ANÁLISIS SENSORIAL

has appeared of the fighting in Bucharest. The lack of any work of scholarly syn­ thesis means that the narrative of events has to be reconstructed from the scores o f frequently contradictory eyewitness accounts that have appeared in a totally random pattern throughout the colossal number of publications which have blos­ som ed forth in Romania since the revolution. Many of these magazines, produced on a shoestring by enthusiastic amateurs, collapsed and died within a few weeks of their first issue, often passing away unkept and unrecorded by a state library sys­ tem which was itself unwilling or unable to keep track of this frenzy of journalism. Moreover, the highly political slant of many of these publications means that most o f these articles offer only a limited perspective on events with the writers usually being content to marshal a series of often highly contentious ‘facts’ in support of one particular line of argument.

This continuing lack of knowledge seems particularly surprising when it is remembered that much of the revolution was publicly aired on TV and that many of the events in the capital took place under the full glare of the spotlight of international media attention. Instead, the tendency has been for the events to become less not more clear with the passage of tim e, as fact and fiction have become woven together to form a number of intricate tales. Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian born poet long exiled in the United States, visiting the country shortly after the revolution noted:

It was hard to meet a citizen who had not somehow been at the centre of events, particularly those events that were most likely to strike a familiar chord with a stranger who had seen them on TV, heard them on the radio or seen them in the papers. The revolution, I soon found, was a collective story belonging to every single Romanian. Whatever was added to it, from whatever source, was immediately incorporated in the larger tale. Romanians are a great, imaginative people. The tale of the Timigoara family [with whom he was travelling] was spoken at once by several voices — even the children had many details to add — and there was barely any chronology. In fact they argued about what happened when as if they were relating a dream.^

Matters are not aided by the fact that many of the chief actors of the period now seem to be suffering from a collective amnesia, sometimes expressed through elab­ orate riddles, as in Riescu’s reply when asked why the full facts have not yet come to light: ‘It’s not a question of guarding t h e m . . . . The secrets must be known to be guarded.’* Others, most noticeably Silviu Brucan and Nicolae Militaru, have been selectively disclosing fresh facts but their new testimony is frequently at complete variance with earlier utterances leaving unresolved the question of which version, if either, is correct. Indeed, the tendency has been to define and redefine the events

‘The m ost obscure problem^

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Total Civilian Army Min. Interior

Bucharest® 618 470 89 59 Timi§oara area 122 103 17 2 Sibiu area® 90 58 7 25 Bra§ov area 70 56 11 3 Ploie§ti area 44 30 13 1 Constanta area 22 12 7 3 Craiova area 24 17 7 0 Cluj area 21 10 8 3 Oradea area 19 11 5 3 Mure§ area 12 10 1 1 Bacau area 10 8 2 0 Ia§i area 1 1 0 0 Total 1,053 786 167'' 100

Source: 'Pentru ei a rasunat simfonia destinului’, Adevarul^ 21 December 1991, pp. 2-3.

'* These figures appear to be fully comprehensive and include all deaths associated with the revolution between 15 December 1989 and 10 January 1990 including foreign news reporters and the victims of the An-24 air crash on 28 December. However, note that the figure is still slightly less than that given by the army of 1,104.^

^The municipality of Bucharest plus coterminous counties. Note that the army gives a far lower death toll for Bucharest of 543 (forty-eight before 22 December, 495 afterwards). '^In Sibiu 300 were wounded, 230 of whom required hospital treatment — 180 civilians, twenty-seven army and twenty-three Ministry of the Interior.®

'^In its own figures the army registered a higher death toll of 260 (545 wounded) whilst that of the Ministry of Interior was lower at sixty-five (seventy-three wounded). It seems possible that this apparent discrepancy might partly have arisen due to the transfer of Ministry of Interior units into the army during the revolution.

to m eet post-Ceau§escu political needs, with the revolution being shamelessly ex­ ploited to provide a tendentious political legitim acy or elaborated through a series of complex conspiracy theories into a myth of a revolution manipulated by foreign powers or stolen by a small group of former communists who favoured the main­

tenance of the status quo — a Romanian version of the Mazzinian Revoluzione

8 6

‘The m ost obscure problem

Table 2.2: Opinion poll on revolutionary events occurring in local area.

Revolutionary events Yes“ No D on’t know

occurring in local area (%) (%) (%)

Violence 31 57 10

Arrests 15 57 24

Demonstrations 50 38 10

Attacks upon institutions 26 53 17

Public meetings 60 23 14

Personal participation in events 23 76 0

Family participation in events 21 74 4

Source: Pavel Câmpeanu, De patru art in fa^a u m elor (Bucharest: Editura ALL, 1993),

pp. 179-80.

“No explanation is given as to why the figures do not tally to 100%

The exten t o f the violence

Although after the revolution the seriousness of the conflict was occasionally to be the victim of hyperbole, as in exaggerated descriptions of ^Massive attacks with an extremely large force’ being launched on the Ministry of Defence by ‘successive waves of terrorists’, the high casualty figures recorded at this tim e leave little doubt as to the ferocity of the fighting (table 2.1).® In Timigoara the night of 22/23 December has been described in almost apocalyptic terms: ‘After the massacre we felt that on Saturday morning we would all be picked up from our homes and lined up against the wall. We felt that it was not just the end of the revolution, but of the entire w o r l d . H o w e v e r , the amount of physical damage recorded, even in the centre of Bucharest, excepting the destruction of the University Library, was surprisingly small given the huge amounts of ammunition expended, one army unit alone in Bucharest having fired over 175,000 rounds.® Indeed, the lack of visible damage to certain key installations such as the TV station and the Central Com mittee building compared with surrounding structures fed suspicions as to the artificial nature of the violence and suggestions that the pattern o f destruction had not been accidental but contrived.®

The exact bounds of the violence after the flight of Ceaugescu on 22 December is still far from clear. However, the overwhelming impression is that the vast bulk of the country remained largely peaceful and, in the absence of detailed information, the best indication available as to the scale of the revolution are the results of

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m ost obscure problem^

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