Revolution 1989 (63 page)

When Iliescu spoke on television that afternoon he looked like a figure of power and authority as he promised to bring the man who had inflicted such misery on Romanians ‘to the reckoning before the public’. He said that the immediate task was to restore order. It was not yet certain that Ceausescu would not fight back. And he called on all ‘responsible people’ to form a Committee of National Salvation. By 6 p.m. that evening the army had effectively installed Iliescu as leader of a new government, shaky, weak, born amidst uncertainty and confusion. It had one urgent primary task: to fight a civil war.

The shooting began at 7 p.m. Small groups of Securitate officers loyal to Ceausescu started firing indiscriminately on the streets at people celebrating liberation. It went on ferociously for a day and two nights and sporadically for another day after that. Often it was difficult to know who was shooting at whom or for what. Much of the violence seemed entirely wanton, like the deliberate shelling of the beautiful neo-classical National Library when nobody was inside the building. Hundreds of ancient and irreplaceable volumes were destroyed. The Securitate operated under an order - number 2600 - which was supposed to deal with a foreign invasion or a serious uprising. It is unclear who activated the order as the most senior Securitate officers, including General Vlad, had gone over to the revolution. The tactics did not seem to have a military purpose, but were designed to sow as much terror in the civilian population as possible. The army was unsure how to respond. The soldiers were mostly raw conscripts, barely trained, who had never before fired a shot in anger. Differentiating friend or foe was hard, made even more so as thousands of civilians were handed weapons by soldiers at military barracks. Often the Securitate ‘ter rorists’ would wear civilian clothes, or army uniforms. In small groups, they used the underground passageways and sewers to move around Bucharest, attack army units or civilian targets, and then just as suddenly disappear.

At 9 p.m. on 22 December they attacked the TV station, but not in a serious attempt to take over the building, which by then was ringed with tanks. The defending troops had received less than two months’ training and wore heavy armour better-suited to the open battlefield than to fighting guerrilla actions in the streets of a city. Fighting raged for about an hour and sixty-two people were killed, mostly civilians caught in the crossfire. The studios were attacked several more times over the next few days. Rumours spread that the casualty figures were in their thousands and Bucharest had turned into a bloodbath. Fighting was intense. Throughout Romania the death toll was 1,104, of whom 493 died in Bucharest and about a third were Securitate ‘terrorists’. There were 3,352 wounded, 2,200 of them in the capital. The worst single incident was a case of ‘friendly fire’. Early in the morning of Saturday 23 December, troops guarding Otopeni, Bucharest’s airport, fired at a truck bringing fresh reinforcements to join their own side.

According to Valentin Gabrielescu, chairman of the Senate inquiry that later looked at the fighting in the revolution, most of the deaths were civilians, ‘innocents caught in the crossfire between panic-stricken soldiers and civilians firing at terrorists’. He concluded: ‘As well as the army and the police, thousands of civilians were armed and under the stress of false rumours and false dangers . . . everyone fired at everyone else. It was chaos.’
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The Ceausescus’ getaway attempt was tragicomic. By mid-afternoon the couple were left abandoned, on their own and under arrest. After escaping in the nick of time from the rooftop at Party headquarters, they reached their forty-room villa in Snagov within twenty minutes. But they did not stay long. Ceausescu made a series of phone calls to local Communist Party secretaries to see if there was any region willing to take him in. They ruled out trying to flee the country. He frowned as he was told the revolution had spread everywhere. They went up to their apartment on the first floor. There they searched through all the cupboards, emptied the drawers and turned over the mattresses. They put everything into blue bags, including two loaves of bread.

Within fifteen minutes, at around 1.20, they hurried back to the waiting helicopter. They sent their two unwanted passengers, Prime Minister Bobu and his deputy Manescu, off by car to fend for them selves. As they left, Manescu knelt and kissed the President’s hand. Now the Ceausescus were accompanied only by their two bodyguards, Lieutenants Florian Rat and Marian Rusu. The helicopter pilot was desperate to offload the President and his party, but the guards kept pointing their guns at him and told him to do as he was instructed by the President. Malutan said: ‘When they were all back on board Ceausescu asked me, “Whose side are you on? Where are we going?” I answered “You give the orders.” We took off at 13.30 hours. The bodyguards were very nervous. They kept their machine pistols pointed at me. On my headphones I could hear my commanding officer saying to me “Vasile, listen to the radio - this is the revolution.” After that, Ceausescu ordered me to cut all radio contact with my base. I wanted to persuade him to let us land . . . but I was on my own, cut off from the world.’
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He was told to head for Pitesti, in the south-west of the country, and he deliberately flew high ‘so we could be seen by radar’. But one of the guards spotted the manoeuvre and said, ‘Vasile, what are you up to?’ The pilot answered Ceausescu himself. ‘We’ve been spotted by radar,’ he said. Both of the Ceausescus looked terrified and Nicolae barked ‘Let’s go down, land near the road.’ The pilot put the helicopter down in a field, four kilometres from Titu, outside a village called Salcuta. It was 1.45 p.m. Marian Rusu hailed two passing cars. The Ceausescus and Florian Rat got in one. Rusu, who had been Elena’s personal bodyguard for many years, got in the other, promising to follow close behind. But he deserted them immediately.

The Ceausescus were in a red Dacia driven by Doctor Nicolae Deca. He realised immediately who was in his car and he tried to get rid of his passengers as soon as possible. He said he was running out of petrol, which was a lie, but plausible in Romania at the time. Rat hijacked another driver, thirty-five-year-old Nicolae Petrisor, outside the front door of his house. Ceausescu told him to drive to Târgoviste, where there was a showcase Potemkin village-type factory which he had visited several times with foreign dignitaries. They were privileged workers, loyal Communists, surely they would be welcome there, he told Elena. She looked doubtful.

When they arrived in Târgoviste the town was in uproar, celebrating the news of the revolution. They abandoned Rat on the outskirts. Fearful of being recognised, they kept their heads down as far as they could. Petrisor was ordered to drive to an agricultural plant which they had also visited many times. The director, Victor Seinescu, let them in, but at around 2.45 p.m. called the local militia to inform them of the identity of his guests. The Ceausescus were taken away by two uniformed militiamen, but it was not until three hours later that they were handed over to the army, even though the barracks were only 450 metres away. Like so many senior officials that afternoon Seinescu was deciding whose side to be on. Eventually he chose to hand them over and just before 6 p.m. they were taken to the barracks at Târgoviste, where an anti-aircraft artillery regiment was based. It was difficult getting the couple to the barracks without anyone seeing who they were. The Ceausescus were bundled into an armoured personnel carrier, shielded from the public’s gaze, and taken by a roundabout route to the barracks. The drive took five minutes or so. When they arrived they were taken to their last living quarters. An office had been transformed into two cubicles, separated by standard-issue desks. Two army beds were placed in the corners of the room, with blankets but no sheets. There was a large porcelain stove in another corner and a cold-water-tap washbasin next to it. This ground-floor section of the barracks was placed off-limits for all but a few hand-picked officers and NCOs. Major Ion Secu spent the next two and a half days with the couple.

At first, said Secu, ‘Ceausescu behaved as though he was still the Commander-in-Chief. His first words were: “Well what’s the situation? Give me your report.” I said “We are here to protect you from the mob, but we must obey the authorities in Bucharest.” This enraged him and he launched into a long tirade against the traitors who had engineered this plot against him. Only gradually did he adjust to the fact that he was the prisoner.’ His mood alternated between bouts of deep, silent depression and intense excitability when he would rant about ‘traitors’. The commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Mares, was worried above all about security. There were 500 soldiers and forty civilians on the base. They had to be restricted from leaving in case news of the Ceauescus’ presence became known.

Sometimes Ceauescu was wheedling. One of his twenty-four-hour guards said: ‘He came up to me . . . he put his hand out and said “I’ll give you a million American dollars and any rank in the army you like if you help to get us out of here.” But it never occurred to me to believe the offer was genuine. I thought that instead of a million dollars I would just get a bullet in the back of the neck. So I said to him “nothing doing”.’

From Elena there were three days of nagging. ‘She complained all the time,’ her guard said. ‘She was scared, but in a state of constant fury and her rage was terrifying. Because he was diabetic, Ceauescu had to make frequent visits to the foul-smelling lavatory at the end of the corridor. She refused to use the lavatory so we had to bring her a chamber pot. Whenever I addressed him she snapped at me “How dare you talk to the Commander-in-Chief like that?” ’

That first night, recalled Secu, they shared a single bed, huddled together - two old people in each other’s arms. ‘They talked in whispers and though they kept hugging each other they kept bickering softly. At one point Nicolae said, “If you’d only told me what was going on I could have got rid of that Iliescu. I could have finished him off last summer. But you didn’t let me.” And she whispered at one point: “It’s all your fault; we shouldn’t have come here in the first place. That was your responsibility.” ’

They refused to eat anything but bread and apples and drank only unsweetened tea. Meals were brought to them from the officers’ mess. But they were left untouched as though they feared the food was poisoned. On their first morning, officers tried to put them in army clothes - to make them more difficult to find should the barracks be stormed. Ceauescu was told to take off his dark overcoat and fur hat and wear an army uniform. Elena refused. Guards removed her fur-collared coat by force, placed an army greatcoat around her and thrust an army cap on her head.

That night Ceauescu made another attempt to talk his way out of his predicament, according to Major Secu. ‘He saw me dozing off. Elena was watching everything from her bed, wide awake and attentive. He said to me “Are you tired? You have every right to be tired.” He then asked about my family. I told him I was married with one child and lived in a small apartment. “That’s tough,” he said. “You deserve something better than that. Listen, I could get you a villa in Kiseleff [a fashionable district of Bucharest]. Seven or eight rooms, more if you like, and a garage. And the car inside the garage needn’t be an ordinary Dacia” . . . I didn’t reply and he began again. “You wouldn’t be risking your life for nothing. If you get me out of here and take me to the TV station where I can address the people, I would see that you got one million, no, two million dollars.” ’
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On Christmas Eve the Securitate troops finally worked out where they were held and took up positions outside the building. Soon after midnight they opened fire, but were forced back. An hour earlier, the Ceauescus had been told to put on their greatcoats, were hurried into an armoured car parked in a sheltered place outside the building and told to lie face-down on the floor. They remained there for the next five hours until the firing died down. They were then taken back to their room in the barracks. It was there that they spent their last night.

 

The new government needed to assert its authority. By late afternoon on Christmas Eve fighting in Bucharest, and in large towns like Sibiu and Braov, was less ferocious, but there were still sporadic battles and mounting casualties. The more moderate of the revolutionaries hated the name National Salvation Front. It sounded too Stalinist. But Iliescu and the other long-time Communists in the new regime thought it had a patriotic ring. They met at around 5 p.m. on the 24th to reach a decision on the fate of the Ceauescus. It was a sombre, bad-tempered occasion. They had hesitated for two days. But now the soldiers wanted a swift execution. They felt sure that would immediately halt the shooting. If Ceauescu was dead there would be no rallying point, nothing to fight for. Iliescu was at first doubtful. He did not want blood on his hands. When Militaru suggested with heavy sarcasm that ‘Yes, that might look like a bad start to your reign,’ Iliescu angrily replied, ‘What do you mean, my reign? This is not a reign.’ Some voices suggested that holding a kangaroo court in a rush, without proper evidence, would cause derision internationally. But the generals were adamant, and Brucan supported them. He said Romania needed to be assured that the Ceauescu dictatorship was dead and gone and there was no better way ‘than to show them the body’. Iliescu, finally, was convinced. ‘It would be better to have a proper trial and allow all the evidence to be presented,’ he said. ‘But circumstances don’t allow it. Let’s proceed with a trial tomorrow.’ The sentence was decided by a handful of people after that meeting and nothing was put down on paper. But Iliescu, Brucan, Militaru, Voican-Voiculescu and Stnculescu all decided on a firing squad immediately after the trial.
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There was hardly a murmur of protest. The poet Anna Blandiana objected. In the first euphoric hours of the revolution she had been given a position within the Front to show that it was a ‘government of all the talents’. But she had not been informed of the decision to execute Ceauescu and she was appalled by it. She resigned immediately he was shot. It was the first of many open splits in the movement that emerged later. One of the few voices from outside the country against the execution came from Eduard Shevardnadze. He said he understood the circumstances. ‘But still it left a bad taste in the mouth.’ Many Romanians are convinced the Soviets inspired and took part in a coup against the dictator. The evidence, it is said, was the presence of the
éminence grise
Silviu Brucan in Moscow in November. But there is no evidence. Brucan frequently visited Moscow to see contacts and he often asked the Russians if they could intervene, but they declined. He always denied there was a plot - ‘In the circumstances in Romania it was simply impossible to organise anything like that. We complained to each other and hoped for his death. The whole nation longed for his death. But we didn’t do anything,’ he said.
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