Hated Secret Police Unit Abolished : Romania: The new government also does away with the death penalty and shortens the workweek to five days.

The new Romanian government announced Monday that it has abolished the death penalty, disbanded Nicolae Ceausescu’s hated secret police, the Securitate, and will introduce a five-day workweek.

A week after Ceausescu, 71, and his wife, Elena, were executed by a military firing squad, the revocation of the death penalty and other steps were made public by interim President Ion Iliescu in a New Year’s television address.

“The two executions will be the last to be carried out,” he said.

The interim president’s speech was part of an energetic campaign by the new government to win the trust of 23 million Romanians who lived for the last 24 years under one of the world’s most oppressive Communist regimes.

“No attempt by the remains of the old regime is capable of turning back the wheel of history again,” Iliescu said. “The process that has occurred is irreversible. The popular revolution has triumphed, and it will remain unvanquishable.”

He announced a decree abolishing the Securitate, the vast secret police organization that was a pervasive presence in Romanian society.

Referring to members of the Securitate who have not yet surrendered, he said that “all further terrorists will be prosecuted according to the valid laws of the land.”

Iliescu said the five-day workweek will be introduced in March. A six-day week had been customary.

He also announced that the government is abandoning a principle of the Ceausescu regime that considered all land the property of the state. Henceforth, he said, homeowners can consider the land that their houses stand on as their own. Farmers, he said, will be allowed to buy land adjoining their houses and will be able to farm privately and sell their produce on the free market.

Romanians who were forced to relocate to cities and towns under Ceausescu’s scheme to move farmers off land will be allowed to move back and will be alloted six-tenths of an acre of land, “providing they commit themselves to pay taxes and cultivate the land well.”

In moves to build public confidence, leading figures in the interim government began appearing in television interviews Sunday to explain their past connections with the Communist Party, run with an iron hand by Ceausescu and his family.

The ruling National Salvation Front council decided to tackle head-on the complaints voiced by some Romanians that too many Communists have been included in the new government, which will run the country until free elections are held in April.

Silviu Brucan, a 73-year-old former diplomat and possibly the most widely respected member of the 11-member council at the head of the National Salvation Front, appeared on television Sunday night in an hourlong interview. He explained that he and others on the council had constituted virtually the only opposition to the Ceausescu regime in recent years.

Brucan was placed under house arrest in 1987 for protesting in an open letter to Ceausescu that Romanians were sufferring under the Draconian austerity program he imposed on the country. The letter charged that the people were faced with starvation and were “freezing in their own houses.”

Brucan said that in the future, “there can be no ‘isms’ in Romania.”

“We are not Communists,” Brucan said. “We are not anything. Theory has been destroyed in this country.”

In an interview earlier in the day, Brucan indicated that the National Salvation Front decided to move quickly to counter any suggestion that its leading members had been sympathetic in any way to the Ceausescu regime.

“It is a matter of establishing our credentials,” Brucan said. “It is an overriding consideration. People must know what we did.”

In the coming days, he said, Petre Roman, the interim prime minister, and interim President Iliescu will make similar television appearances.

National Salvation Front sources said Sunday that, in effect, they are in the initial stages of what will likely become their campaign for the April elections.

So far, six organizations have announced they intend to form political parties with a view to competing in the elections.

Representatives of the National Peasants Party, after a meeting with Dumitru Mazilu, a vice president of the council, said they were assured that the National Salvation Front is committed to free and fair elections.