Christmas in Timisoara: Peril Amid Celebrations

The city where the Romanian uprising began one week ago was still not free of conflict on Christmas Eve.

Christmas services at the Central Cathedral were not held Sunday because secret-police snipers, still loyal to ousted dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, were believed to be in the cathedral towers.

Families dragging freshly cut evergreen trees into their homes for trimming faced occasional bursts of gunfire. Provisional authorities ordered about 200 Western journalists to remain inside the Continental Hotel because nearby snipers were active, firing into adjacent streets.

Despite the danger, however, there was a visible sense of celebration in this western provincial city, the first place where Romanians openly challenged the 24-year rule of Ceausescu.

“Even if we are not prepared . . . as we like for Christmas, we have enough to celebrate,” said Cornelia Borca, 46, who showed a reporter a decorated Christmas tree in the living room of her family’s small apartment west of the city center.

Another woman in the apartment complex, Korina Popovitsch, 28, placed a black ribbon around the base of her tree to commemorate the people killed when Ceausescu forces opened fire on demonstrators a week ago. Already more than 4,000 bodies have been found from that and subsequent attempts to put down the demonstrations, and some fear a final toll of perhaps as many as 12,000.

Still, for the first Christmas in years, ethnic Hungarians in the large public housing project west of this city were openly speaking their native language. While the Ceausescu government never officially banned Hungarian, it often arrested Hungarian speakers as foreign agents. An estimated 2 million Romanians are ethnic Hungarians, including at least 30% of the population here.

The former Communist paper here, renamed three days ago from the The Red Flag to the Banatean Fighter, published a Christmas carol on the front page of its Sunday edition.

Before this year, Christmas was not even an official holiday in Romania.

Military and civilian officials here said the fighting between the army, which supports the new Front for National Salvation government in Bucharest, and Ceausescu loyalists, most of them well-armed commandos of the security police, was under control.

“It’s not so bad,” said Oprea Sorin, 27, a leader in the local Timisoaran Liberation Front, who said he was in charge of the local civilian militia. “But there are still isolated spots of trouble. Today, a 9-year-old girl was killed by a sniper. Some of these opposition leaders are very well instructed and able to communicate with each other. They are very difficult to detect.”

An army officer supporting the new government said, “Five or 10 well-trained snipers can exist for another month here. But we are at no risk of losing our position.”

Under Ceausescu, Romania was a Stalinist-model police state in which secret police outnumbered army personnel and were better armed.

Stopping foreign journalists on the streets Saturday and Sunday, ragamuffin civilian patrols appealed to foreign governments to send automatic weapons to the new government here.

“Tell President Bush that we like what he is doing in Panama,” said Ion Avram, 29. “Ask him to send us weapons.”

Four foreign journalists, two of them American, were shot and wounded in the city over the weekend.

Driving into the city Saturday evening, New York Times correspondent John Tagliabue was wounded as snipers opened fire on his car. Tagliabue’s traveling companion, Curtis Wilke, a reporter for the Boston Globe, said the car’s driver was able to steer the vehicle to safety near a medical clinic.

“(Tagliabue) was on a stretcher and into the hospital in about five minutes,” Wilke said. Doctors at the clinic said the correspondent, who suffered a wound to his abdomen, was in satisfactory condition after surgery.

Tagliabue is the younger brother of Paul Tagliabue, commissioner of the National Football League and a Washington lawyer.

Two other journalists--John Daniszewski of the Associated Press and Italian photographer Pasquale Modica of the newspaper La Republica--were also wounded in separate incidents while in cars.

A group of uniformed men on Saturday night ordered a car carrying Daniszewski and a Yugoslav reporter, Ljuba Pajic, to stop, then opened fire as soon as Daniszewski stepped on the brakes, according to the Associated Press.

One bullet struck his arm and two others grazed his head, the Yugoslav Consulate said, quoting Pajic, who was not injured. The assailants fled after robbing the reporters, the consulate said. Daniszewski was in satisfactory condition Sunday in a Timisoara hospital.

Modica, the photographer, was hit in the chest but was reported out of danger, Tanjug said.

Zeljko Sajin, a reporter for a Zagreb, Yugoslavia, television station, and Yugoslav Vice Consul Slobodan Krekovic were slightly wounded as they ran for their car near a hotel in Timisoara about midnight Saturday, the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said. Sajin was hit in the chest, and Krekovic was grazed by a bullet.

The people of Timisoara, despite their losses, were taking great pride Sunday in having provided the spark for the Romanian uprising.

“Our revolution set a world record for speed in eliminating a dictatorship,” said Lorin Ortuna, 47, an engineering professor and leader of what could be the main new emerging political force here. “It has been said that Romanians are cowards. But people did not understand what Ceausescu did to us. It was like living under Hitler or Stalin.”