Romania to Toughen Security Law : Eastern Europe: The prime minister blames ex-convicts and ‘suspicious persons’ for an attack on government offices.

Romania’s provisional prime minister, Petre Roman, said Monday that some of the demonstrators who forced their way into government offices in Bucharest on Sunday and briefly held captive the country’s vice premier were “suspicious persons, ex-convicts, people without jobs, loaded with money and armed with knives.”

In Bucharest, the 21-member executive bureau of the Council of National Unity held an emergency session to discuss the attack on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, where the prime minister and Deputy Premier Gelu Voican have their offices.

Interim President Ion Iliescu said the bureau decided to propose a law “increasing the power of those organizations that must maintain law and order and defend institutions and citizens against violent acts.”

In a statement broadcast on national radio and television after the meeting, Iliescu blamed the attack on “counterrevolutionary forces” incited “by circles interested in destabilizing the situation in our country and restoring the vestiges of the dictatorial regime”--a reference to the ousted government of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed in December, days after the start of the revolution.

“If the army and police don’t have the legal ability to maintain order, people will feel it necessary to defend themselves. We could become like Lebanon, and anarchy could lead us to total chaos,” he said on state television.

Iliescu pledged to severely punish anyone who staged a repetition of Sunday’s violence.

On Monday evening, more than 300 people staged another demonstration but stayed away from the government building that was Sunday’s target. French television Monday night showed the building encircled with soldiers and armored vehicles.

News agencies reported from Bucharest that about 5,000 miners rallied Monday in support of the government, angrily demanding an end to the anti-government protests.

The demonstration Sunday was the first major incident of crowd violence since the revolution. Several hundred protesters, shouting slogans against Roman and Iliescu, stormed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building. They grabbed Voican and held him on a balcony before a jeering crowd until soldiers finally intervened.

“The bastards very nearly hung me,” Voican told a correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde. “The beat me, insulted me, spat on me. They manhandled me like I was a henchman for the Securitate”--the hated secret police under Ceausescu.

While the demonstrators were ransacking his office in Bucharest, Roman was dining at the Left Bank home of French President Francois Mitterrand. He said he assured Mitterrand that despite the violent episode, which he blamed on an unidentified outside force that paid and armed the attackers, the interim Romanian government is stable.

“We are stable because we represent a consensus,” Roman said, “but the 200 or 300 demonstrators represent nothing.”

Under considerable pressure from opposition groups that contend that too many former Communists, including Roman and Iliescu, hold leadership positions in the new National Salvation Front government, the ruling body was expanded last month to create the Council of National Unity.