The Need for Focus Now

Romania is in no condition to focus on the future. Not while fugitive secret police might slip into hospitals and drag away the wounded to finish them off. Not while wives search through mass graves praying that they will not find missing husbands. Not while shots are still heard in the night.

But the future is precisely where the West must focus while Romania sorts itself out, searches for food, cleans up its streets and ponders the televised images of a dead dictator and his wife, secretly tried and secretly shot.

The question of what court sat in judgment of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, found them guilty and then ordered their execution by firing squad is crucial not only for Romanians but also for the West. It is crucial for understanding what sort of government can emerge from the carnage and terror that raged through the country for two weeks while it shed its Communist leaders.

Romania’s new president, Ion Iliescu, a publisher said to have known Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev when both were students at Moscow State University, made clear how difficult it will be to define the new Romania. The nation starts at square one in its search for stability in the wake of the wildfire that toppled Communism in the last of the Warsaw Pact nations. There was “no organized structure” behind the revolution, Iliescu said; Romanians are just now “creating such a structure.”

To underscore the difficulty of stabilizing Romania, angry crowds in Bucharest shouted that the first attempt to create a government included too many Communists in the mix of soldiers, dissidents, writers, academics and others who have formed a provisional government called the National Salvation Front. The crowd obviously was not impressed that the Communists in that group had defected from the Ceausescu government long before people took to the streets, and that some were even on hit lists of the secret police. To underscore how fundamentally things have changed in Eastern Europe in just four months, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III saw no problem with a French suggestion that Soviet troops be invited to step in if the new Romanian government could not put down the counterrevolution of its secret police.

A trickle of medical teams and supplies has already begun moving into Romania from Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and other countries, and the Bush Administration has turned over $500,000 to the Red Cross as a first installment on aid from the United States. More aid will be needed and should be forthcoming.

But as the aid rolls in, the most important task for Washington, Western Europe and Moscow is to start rethinking how to live in the coming decades and generations with an Eastern Europe that bears no resemblance, politically, to what it was just a year ago.