Slaughter In The Streets

By Bruce W. Nelan

Let them hate. So long as they fear.

-- Caligula

In the end, all dictators govern by fear. Long-suffering citizens obey orders only because they are convinced that a single individual has no hope of opposing the overwhelming forces loyal to the state. A dictator falls when fear changes sides, when individuals coalesce into crowds and defy him. Emboldened by the discovery that they are not alone, they take to the streets and squares to protest, and they learn -- though sometimes at great cost -- that no tyrant can kill or arrest an entire nation. At that point, despots lose the special combination of visible authority and legitimacy that the Chinese call "the mandate of heaven." In 1989 it happened all over Eastern Europe, where the accelerating pace of reforms gave birth to the observation that Poland took ten years, Hungary ten months, East Germany ten weeks, Czechoslovakia ten days.

The people's overthrow of President Nicolae Ceausescu's paranoid dictatorship last week seemed to take ten hours. On Thursday night the megalomaniacal leader and his wife Elena were ensconced in the presidential palace in Bucharest; by Friday morning, they were gone. But unlike the bloodless revolutions in the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries, the Rumanian convulsion was soaked in blood. The number of casualties is still not known, but if the estimates of thousands killed turn out to be correct, Ceausescu's name will be indelibly linked to one of the largest government-inflicted massacres since World War II. Ceausescu fled his grandiose palace only after the army refused to shoot demonstrators and many troops switched sides, joining them.

Hundreds of thousands of Rumanians took joyously to the streets, running, jumping, riding on tanks. "The army is with us!" they shouted. "We are the people!" Crowds stormed Ceausescu's palace and rushed to the state television studio to put out the message "We won. The dictator has fallen." Ceausescu's son Nicu, party chief in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu (pop. 173,000), was captured and paraded before the cameras. His face was bruised, and his eyes flicked in terror from side to side, as if seeking a way to escape.

But the country's joy quickly turned to dread. Progovernment forces staged a fierce comeback in Bucharest and other cities, plunging the country into civil war. In the heart of the capital, troops of the well-equipped 180,000-member security forces, the Securitate, battled army units for control of the fire- gutted presidential palace. At one point, members of the security forces reportedly burst into a meeting of demonstrators at the Opera House and sprayed the room with submachine guns. The violence assumed its own macabre rhythms. Whenever the fighting lessened, citizens would flood into the streets to celebrate Ceausescu's downfall; when the fighting began again, they would flee for cover.

The death toll soared, with hundreds of bodies lying in the streets. There were even unconfirmed reports that Syrian and Libyan mercenaries were aiding the pro-Ceausescu forces. As the fighting intensified, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev offered to send medical aid to the anti-Ceausescu forces, and Western diplomats suggested that the growing bloodshed might even lead to direct Soviet intervention on the side of the revolutionaries.

In the confusion, Ceausescu and his wife vanished. First reports said that they had helicoptered from their palace to the airport, where they boarded a plane heavily laden with loot. Then they were reported to be traveling by car. There was speculation that they had fled abroad, but if so, only three countries seemed likely to accept them: China, which also sends tanks against its own people; North Korea, where dictator Kim Il Sung maintains a cult as extravagant as Ceausescu's; and Iran, where the Rumanian despot last week placed a wreath on the Ayatullah Khomeini's grave. At week's end Rumanian TV said the Ceausescus had been captured.

The country's new political leadership is likely to rise from ad hoc coalitions of intellectuals, students and workers similar to the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia and the New Forum in East Germany. In Bucharest a group called the Front for National Salvation announced that it was assuming power. The organization is headed by Corneliu Manescu, a former Foreign Minister, who said he would act as President until free elections are held in the spring. Once a confidant of Ceausescu's, Manescu, 73, had a falling-out with the President during the 1970s, and has been banished to an apartment outside the capital since last March, when he and five other former senior officials released a letter criticizing Ceausescu for destroying the economy and trying to isolate Rumania from the rest of the world.

The new head of the Communist Party is Ion Iliescu, 59, who studied at a technical institute in Moscow in the early 1950s and became a close friend of Gorbachev's. As a regional party secretary, he earned a reputation as an idealistic communist reformer. Since both Manescu and Iliescu held high posts in the now discredited party, however, they are likely to be transitional figures.

As the crescendo of toppling communist dominoes shook Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, 71, vowed that reform would come to Rumania "when pears grow on poplar trees." He ignored warnings from Gorbachev that he should begin easing up before it was too late to avoid violence. After 24 years of ruling by fear, Ceausescu rejected the idea of change.

But change did not require Ceausescu's permission to enter Rumania. The country's 23 million citizens had a long list of grievances, from shortages of - food and fuel to crushing boredom, but the proximate cause of the civil explosion was the Securitate. When its officers tried to arrest an ethnic Hungarian clergyman in the western city of Timisoara (pop. 309,000) for his outspoken opposition to the government and to the policies of his own Hungarian Reformed Church, a vigil outside his house erupted into an antiregime riot. Angry mobs smashed shopwindows, burned Ceausescu's books and portraits, and besieged party headquarters and police stations. About 60,000 of the country's 1.7 million Hungarians live in the city, but the rioters included Rumanians as well.

Eyewitnesses who spoke by telephone with Vladimir Tismaneanu, a Rumanian specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, said that army units in Timisoara refused to fire on the protesters. The Securitate summarily shot three army officers for disobeying orders, then sent in troops from its Special Assignment Brigade. After a barrage of warning shots, the security forces mowed down a line of children standing in front of the crowd before shooting the adults. The scene was so bloody that witnesses compared it with Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where the Chinese army crushed pro-democracy demonstrators last June. At least 2,000 men, women and children were killed, they said. In fact the carnage may have been worse. Garbage trucks were seen hauling corpses out of the city; after Ceausescu's fall, searchers in a nearby forest uncovered three mass graves that they said may contain as many as 4,500 bodies.

Fed-up Rumanians had ignited riots before, but they had been stifled quickly. Not this time. Three days after the massacre in Timisoara, demonstrators shouting "Give us our dead!" filled the city's bloodstained streets. As word of the killing spread, marchers turned out in towns throughout the country. Because of the government's total control of travel and communications, rumors often replaced information. East European news agencies such as Yugoslavia's Tanjug and, in the new world of glasnost, even Moscow's TASS and East Germany's ADN, became important sources of news. They reported that Rumanian army troops had joined in some of the protests, that more soldiers had been executed by the Securitate for refusing to fire into crowds, and that striking workers were threatening to blow up their factories.

In Bucharest, Ceausescu appeared before a contrived propaganda rally outside the presidential palace. Thousands of workers had been assembled to applaud and wave flags on cue as he called for unity and tried to blame the riots on Hungarian "revanchists" bent on recapturing Transylvania. His rasping voice was rising to a shout when the crowd suddenly drowned him out with boos, jeers and demands for the truth about Timisoara. Visibly astonished by this face-to- face encounter with rebellion, Ceausescu froze. He quickly ended the rally and darted into the palace.

As he did so, the crowd of protesters in the square poured into nearby Magheru Boulevard and swelled to thousands. Shouts of "Freedom!" and "Down with Ceausescu!" rang out. Tanks, troops and helicopters herded the marchers into University Square, ringed by the University of Bucharest, the National Theater and the 22-story Intercontinental Hotel. A tank rolled over two demonstrators, and as others ran to help them, they were shot down by automatic-weapons fire. At least 13 were killed, the American embassy reported. The streets did not clear, however, and more people were shot during the night.

At the same time, East European agencies reported, Ceausescu's fall was sealed at a meeting with his security chiefs. Defense Minister Vasile Milea apparently said that his troops would refuse to fire on their countrymen. There seemed to be a split among the Securitate commanders, with only some favoring a continued crackdown. Party spokesmen claimed that Milea then committed suicide, but it was more likely that he was shot by Securitate men. Next morning an unidentified general appeared on television to say, "I am very sorry that my friend the Minister died. It is a lie that he committed suicide." With his defenses crumbling, Ceausescu fled.

Of all Warsaw Pact party chiefs, only Ceausescu dared to order his security forces to shoot after Gorbachev had made it clear that the Soviet army would not back them up. But then Ceausescu for many years had set himself apart from his East bloc brethren. He was cheered by the West as the "maverick" of the Pact and praised for his refusal to allow Soviet troops on his soil, to participate in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 or to support the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Washington, Paris, London and other capitals chose to overlook Ceausescu's steel Stalinist hand at home, where he enforced a shameless cult of his own personality. He tolerated neither dissent among citizens nor a difference of opinion inside the party. He appointed his wife to the Politburo, his sons to high party and government rank and more than 30 other relatives to official positions. He basked in such honorifics as the Genius of the Carpathians and the Danube of Thought while treating the Rumanian people with extraordinary cruelty.

To repay his $10 billion foreign debt, he halted imports, exported food, rationed electricity and impoverished the population. He wasted scarce investment funds on giant party office buildings and decided to bulldoze thousands of villages and force farmers into high-rise apartment buildings. His go-it-alone stubbornness in foreign policy was only one more sign of his determination to depend on no power but his own. As it turned out, that was not enough.

Though Ceausescu is out of power, he still casts a black shadow over his country's future. Rumania has no history of democratic government and Ceausescu permitted no institutions to develop outside his control. The Communist Party, if it is not completely discredited in the eyes of the people, will have to enter negotiations with nascent political organizations, if they can take solid shape. With security men still fighting desperately to avert a reckoning with the nation they brutalized, the regular army will play a stabilizing role.

The European Community has already dispatched planeloads of food and medical supplies to Bucharest. Gorbachev and the Soviet parliament have passed a resolution of "support for the just cause of the people of Rumania." In the days ahead, the people of Rumania will need all the help they can garner from both East and West if they are to recover from their bloody rebirth.

With reporting by John Borrell/Vienna and William Mader/London, with other bureaus