Word: bucharest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ever since taking over from deposed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu last winter, Romanian leader Ion Iliescu has played down his Communist background and promised his countrymen a new democratic era. But actions speak louder than words. By setting club-wielding miners loose in Bucharest last week to crush antigovernment protests, Iliescu demonstrated that he was quite willing to rule by thuggery...
Iliescu's National Salvation Front also prevailed in elections last month, collecting an astonishing 85% of the vote. But even the magnitude of the win did not silence a minority that believes last December's revolution was hijacked by onetime Communists. Every day hundreds of protesters gathered in Bucharest's University Square, occasionally chanting, "The final solution is another revolution...
...Just before dawn on Wednesday, more than 1,000 riot police poured into the square, setting fire to the tents of hunger strikers and beating 100 dissidents. Within hours thousands of protesters armed with clubs and petrol bombs were battling police throughout the city. As black smoke rose over Bucharest, Iliescu appeared on television to appeal for support against "a fascist rebellion...
LAST EXITS IN ROMANIA. The grainy videotape of last December's trial and execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife never shows the couple actually being cut down by bullets. This gap is now suspected of hiding a grisly interlude. Quoting government sources in Bucharest, a French newspaper claims that Ceausescu was tortured to death following the tribunal, by Romanian soldiers who were trying to locate three briefcases containing numbers and access codes of the family's foreign bank accounts. After studying the photographic evidence, forensic experts at France's Carme Institute tentatively confirm this scenario. They note...
...Bucharest sit-in has blocked traffic in one of the capital's main thoroughfares and led Iliescu to denounce the protesters as "vagabonds," a description for which he later apologized. Throughout the country, protesters took to wearing lapel badges inscribed I AM A VAGABOND and renewed their demands for Iliescu to step aside...