TURMOIL IN THE EAST BLOC : Dozens May Have Been Killed in Romania

A witness estimated that dozens of people were killed when Romanian security forces opened fire on protesters in Timisoara on Sunday, and the hard-line Bucharest government virtually sealed its borders to travel on Monday.

Radislav Dencic, a graduate of Timisoara University, was in the city for a week and returned to Yugoslavia on Monday. He said troops and police shot at the protesters from the street and from helicopters.

“Hundreds of people were falling on the pavement in front of my eyes,” he told reporters. He estimated that dozens were killed in the hail of gunfire.

Two Romanian youths who fled to Hungary before dawn Sunday said they had also seen bodies of slain people on the streets of Timisoara, a city of 200,000 people near the Yugoslav and Hungarian borders.

On Monday, Romania blocked or restricted travel from neighboring Hungary, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and from other countries, in an apparent effort to curtail reports of the unrest at Timisoara.

The Hungarian and Yugoslav borders were closed, and at the Bulgarian frontier only heavy trucks were allowed through.

Arriving flights at Bucharest airport were returned to their points of origin. Bulgarian television said travelers were held in trains for hours before being sent back by Romanian border guards.

Dencic said he had personally seen three corpses, including a child wrapped in white linen.

He said he had seen smoke pouring from the city’s police headquarters and believed the demonstrators had attacked the building.

“Cars were overturned in the streets and windows were smashed. People broke into bookstores, took out books written by (President Nicolae) Ceausescu and burned them,” he added.

A Yugoslav medical student who was in Timisoara over the weekend also made clear that people had been killed. “It was horrible, horrible. I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

Anti-government protests apparently began after hundreds of ethnic Hungarians formed a human chain Friday night in an effort to prevent the eviction of the Rev. Laszlo Toekes, a Reformed Church clergyman who has championed human rights, Mihnea Berindei, vice chairman of the Paris-based Romanian League for Human Rights, said.

Toekes had reportedly been harassed for months by Romanian authorities. He and his wife, who is pregnant, had remained inside his church since masked assailants tried to attack him in his neighboring apartment Nov. 2, Berindei said, again quoting witnesses.

The demonstration was the biggest challenge to the harsh 24-year rule of Ceausescu since thousands of workers rioted two years ago in Brasov, in central Romania.

Resentment has grown against Ceausescu, who has resisted the liberalization and reform sweeping through Eastern Europe. He has been Communist Party chief since 1965, and with the downfall of other old guard Communists has become the longest-serving leader in the Soviet Bloc.

Ceausescu’s crash industrialization program and the domestic austerity he has imposed to repay Romania’s $11-billion foreign debt have caused widespread shortages and food rationing. The pervasive and feared secret police is the main agency used to keep the people under control.

According to Hungarian and Yugoslav press reports, quoting witnesses, the protest began when police attacked crowds that were trying to block the eviction of Toekes.

It turned into a demonstration against Ceausescu as thousands of people, up to 10,000 according to some estimates, poured into the streets chanting, “Freedom!” “Down with Ceausescu!” and “Romanians, rise up!”

A Yugoslav witness said Toekes had appeared at the window of his home and appealed to the crowd outside to leave peacefully, but some people said the priest’s face was bruised and his hands stained with blood.

“It was then that the riot broke out. Thousands joined in, Romanians as well as Hungarians. The police began to shoot indiscriminately,” he said.

In Budapest, the Hungarian Parliament protested to Romania over the treatment of Toekes, a member of Romania’s 1.7-million-strong Hungarian minority, and expressed its alarm over the human rights situation in the country.

In Washington, the State Department said the United States is planning to protest Romania’s violent repression of the demonstration in Timisoara.

Hungarian television reported that Romania had not only sealed itself off from the outside but had also thrown a ring of steel around the three major towns in Transylvania, where the Hungarian minority is concentrated--Timisoara, Oradea and Brasov.