Romania Protesters Demand End of Communist Party
More than 5,000 Romanians blocked downtown traffic Friday to demand that Communist parties be outlawed and that President Ion Iliescu’s government resign.
Flag-waving demonstrators jammed the capital’s main University Square, site of a 53-day anti-Communist demonstration in 1990 that left six people dead.
Witnesses reported minor scuffles with riot police on Friday.
Ticu Dumitrescu, president of the Assn. of Former Political Prisoners, said that the existence of the Socialist Labor Party and the National Salvation Front “proves to be a fatal danger to the future of democracy in Romania.”
The Socialist Labor Party succeeded the former Communist Party. The governing National Salvation Front took power after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and the Communists were ousted in the December, 1989, revolution.
A proposal before Parliament would pronounce the Communist Party illegal.
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