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| MEDIA HEADLINES 14/10/2008 |
| (2008-10-14) |
| Last updated: 2008-10-15 15:45 EET |
“Iliescu grins with satisfaction: thanks to the prosecutors, he got away with the crimes of the miners’ raids in the 1990s”, the daily paper Curentul headlines on its front page, after on Monday, the Prosecutor's Office exonerated the former president and current Social Democrat senator for the death of several people during the political unrest in the first months of post-communist Bucharest.
“A shameful solution from the General Prosecutor’s Office, just as shameful as the miners’ raids themselves”, the paper Gardianul also writes, reconstructing the tragedy that occurred 19 years ago and which brought Romania on the verge of a civil war.
On the 20th of May 1990, 5 months after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist dictatorship, Ion Iliescu, seen as the leader of the Revolution, was basically reconfirmed as head of state, winning the free elections by about 85% of the votes. His party, the National Salvation Front, a heterogeneous combination of genuine revolutionaries and second hand communists, had also won two thirds of the seats in Parliament. In Bucharest, University Square, declared a “neo-communism free zone”, had already been emptied, protesters having accepted the verdict of the ballot. Only a few dozens of people on hunger strike were still there. On the night of the 13th of July, they were evicted by the police using a disproportionate force reminiscent of the communist crackdown in the early days of the Revolution.
It’s still not clear today if those who reacted the following day clashing with the police and storming the headquarters of the Interior Ministry and the Television headquarters were really connected to the Square. Iliescu and his aides described them as “Iron guardists”, a term applied to the inter-war far right, and although the army had already restored order, called on the population to salve “the democracy under threat”. The miners answered the president’s call. They occupied the capital city for two days, on the 14th and the 15th of June, and substituted the legal institutions. They detained abusively 1,000 people, and left behind 700 injured and dead whose number is still uncertain, somewhere between 4 and over 100, generally innocent and random victims. At the end of the two days, Iliescu thanked the miners.
And yet, Evenimentul Zilei headlines, “the prosecutors established that the former president could not be blamed for the crimes committed by miners and the soldiers”. History books are the only, though not much of a consolation for the victims, writes the same daily. In these history books, writes historian Armand Gosu, “the miners’ raids will be exposed for what they really were: a return to the Middle Ages.”
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