by DORIN TUDORAN - August 13 2004
A lot has been written about the former members of the communist intelligence services [Securitatea]. It is still done: with a lot of tolerance.
It will still be done: admiringly. We did not have a lustration law that would have allowed a national reconciliation nourished by the humanity of the victims granting a second chance to their torturers. We got instead the former torturersâ economic, political and social advancement.
The political parties are full of them; the government cannot work without them. As parliamentarians they go around in limousines; as diplomats they walk the worldâs meridians in Bally shoes; as journalists in the public radio and television they are instrumental to the broadcasts, while the free market economy helped them get rich by as many billions of lei as the stars on the military gear showing their former ranks.
At a conference taking place in Greece, I think, the idea of passing a bill on lustration resurfaced - an attempt as successful as pumping life again up the Vladimir Ilici Leninâs mummy. One political party, with roots deep down in history, tries to get born again from its own cinders, with a new leadership. Only that its attempt to promote a law of lustration 15 years after the events in December 1989 is bound to have the same success as the efforts of a drowning man to come to shore while clinging to a floating straw.
Whom should we make the subject now of a lustration law?! Those that should have been its subjects managed to worn out our collective memory to such an extent that now the people who were looking for them back in 1989, to lynch them, are now applauding them and voting for them.
Citește pe Antena3.ro
Rightly or not, the heroic deeds of the famous petty criminal were contested more than once. Eye-witnesses claim the "hero" shot down 29 innocent people because the supposedly "terrorists" did not want to surrender. Others believe that the Revolution started at a time when our petty thief was stoned and grabbed a weapon thinking it was a bottle of Johnny Walker, thus bringing all his past, present and future on the side of the Revolution. Then all the public tenures and perks were up for grabs for him.
[President] Ion Iliescu is adamant: he wants to walk into the hall of historic fame holding the arm of an illiterate praetorian guard who, if pressed a little, would either swear on your mother or holler "Papers prove it!" Then, whatâs the point in asking why the December 1989 uprising was turned into a palace coup?
Translation by ANCA PADURARU