Word: rumania
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James Wilde's presence in revolutionary Rumania last week surprised none of us: after all, the foreign correspondent is hardly a stranger to bloodshed and chaos. In 30 years with TIME, Wilde has reported on wars from Viet Nam, Africa and the Middle East. During the war in Biafra in the late 1960s, when the eastern part of Nigeria tried to secede, Wilde not only came under frequent ground fire but was strafed by Nigerian jet fighters as well...
...facing a military tribunal, he did not seem to understand or accept his defeat. He raged at his judges, who were not shown on the tape, insisted that he would answer only to the "working class" and refused to address the prosecutor's charges that he had destroyed Rumania. Within a bare two hours, the Ceausescus were found guilty of genocide, with "more than 60,000 victims," and of gross abuse of the power of the state...
...ashen face of the dictator, eyes open, blood oozing from his head, leaped almost instantly onto TV screens in Rumania and around the world. Many Rumanians wept or cheered in relief. Soviet viewers saw parallels with the Bolshevik Revolution and the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family. In Paris editorial writers recalled the French Revolution and suggested it was 1789 in Rumania -- with some of the same ambiguities of that upheaval...
Comparisons with 1789 and 1917 are not out of place. The old order in Rumania has passed, but the bloodshed is not over, and the shape of a new order is not yet discernible. Euphoria collides with the reality of post- Ceausescu life: unrelenting poverty, political confusion, ethnic tension. Rumanians may be jubilant, but they are also fearful of the uncharted world into which they have been pitched. Ceausescu is gone, but the real revolution is just beginning...
...Rumania is potentially a prosperous country, but Ceausescu's compulsion to pay off a $10 billion foreign debt led him to sell most of the country's oil and food production abroad and ration everything at home. Last week supplies his regime had hoarded for export -- and for the old communist elite -- were rushed into empty stores, and shoppers were dazzled to find meat, oranges, coffee and chocolate, the kind of goods that had not been available to them for years...