All Members of Politburo in Romania Put in Prison

The interim government said Tuesday that it has imprisoned about 60 of former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s closest associates, including all members of the Politburo, and will punish “all evildoers from the old regime.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Constanin Girbea said that judgment will also follow for “all members of the Ceausescu family” and that the Defense Ministry will announce further details of punishments.

Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were convicted of genocide and other “grave crimes” against Romania at a secret trial and executed Dec. 25. Whether or where they were buried has not been disclosed, but the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug quoted Girbea as saying they were “probably buried on the spot.”

Girbea told a news conference that all members of the Communist Party Politburo are in prison.

“I estimate there are about 60 . . . all close colleagues of Ceausescu,” he said. “All evildoers from the old regime will be brought to justice.”

About 40 Ceausescu relatives are thought to have occupied ranking government posts before the popular revolt that ended Ceausescu’s 24-year rule.

The Ceausescus’ youngest son, Nicu, and only daughter, Zoia, were captured in the early days of the violent two-week uprising that claimed thousands of lives.

In another development, a member of the National Salvation Front and a principal architect of the revolution, Silviu Brucan, announced that his organization will probably field its own candidates for elections in April.

The front originally had said it would not post candidates for the elections, and Brucan did not explain the change of policy in his televised speech late Monday.

Meanwhile, a senior economist in the Communist Party, Andrei Vela, told reporters that the party was “ de facto dissolved already” but had to make its liquidation official.

Vela said he belongs to a group of about 60 Communists trying to rebuild a political force on the left from the ashes of the party, once numerically the strongest in Eastern Europe with 3.8 million members out of a population of 23 million.

“We failed to take action in time to stop the rise of dictatorship,” he said. Ceausescu had been allowed to build up a massive apparatus of repression and in the end the party lost all power to the dictator.

“We did not take a stand. There was some opposition but it had not the necessary unity. Ceausescu was an able manipulator.”

Vela, who worked in the central party apparatus, said the Communist Party of Romania could no longer be reconstructed.

No date had been set for the congress his initiative group was seeking and he did not know how many would attend. Vela said it will have to take place soon, since free elections have been scheduled for April.

But he said there was “great hesitation because the center of gravity of fear has shifted from the opposition” to the party that once ruled. “It is an interesting irony,” he said.

Bucharest was calm Tuesday. There were no reports of sniper fire or clashes between the army and members of Ceausescu’s hated Securitate police, which was officially disbanded Monday.

Hundreds of armed secret police agents are still believed to be at large.

The number of people killed in the uprising that toppled Ceausescu is still unclear.

A spokesman for the International Red Cross in Geneva, Juerg Bischof, said initial estimates that at one point reached 80,000 were “far too high.” But the spokesman offered no total.

Western diplomats in Bucharest estimate that 7,000 to 10,000 people have died across the country.

OLD WARRIORS--Aging freedom fighters savor victory at last. A8.