Word: timisoara
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rumor swirled. Everyone had heard about one place or another where Ceausescu followers had suddenly appeared: "Last night we heard that paratroopers loyal to that murderer ((Ceausescu)) had been dropped outside the town," said Asofei Jorim, 21, a student who had survived the Timisoara massacre and joined the militia guarding the city. "We have even heard that Palestinian students who were being trained as terrorists here are also supporting the old regime...
...been so confident of his power: only a week earlier, he had ordered his security forces to fire on demonstrators in the city of Timisoara, near the border with Yugoslavia, as he flew off for an official visit to Iran. Now, under arrest and 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...
That organizing process got haltingly under way last week. Citizens' committees in provincial cities such as Timisoara, where the revolt ignited in mid-December, refused the call to "subordinate" themselves, and demanded a role in the National Salvation Front. Workers who joined students in the streets of Craiova, a southwestern industrial town, for example, had no more coherent a plan than the warning "Beware of the wolf in sheep's clothing...
...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...