| TIMISOARA, THE PLACE WHERE THE ANTI-COMMUNIST REVOLUTION STARTED 17/12/2008 |
| (2008-12-17) |
| Last updated: 2008-12-18 15:21 EET |
Nothing would have been possible without Timisoara. The revolt that broke out on 16th of December 1989 in the west of the country was not just the triggering event of the Revolution, it was the founding act of today’s Romania: a democracy that is a member of NATO and the EU. It is the same country that, 19 years ago, under the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, seemed forever condemned to cold, hunger, fear, and seemed incapable of ever freeing itself from the most airtight of the communist dictatorships of eastern Europe.
In a false mirror, the aggressive, primitive and oversized propaganda apparatus was building, repetitively and monotonously, a parallel reality, a happy and prosperous country led by a president who shamelessly called himself a genius. And, with the exception of a few well supervised, harassed, and isolated dissidents, no one dared protest. The political police had managed to build up a myth for itself that depicted it as omnipresent and omnipotent, paralizing any form of opposition.
Ceausescu had been isolated not only by westerners, who were appalled at the infringement upon the most basic of human rights, but also by former cronies sharing the space behind the Iron Curtain, tired of his resistance to the moderate reforms initiated by Gorbachev’s Kremlin. Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, or East Berlin had already broken the yoke of dictatorship by non-violent revolution.
Romania was to be the only country where communism treaded on corpses, and Timisoara, the first free city, was the first to have victims. After almost two decades, the inhabitants of Timisoara are still living with the frustration that justice has still not been done to their dead, that many of their claims are left unanswered, and that the revolution has been hijacked by lower level communist leadership.
One of the true revolutionaries from that time said that even in school, the Revolution is discussed so little, that students think of it as an event as remote as medieval battles.
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2025-04-03
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