SERVICIO EDUCATIVO DE UN COLEGIO DE ALTO RENDIMIENTO

21.00, although these were isolated, and the size of the complex together with the constant coming and going means that the various accounts give differing times. The battle that followed at the television was long and bloody claiming at least sixty-tw o lives, the vast majority of whom were civilians. For the best part of three days the area resounded with gunfire — the conflict only, finally, abating on Christmas Day. However, during this tim e the fighting was never continuous, being essentially sporadic in nature, reaching several crescendos and, then, subsiding into a bitty warfare of occasional isolated shots. The vast majority of the casualties occurred between the evening of 22 December and the dawn of 24 December. On 23 December alone one unit, U.M.01210, which was heavily involved in the fighting throughout the period, suffered 38% of all the casualties it sustained during the whole revolution at the television station.®^

The soldiers dispatched to defend the television were faced on their arrival with utter pandemonium. Many of them were poorly trained young conscripts with only a few months of instruction and totally unprepared psychologically for the situation which confronted them , never having trained under fire. Now these soldiers together with their heavy armour, better suited to the open battlefield than guerrilla street warfare, were deployed in a heavily populated urban environment and expected to meet an, at first, unknown threat — on 22 and 23 December the outcom e of the revolution was still in doubt and nobody knew how many forces remained loyal to Ceau§escu — which was only afterwards partly clarified as coming from unidentified specialist killers. Indeed, highhghting the confusion existing within the ranks of the army are stories of some soldiers not realising they were a part of a mass revolution and thinking they were participating in some exclusively military operation until Patriotic Guards or other civilians appeared.®® Furthermore, units like U.M.01210, who had only the day before been involved in the thick of the fighting at Pia^a Universita^ii, now found themselves defending the very people with whom in the previous night they had been locked in a bloody confrontation. This abrupt volte-face required them to legitimise them selves in their new position and, perhaps, fuelled their enthusiasm to meet the ‘terrorist’ threat. The BBC journalist, John Simpson, found himself remonstrating with a tank commander in Pia^a Palatului whose only motive for firing at th e cupola of the University Library seemed to be because he found it a ‘tem pting target’. Simpson concluded that;

The soldiers were hot and nervous, with no clear orders about what they should be doing. The Army, weak and poorly trained, was anxious to demonstrate the extent of its new allegiance to the people. And so it used its overwhelming strength to hammer away at the grand buildings in the

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centre of the city, regardless of the damage it was doing. The noise and the damage were an end in themselves, the outward and visible sign of an inward and guilty desire to make up for its failure to side with the popular cause earlier. The Army was demonstrating its fitness to carry on serving the people. A few buildings destroyed were less important than the construction of a new public trust in its loyalty.

Now, as the army moved back onto the streets of Bucharest, around these young conscripts thrust into the middle of the conflict jostled the crowd regaling them with wild and frequently conflicting stories and exposing them to the full gamut of rumours buzzing through its m idst. On the outside of the television centre a loudspeaker system was rigged up and as in Pia^a Palatului this also came to act as a potent source o f rumour. Valiantly it tried to bring some order to the situation and protect the civilian revolutionaries caught in the field of fire between the army and the ‘terrorists’ — indeed, many pictures that were later captioned as showing surrendering ‘terrorists’ in fact depict frightened volunteers raising their hands in the air so as to gain entry into the television centre. Nevertheless, accidents do seem to have occurred and many people, including foreign journalists, still recall the dangers involved in having to run the gauntlet of trigger-happy troops in order to reach the building.®^

As the soldiers of the army moved to defend strategic points across Bucharest they were joined by contingents from other branches of the security forces includ­

ing members of the m ilitia, Securitate and USLA troops, and even naval officers.

However, at the same tim e, enormous numbers of less disciplined forces were also drawn onto the streets to defend the revolution. Some of these, such as the Patri­ otic Guard units, were sem i-organised but the vast bulk were enthusiastic civilians responding to the desperate pleas heard on the television and radio. Most of these civilians were ‘armed’ with nothing more than stones or Molotov cocktails, but a surprisingly large amount, perhaps because they could prove they had undergone military service or were actual reservists, were given guns and eflfectively became armed irregulars.®® For these armed civilians there were no formal structures of command and frequently the only marks of distinction which proclaimed they were loyal to the revolution were makeshift armbands. It was a true recipe for chaos and it bred bloody mayhem. At the forefront of this confusion seems to have been the various Patriotic Guard units which responded to the many appeals on the television calling for their mobilisation to guard strategic points throughout the country. W hether the central command structure of the Patriotic Guard contin­ ued to function throughout the revolution remains unclear, but, even if it did so, it might be questioned whether in the prevailing chaos it made much difference.