The Agony Still Facing Romania

For nearly 25 years--until 1988--Romania’s President Nicolae Ceausescu enjoyed a most-favored Communist relationship with the United States and many other Western countries. Soviet military forces were booted out of Romania in 1959, and Soviet advisers were never allowed to influence policy as much as in other Eastern European countries. Now, Romania’s 23 million people are paying dearly for what the West saw as gutsy independence from a domineering Kremlin: Maverick but repressive Ceausescu is hardly likely to pay much attention to Moscow appeals for reform. If Romanians want more political and economic freedom, it looks as if they will have to fight for it. The West should expect that they probably will.

While communism is collapsing in other Eastern European countries, it seems less likely every day that the same thing can happen in Romania, because Ceausescu’s iron grip on government and his ruthless secret police force have less to do with socialist ideology than with raw personal power. He and a large network of relatives run Romania’s government like a family business. This has been relatively easy to do in a country that has been ruled for generations by force, whether by monarchs, fascists or communists.

And the absence of a recent history of democracy in any traditional sense also leaves Romanians without the kind of rigorous debate that leads to political and economic reforms. As a result, says Charles Gati, an East Europe scholar at New York’s Union College, change cannot come peacefully as it is evolving in Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland.

Even the deadly clashes between demonstrators and police in western Romania started not as demands for civil rights but as protests against government treatment of its Hungarian minority.

Estimates of just how deadly those clashes were vary wildly, with low reports in the dozens and high reports in the thousands. As an unintended display of just how little pressure the United States feels able to apply to Romania, the White House is talking about a “coordinated response” involving NATO and the Warsaw Pact just to find out what is happening in Romania. Moscow apparently feels just as helpless. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze could do little more than tell the European Parliament Tuesday of his “profound regret” at reports from Romania.

Yet sealing off Romania’s borders is not likely to save the antediluvian Ceausescu government in the long run. Change will probably make its way to Bucharest--but no doubt it will make its way dripping blood.