BUCHAREST: Nearly 17 years after Romania’s communist regime collapsed, the first of an estimated 1.3 million files amassed by its secret police are finally about to become public, and already the nation is convulsed by revelations of how citizens were forced into betraying friends and colleagues.
While other former communist-bloc countries have moved at varying speeds to confront their Cold War past, Romania has kept most of its dirty laundry firmly locked up.
Despite the ouster and execution of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, the country continued to be governed by ex-communists until the 2004 election of a centrist government more open to reform. Now, as Romania prepares its bid to join the European Union next year, the pressure for more transparency in government is mounting, and a national commission is trying to sort through some eight miles of files in the archive of the Securitate, Ceausescu’s hated secret police.
But some aren’t waiting for the files to expose them. Several journalists and politicians have sought to pre-empt matters by coming forward to own up.
A respected former BBC journalist known as a fierce critic of the post-Ceausescu leadership turns out to have been keeping tabs on a friend. Another journalist whose father was a political prisoner also told the newspaper where he works that he had informed on Romanian emigres living in Canada.
The disclosures began last month as a result of ‘Clean Voices’, a campaign launched by the daily newspaper Ziua to open the files of leading journalists in Bucharest. Ziua argued that the cleanup should begin with those calling loudest for transparency — the media.
Many more revelations are expected this year when the commission opens the dossiers of some 1,000 journalists. Meanwhile, other groups such as student organisations have set out to emulate Ziua in calling for the ‘Clean Voices’ example to be spread more widely.
A handful of politicians have been named. Alin Teodorescu, a senior member of the previous leftist government, told the daily Cotidianul that he was forced to inform on Romanian intellectuals in 1988.
Mona Musca, a former culture minister and reformist, said on Thursday that she had verbally informed on foreign students for the Securitate when she was a university teacher in the western city of Timisoara. She said her work as an informer was ‘a question of national security’.
The way the confessions have been dribbling out has been heavily criticised. “In Romania, files are destroyed, hidden, burned and used to blackmail people,” said journalist Cornel Nistorescu. “They should just open all the files and there would be three days of mayhem, recriminations and that would be it.”
But the campaign is fraught with problems. Emil Constantinescu, who was president in 1999 when the first law was passed allowing for files to be opened, laments that only the low-level informers are being exposed, while ex-Securitate officers are protected and in some cases are working for the current intelligence service.
One of the reasons Romania and other communist countries have moved so slowly to open the files is that so many cases are far from simply questions of right and wrong behaviour. Under regimes that made snooping the currency of survival, a citizen’s conscience was constantly being tested in grey areas and painful compromises. He or she might opt for a minor betrayal to avoid having to commit a big one. A person might cooperate to win more humane treatment for a jailed father or mother. And a lot of the dirt accumulated in the Securitate files is uncorroborated or plain lies.
Carol Sebastian’s collaboration offers a glimpse into the sordid tactics of blackmail and coercion through which the regime was able to mobilise 700,000 informers to keep tabs on a population of 23 million.
Journalist Sebastian was a second-year literature student when the Securitate summoned him and told him it knew his secret: He had made a fellow student pregnant and refused to marry her. It then forced him to keep tabs on his friend, poet Andrei Bodiu, during the late 1980s.
Bodiu says he has read the notes Sebastian wrote about him for the secret police, finds them ‘neutral’ and has forgiven him. But nonetheless, many Romanians are shocked. Sebastian used to be a journalist with the BBC’s Romanian-language service and a critic of the reformed communists who succeeded Ceausescu in power. Now 41, he has told a Romanian radio station his failure to come clean sooner ‘is an indelible stain on my career and my life’, and he has resigned from his job with national television.
Another journalist exposed in the ‘Clean Voices’ campaign is Valentin Hossu-Longin, who turns out to have reported on the activities of Romanian emigres in Canada.
His ex-wife, Lucia Hossu, who made an acclaimed documentary series about the horrors of communism, said the former couple’s two sons, also journalists, were in shock, especially because Hossu-Longin’s father was persecuted by the communists. “He could have held out, for the sake of his father who was a political prisoner,” she said.
Hossu-Longin has admitted his collaboration to Ziua where he works, but has made no other comment.
Dan Ciachir, a respected commentator on the Romanian Orthodox Church, described being made a tool of the Securitate’s paranoia about visiting foreigners. He told the AP that in the 1970s he was forced to inform on Italian poet Mimmo Morina and French author Helene Cisoux when they visited Bucharest.
The Securitate paid him, he said, with cartons of cigarettes.
Ciachir said he confessed to an Orthodox priest, believing this relieved his conscience of any need to go public. But then the ‘Clean Voices’ campaign kicked off and he decided to come clean.
The way the ‘Clean Voices’ campaign has snowballed shows the need for catharsis after years of cover-up and hesitation.
Zaharie Urdea, 84, who spent 12 years in communist gulags and decades under surveillance, says the initiatives ‘are good but rather late’.
