Ex-Romania Aides Get Life for ‘Genocide’ Role : East Bloc: The 4 leaders in Ceausescu’s fallen dictatorship admitted doing nothing to halt the December slaughter of civilian revolutionaries.

Four top members of the regime of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu were sentenced to life in prison Friday for failing to stop the killing of civilians during the revolution that toppled Ceausescu.

A five-man military tribunal convicted the four for “complicity in genocide” after rejecting a prosecutor’s motion that the charges be raised to the more serious “co-authorship” of genocide.

The four defendants--Emil Bobu, 62, former secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee; former state council Vice President Manea Manescu, 74; former Politburo member Ion Dinca, 62, and former Interior Minister Tudor Postelnicu, 59--had already pleaded guilty to the charges.

The trial, much of which was broadcast late at night over Romanian television, was meant to satisfy a widespread public call for revenge against the leading figures of the Ceausescu regime.

The ruling National Salvation Front revoked the death penalty after Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by a military firing squad on Dec. 25. Their execution followed a hasty trial in a military barracks while the Romanian army was still fighting Ceausescu’s secret police in Bucharest and other cities nationwide. The executions were seen by most observers as a key factor in ending the resistance to the revolution on the part of Ceausescu loyalists in the security system.

The new government, however, was conscious of the hasty nature of the trial and reacted to Western opinion condemning its swiftness.

The judges on Friday ordered the seizure of all property belonging to the four men and stripped them of their civil rights.

The four stood solemnly as the tribunal’s president, Col. Andre Nitoiu, announced the verdict after two hours of deliberation.

Bobu, Postelnicu and Manescu said they would appeal, but Dinca told the judge he would not.

“I am an orthodox man,” Dinca told the court. “I will die an orthodox man.”

Manescu, while he admitted his guilt, asked the court for a lesser sentence than the others, contending he had no part in the repression of the demonstrators.

In fact, all denied they gave direct orders to put down the protests. They did, however, admit that they backed Ceausescu’s orders to shoot the demonstrators and did nothing to end his dictatorship.

The court said that about 870 people are known to have died in the fighting that surrounded the revolution.

Earlier reports, some from Western diplomats, indicating that as many as 10,000 persons died in the fighting have never been confirmed.

A central issue in the trial involved Ceausescu’s orders to army and security forces to fire at demonstrators, who took to the streets Dec. 16 in the western Transylvanian city of Timisoara to protest the harassment of a local clergyman, Lazslo Tokes.

Much of the testimony centered on a fateful Dec. 17 meeting of the Politburo at which Ceausescu, backed by his wife, raged at his hand-picked officials for not forcefully backing his orders to shoot at the demonstrators in Timisoara.

At the meeting, Ceausescu demanded the resignations of Postelnicu, Defense Minister Vasilie Milea and chief of Security Iulian Vlad for failing to carry out his instructions to issue live ammunition to soldiers on the streets of Timisoara. At one point, they said, Ceausescu bluffed that he would resign himself and began to walk away. The Politburo, the defendants then said, knuckled under.

On Dec. 22, after the revolution erupted in Bucharest, Milea committed suicide rather than issue orders to fire on unarmed people in the street, the defendants said. They denied earlier assertions that Ceausescu ordered that Milea be murdered by security officers.

Scores of other Communist Party officials are under arrest here and await similar trials. Foremost among them is Nicu Ceausescu, the dictator’s eldest son.