Related Story 20 Years After Communism’s Death Civil Society Breathes Life Into Romania by Victor Shiblie BUCHAREST, Romania — On Dec. 6, Romanians voting in a runoff re-elected President Traian Basescu, but only by the slimmest of margins. According to official numbers, the center-right Basescu won 50.3 percent of the votes, compared to 49.7 percent for Mircea Geoana of the Social Democrats. Geoana, Romania’s ambassador in Washington from 1996 until 2000, formally contested the election, arguing that the victory was rigged, though Basescu was eventually certified as the winner. The stalemate marked one of Romania’s worst political crises since the fall of communism because no new prime minister could be appointed or new government formed until the president was chosen. But one thing is certain: Such an election would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, when Romania was still ruled by Nicolae Ceausescu, one of the worst dictators of the 20th century. Ceausescu ran this Oregon-size country with an iron fist from 1965 until his overthrow in December 1989 and execution by firing squad on Christmas Day, Dec. 25. In the two decades since, Romania has emerged from its darkest days, when citizens could be thrown in jail for listening to the Voice of America on shortwave radio. In March 2004, Romania was admitted into NATO and on Jan. 1, 2007, the long-suffering country — along with Bulgaria — celebrated its entry into the European Union. One of the poorest countries in Europe, Romania now has an annual per-capita gross domestic product of $5,500, despite an expected drop of 7 percent this year, according to Lucian Claudiu Anghel, chief economist at BCR, one of Romania’s leading banks. Bucharest, whose streets were once filled with propaganda posters glorifying the hated Ceausescu, today is choked with traffic and pedestrians listening to iPods. The capital city’s skyline has lots of Soviet-style apartment buildings and other eyesores — but also glass towers where companies like IBM and Oracle have their regional headquarters. Office Depot now runs a huge call-center operation in the Transylvanian capital of Cluj-Napoca, which like most other major Romanian cities now boasts gleaming shopping malls to rival any in the United States. Within about four years, Romania will adopt the euro as its national currency — completing its entry into what has become the world’s most powerful economic bloc. Anca Harasim is executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Romania. She’s one of many prominent Romanians interviewed during a late October fact-finding trip by The Washington Diplomat to this Eastern European nation of 21 million. The visit also coincided with a one-day stopover in Bucharest by Vice President Joe Biden. “If you would have come here prior to the 1989 revolution to talk to politicians in an official meeting, they would have given you all the crap about how great the system was,” Harasim told us. “But if you met them for dinner, over a glass of wine, they would have given you a different story.” Harasim recalled how she and her friends used to secretly tune into Radio Free Europe in the evenings. “We were living in a prison, so the only way to develop intellectually was through education and culture. We didn’t have access to other temptations,” she said. “People were oppressed because of all the indoctrination. You didn’t have dissidents who would fight against the system because that would have been pure suicide.” Mircea Toma, president of ActiveWatch in Bucharest, estimates that 40,000 Romanians were killed by the Ceausescu regime. “Tens of thousands of people were put into forced labor camps. This created such huge fear that the Securitate [Romania’s secret police] didn’t have to do anything more. The fear was so deeply rooted that you did not dare make a move,” he said. “Under Ceausescu, there was no direct physical aggression against dissidents. There was no dissent, period.” Daniel Apostol, editor in chief of the Money Channel — a TV program on economics, business and personal finance — says he can’t see what good half a century of communist rule did for his country. “My grandfather was an officer in the Romanian army. During World War II, he had to swear an oath of loyalty to his country and his king. He fought against the Russians and the Germans,” Apostol told us over lunch at a restaurant in Bucharest’s historic district. “In 1947, the communists came and forced King Michael to leave the country. Some officers were made to swear again, this time to the Communist Party, and he said, ‘No, I have only one honor, to my country and my king.’ For this sentence, he was kicked out of the military, all because he refused to swear allegiance. From an army officer, he became a substitute teacher of small children, and as a result, my own father couldn’t go to university.” Apostol says communism’s worst legacy is that “we lost the meaning of how to respect each other as human beings. That’s the feeling I have after 50 years of communism in this country. Money I can lose and make again, but I cannot get back my time.” These days, civil society groups like the Romanian Center for European Policies and the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania seem to flourish. Some receive funding from the European Union, others from the U.S. Agency for International Development. And some don’t get any outside funding at all. One up-and-coming group is the Center for Independent Journalism in Bucharest. Ioana Avadani, the organization’s executive director, worries that young Romanians now have freedom but don’t quite know what to do with it. A general sense of pessimism pervades the country, despite the dramatic gains that have been made in personal freedom in the 20 years since Ceausescu’s overthrow. “Immediately after 1989, we all had something to challenge, something to blame on somebody else. But now, people who lived under communism have exhausted their desire to express themselves — not because there is nothing to express, but because they don’t feel its worth it,” she said. “They don’t think things will change.” She adds: “The younger generation, including my 20-year-old son, doesn’t feel obliged in any way to those who lived under communism. He says, ‘This was your life, this is my life. I can be sympathetic, but don’t ask me to feel guilty. I was born in a free world.’ By the age of 4, he had his first computer, and by age 9 he had visited MIT in Boston. He was exposed to complete freedom.” Asked what advice she would give young people chafing under authoritarian rule elsewhere, Avadani said the most important thing — aside from scrawling graffiti on walls and writing subversive songs and books — is to take advantage of technology. “The government does not know how to deal with the Internet. There’s a lot of freedom online,” she suggested. “The idea is to get around the stupidity and ignorance of the government. That’s what I find most liberating.” Victor Shiblie is publisher and editor in chief of The Washington Diplomat.