Romania, Romania
Swick, Thomas
REPORT FROM EASTERN EUROPE ROMANIA, ROMANIA EATING-CEAUSESCU'S SALAD "Where is Romania?" That is a question I often ask myself as I read articles about the unhappiest corners of the world:...
...Such measures, added to the cold, hunger, darkness, and a deep-rooted Romanian fatalism, make for a passive, muzzled populace...
...Shortages exist of even the most fundamental foodstuffs: milk, butter, bread, and eggs...
...But journalists who have attempted to provide such a look, like Peter Klebnikov, the East European correspondent of the New York City Tribune, are up against enormous odds...
...To make sure of that, however, the Ceausescu regime employs an elaborate and extremely effective security apparatus...
...Monumental structures proclaiming Ceausescu's glory now loom where once stood quiet residential streets and occasional clusters of spires...
...Both the scale and implications of this project are so enormous that it warrants worldwide attention and censure...
...She remains in Romania today...
...She and a host of others need to hear our raised voices...
...All meetings with foreigners must be cleared beforehand by the state...
...The European Community has refused trade talks with Romania as long as its violations of human rights continue...
...Ionesco was published and Sartre translated...
...All typewriters must be registered, indicating not only the degree of attempted thought control, but the almost total lack of computerized technology...
...He points out that when Ceausescu is described- as he apparently often is- as "a Hero among the nations's heroes," only the hero referring to Ceausescu himself is capitalized...
...Rather, one concerns oneself with feeding and caring for one's family, proving the old political axiom that people truly oppressed do not revolt...
...Let the people pay...
...Cornea had been taken to security headquarters in Bucharest and severely beaten...
...It has imposed a profound and pervasive silence on the majority of the country's 23 million inhabitants...
...VladimirTismaneanu, a resident scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, describes Ceausescu's recent actions as a "third-world approach" that is bringing about Romania's "tribalization...
...Do not crush the lives of the people...
...Yet he seems mesmerized, at times, by Ceausescu's implausibility...
...Never one for small gestures, the seventy-one-year-old Ceausescu has embarked on a program that calls for the destruction of 7000 villages-over half the total in the entire country-and the resettlement of their inhabitants in new "agro-industrial complexes...
...He frequently visits and writes dn Eastern Europe.isits and writes dn Eastern Europe...
...Why this total silence...
...The people are not living up to my dreams...
...Do not destroy the sacred laws that are at the roots of any human existence...
...Every month an estimated 1000 ethnic Hungarians cross the border illegally into Hungary, where they automatically receive political asylum...
...That is a question I often ask myself as I read articles about the unhappiest corners of the world: El Salvador, Lebanon, South Africa, the Philippines...
...The misery of the Romanians for most of this decade has been both physical and mental...
...There is precious little in the way of nourishment to steel the people against the elements...
...Families bundle at home in overcoats, shunted away in tiny apartments that are cold because of scarce fuel and dimly lit because of restrictions on electricity...
...Medicines and hospital services are dangerously limited...
...Klebnikov was expelled from the country in February after only two days there, during which he was followed by more than sixty security cars...
...But Romania's current invisibility has to do with the nature of its present horror-producing regime, a regime which cultivates an atmosphere of secrecy, surveillance, and unrelenting oppression...
...But the mood in Romania changed drastically after Ceausescu visited China and North Korea in 1971...
...Embassy has reported that one of every three Romanians has ties with the secret police...
...Ambulances do not respond to calls from the elderly, and Poles-Poles!-who drive through Romania report being besieged by children begging for antibiotics...
...This goes some way in explaining why we haven't heard much about Romania's travails...
...He alone of the Eastern bloc leaders denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968...
...It read in part: "We call on you to stop the demolition of the country's villages...
...Had Hobbes lived in contemporary Romania he would have concluded that life is nasty, brutish, watched, bugged, and-thankfully-short...
...It is, instead, meant to be the destruction of the identity of the Romanian nation itself...
...Several years ago Scinteia printed a telegram from the late Salvador Dali congratulating Ceausescu on adding a presidential scepter to his official paraphernalia...
...Ceausescu's policy is not designed merely to eliminate ethnic Hungarian or German culture, for each of these minorities has another country for its culture...
...Police confiscated his notebooks and film at the border...
...A number of editorials in Western papers have taken up this theme...
...Tismaneanu notes, for example, the copious religious-like references to the leader and the iconography of the many posed pictures of Ceausescu and his wife in such organs as the party paper, Scinteia...
...Mr...
...THOMAS SWICK Thomas Swick is an editorial writer for the Providence Journal in Rhode Island...
...And he will-if his plan of "systematization" succeeds by destroying most of them...
...But it was his emphasis on national traditions and independence from Moscow which won him respect both in the West and in his own country in the late 1960s...
...It was this sort of behavior- not to mention the frequent accompaniment of his wife, and the often-intoned references to "democracy"- that caused a Romanian exile recently to wonder in the New York Times if Gorbachev is another Ceausescu...
...He was impressed by the cult of personality in Mao's China and, in North Korea, by the actualization of "total political control" possible in a small country...
...Cdausescu is waging war against his own people...
...He has a peasant mentality and wants to administer Romania like a mayor does his village...
...These hardships have made Romanians wary to speak out...
...Entire blocks of the city's most historic section, including architecturally significant Orthodox churches, have been razed to make room for Ceausescu's National Palace on the grand Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism...
...Last September, the London Spectator published "A Letter to Ceausescu" written by the dissident Doina Cornea, a former philosophy professor at Cluj University who was fired from her job in 1983 and subsequently imprisoned...
...Birth control is illegal because of a state policy to increase the population...
...Driving people from their ancestral settlements where they have a purpose, where they have houses built to meet the needs of life and labor, is a sacrilege...
...When he speaks of Ceausescu, who has been in power since 1965, it is with some of the detachment of an academic...
...Hot water can be absent for months...
...Romania is the only European country with widespread hunger and increasing malnutrition...
...But Tismaneanu notes that this targeting misses the devastating completeness of the Ceausescu plan...
...There are two things about the scheme that shock: the massive destruction and disregard for both personal lives and ethnic traditions (which were once Ceausescu's cause...
...Yet this is a land blessed with rich farmland and natural resources...
...In such a light, it is easy to dismiss Ceausescu as a demented egoist...
...Almost never do I hear of the ruination of Romania, see graffiti demanding the overthrow of its leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, notice appeals on behalf of the prisoners of conscience in Bucharest, or come upon ads to send food parcels to the hungry people of Moldavia...
...One of Klebnikov's reasons for going to Romania was to report on Ceausescu's latest plan, announced last year, of "territorial systematization...
...Romania, of course, is situated in the Balkans, a part of Europe that has always had something of a nether quality for Americans-enhanced, to be sure, by the presence of Transylvania...
...In Tismaneanu's view, Ceausescu is displaying quintessential Leninist thinking: "The party- or I- knows best...
...We ask for the good will of Romanians in exile, but also of foreigners who are equally concerned about the preservation of our native values, to support this protest...
...He followed this up by condemning the abuses of the Stalinist era, releasing political prisoners, and fostering a modest amount of liberalization at home...
...A community, a nation, is based on individual lives, lived not under constraints or in fear, but on the variety of aspirations and the struggles of the people to fulfill these aspirations in liberty...
...Tismaneanu left Romania in 1981...
...His interest," claims Tismaneanu, becanP "undisputed, unchallenged personal power...
...This predilection for the incongruous act, the callous, self-aggrandizing gesture, has put Ceausescu in tandem with certain contemporary African potentates...
...Some criticism has been voiced...
...Romania's lowlands have traditionally been one of Europe's major grain-growing areas, producing rye, maize, and wheat...
...Ceausescu'SregMU is shrewd and primitive...
...and the relative silence from the rest of the world in the face of it...
...Many Romanian writers, including Paul Goma, joined the Communist party...
...Ceausescu's megalomaniac tendencies have already been apparent in his redesign of the capital city, Bucharest...
...Listening devices are used widely, and the U.S...
...Two months later the magazine reported that Ms...
...And Hungarians have been loudly critical, primarily because they see the project, the main thrust of which will take place in Transylvania, as directed against long-standing Hungarian communities there...
...Every human being has the right, if not the duty, to fulfill his natural, social, and spiritual destiny...
Vol. 116 • May 1989 • No. 9
