Word: ceausescu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...universal support for the narrowly based provisional government. Rumanians are troubled by some of the men who assumed control. Several of the leading figures are communists -- dissident and reformist communists of the Gorbachev variety, to be sure, but still tainted by membership at one point or another in Ceausescu's machine. The President, Ion Iliescu, 59, is a former Central Committee Secretary who was demoted in the early 1970s after complaining to Ceausescu about nepotism in the party. Vice President Dumitru Mazilu is also a lifelong communist whose career ground to a halt after he clashed with the dictator...
...demands that the government retain at least part of the old bureaucracy in the interest of survival. "What can we do?" asked Corneliu Bogdan, the Deputy Foreign Minister. "There is no question of vengeance." But, he added, "we hope gradually to weed out all the top officials who supported Ceausescu." That kind of compromise made many newly liberated Rumanians uneasy about a potential alliance between the army and the bureaucracy -- and a possible new dictatorship in the making. Said Doina Cornea, a longtime dissident and a founder of the National Christian Peasant Party: "We don't need central control anymore...
...lack of central control was an obvious problem last week. Under Ceausescu's paranoid purges and the vigilance of his secret police, no significant resistance movement was able to form. The explosion that ended his reign resulted from spontaneous combustion, and the people who powered it were only beginning to get organized. Nobody had a plan for the revolution; the participants only knew what they were against. Said Iliescu: "It was not the movement that led to the overthrow, but the overthrow that created the movement...
...could the caretaker government be certain of security. It appealed "for an end to acts of revenge," but Securitate gunmen sniped intermittently from Bucharest's rooftops; others were believed to be hiding out in a maze of tunnels and secret passages Ceausescu had constructed under the capital's streets. Fighting around the city's international airport forced the frequent interruption of flights. There were ongoing firefights in Timisoara, Arad and Brasov...
...When Ceausescu left for Iran on Dec. 18, he believed that Securitate had the uprising in Timisoara in hand. "They tortured everyone, young and old, to frighten the city," a young army officer recounted last week. But Timisoara's young refused to be cowed. "It was a revolt by the kids, a young revolution," said Gabriela Vlad, 24, a doctor in the Timisoara hospital. One of her patients, a 13-year-old girl named Suzana who was shot during a demonstration, explained, "We marched because we had nothing to lose here. We are tired of hearing...