Monday, Jan 01, 2007
Opinion
Romania's past casts shadow on new dawn http://www.hindu.com/2007/01/01/stories/2007010103811100.htm
Jason Burke
As they prepare to join the EU, Romanians are also confronting the legacy of Ceausescu now that secret police files have been released to the public.
BENEDEK NAGY rapidly flicks through the piles of documents marked "secret" on the desk. "I am not young," the 69-year-old says, smiling and shrugging. "And I want to draw back the curtains that have obscured my life and understand the past." A few hundred yards away, a clock in Bucharest's vast Victory Square counts down the minutes to the future - the accession of Romania to the European Union on Monday.
Mr. Nagy is reading his own personal secret police file, based on the reports of 30 informers recruited from among his friends, colleagues, and even family by the Securitate, the internal service of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, whose 24-year rule ended in deposition and death in the revolution of 1989.
However, Mr. Nagy, a retired teacher, says: "I am not angry. It was a very hard and complicated time."
But if Mr. Nagy bears no grudges, many others do. The recent release by the new Romanian intelligence services of nearly two million communist-era files to a state-run and funded research centre, due partly to the arrival in power of a new, more reform-minded President, and partly as a result of indirect pre-accession pressure for reform from the EU, has resulted in a stream of revelations. Dozens of senior political figures, including the popular Culture Minister, have been exposed as former police informers and recent weeks have seen dozens of Romania's best-known academics, intellectuals, and journalists forced into public confessions and often resignation and disgrace.
The process is hard but necessary, said Andreas Cornea, a political science professor at Bucharest University. "We are only now beginning to learn about the atrocious things that happened," he said.
Officially the Securitate spied on a million Romanians but the number was, in fact, much larger, according to Germina Nagat, the director of research at the new archives centre. The Romanian secret police, more than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, relied on "citizen spies." Ms. Nagat has even seen one case where a father, his brother, and their two sons were all recruited to monitor each other. "Neighbours reported each other for listening to Western radio stations, for having too many friends, too many parties, too many nice clothes, for quarrelling with their wives, for receiving letters from abroad," Ms. Nagat said. "They did it out of petty jealousy, to be a good citizen, to get hold of a passport or special medication."
Ms. Nagat believes the past should be a lesson to 22 million Romanian citizens now groping their way into a new era. "Keeping this topic alive will give us moral benchmarks, to know what is permissible and what is not," she said.
Stiff challenges
Romania, as it joins the EU a decade and a half after the heady optimism of 1989, has many challenges. The fall of Ceausescu did not mark the turning point many hoped it would. Instead much of the new Romania's economy and control of its nascent democratic institutions fell into the hands of former intelligence service officers and communist apparatchiks. The result has been a mix of genuine democracy - four successful elections - with savage "crony capitalism." There has also been, according to many, a collapse of values. "This is a country in desperate need of real moral markers," said one senior Romanian journalist.
The EU hopes to help build a strong, democratic, and prosperous Romania using the carrot of massive structural aid, foreign employment, free travel and culture backed by the stick of sanctions. Whether such a project is possible or not is still unclear. "It is like belief in God," admitted one French EU official. "If you pray hard enough, you end up believing." Major concerns over corruption, continuing discrimination against the Roma minority, and a lack of political transparency have led Brussels to impose strict conditions on the accession and an ongoing monitoring regime. And, though inflation and unemployment are now low and economic growth next year is forecast at 7 per cent, a 150-mile drive west of the capital rapidly reveals that any relative prosperity is limited.
It is not the case, despite claims in the British press, that rural Romania is entirely plunged in medieval poverty and populated by barely civilised peasants. People are anxious to please and are bewildered by such a reaction. "We are a bit disappointed. We thought the British people had better manners. Of course, there are some bad people in the country, but not everybody," said Mihai Soresco, a barman in the newly opened Casa Argeseana restaurant on Petrochemical Street in Pitesti, an industrial town west of the capital in the middle of the rolling fields of the Wallachian plains. A few miles east, horses and carts plod along the single-lane, hilly road which is the main national thoroughfare. Geese and chicken squawk around water wells in the muddy front yards of single-storey wooden houses in straggling villages.
In Curtea de Arges, a small town not far from where the opening scenes of Borat were filmed, Sogurin, 59, shivered at her fruit stall in a sub-zero dusk. She and her husband live on around £65 a month. The EU accession scares her. "I can't sleep for worry that the taxes will go up and they will stop us selling our produce on the market," she said.
Standing outside the decrepit offices of Bucharest's Overseas Work Agency, Stanico Constantin, 46, said he hoped the accession would allow him to travel to Germany to work without paying the usual bribe. "I just want to work hard and earn a decent living for my family," he said. "It's tough to get by in this country. Honest work is not respected."
Mr. Constantin, a building engineer, said that he hoped joining the EU would set Romania "back on track." "We live in a world of lawless capitalism. Maybe the EU will teach people to respect each other a bit more here." Some fear a possible backlash against the EU if things do not go well. Professor Cornea worries about a surge of populist nationalism as seen elsewhere in Eastern Europe in recent years. "It's not as if joining the EU is the dream it once was," he said. "The EU has many difficulties - economically, politically, with immigrant communities, with its identity - and we get the bad as well as the good."
- © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
Copyright © 2007, The Hindu.