learn from Ceausescu, who once ordered his foreign intelligence aide Ion Pacepa to silence, not kill, a dissident Romanian living in Paris, in this way: "She should be beaten to a pulp and have her jaw, teeth, and arms broken, so that she will never again be able to speak or write," Ceausescu directed...

...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL ROMANIA WATCH by Victor Gold O n the eve of Romania's May 20 election, the student "hooligans" who had started it all last December were still talking it up in the square at Timisoara...

...One school of thought, which might be viewed as a kind of Romanian Civil Liberties Union thesis, is that the Ceausescus should have been brought before a Nuremberg-like tribunal, tried and then shot...

...Nurtured on a socialist order, the majority of Romanians, though opposed to Ceausescu-style Communism, cast their ballots for democratic change-within-limits...

...a primitive method, but as New Mexico Governor Garrey Carruthers, head of our observer team, pointed out, if it's the Romanian way to keep people from voting twice, who are we to argue...

...It was a point aptly made, but one that Iliescu, judging from his sour ex-pression, found unpalatable...

...But young Romanians, having defied and defeated one of the most brutal dictatorships in history, aren't going to settle for the old order in a new guise...

...calumniate the proletarian dictatorship, not even their own homes . . ." On the eve of the election following Ceausescu's overthrow and execution, one of the speakers in the square at Timisoara recalled that dark period in the life of his country, then ventured the hope that regardless of the outcome of the vote, Romania's tomorrow would be better than its yesterday...

...Looking back, I believe he had the miners in his plans even then...

...nor would it be, until the crowds in Timisoara and in Bucharest's University Square said it was over...

...With Campeanu having spent a decade, and Ratiu thirty years, in enforced exile, Iliescu was able to press the point that, whatever the reasons they had for their absence, his opponents weren't in touch with Romania's needs...

...More accurately, it was the first in Romanian history...

...Constitution translated into Romanian...

...The most obvious evidence was the inability of either the Liberal or the Peasant party to achieve even a semblance of unity among those opposing Ion Iliescu and the National Salvation Front...

...Here," said a young election official, pointing to a copy of the U.S...

...Then, in one of those goosebump-producing lines that Oliver Stone or Ed Asner would swear had been programmed by the CIA (or written on cue cards for Ronald Reagan), he added: "America is the beacon of freedom for the world...

...In this random observer's view, the main reason for this outcome lay in the fact that after a quarter-century of paralyzing Ceausescuism, the anti-Communist opposition in Romania was unequipped to conduct an effective national campaign on six months' notice...

...Television commentators, he went on at some length, had criticized him unfairly during the campaign...

...Not to dismiss reports of irregularities...

...I asked our interpreter what they were chanting...

...As originally assigned, this was to be a "letter From Romania" filed by an on-site observer of the May 20 election...

...Discussing the election, Carruthers brought up the absence of television in large areas of Romania...

...When they say "freedom," they have a model in mind and it goes far beyondanything Mikhail Gorbachev and his post-Marxist reformers have in mind when they speak of glasnost and perestroika...

...On the following day, Romanians turned out to vote in record numbers...

...only to say that in visiting fifty or so urban and rural polling sites in three widespread areas of the country—including late-night spot checks of the actual vote count—our group came upon no incident of fraud or coercion...

...Middle-aged and older Romanians (notably labor-unionists), having known nothing but a socialist order since the end of World War II, might be willing to settle for some modified version of a statist society—Ceausescuism without Ceausescu...

...though as subsequent events have 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 shown, neither Ion Iliescu nor his party were as known a quantity as those voting for them might have imagined...

...He said it was, "Freedom, freedom, freedom...