Romania: Too Hot to Handle

Securitate killers flee justice in a land where it will take 150 years to open Securitate archives.

Two former high-ranking police officers are on
the run after being sentenced to 22 years in prison each for the
1985 beating death of dissident Gheorghe Ursu.

The two men’s escape from justice,
short-lived though it may turn out to be, only serves to underline
the erratic progress in recent years toward coming to terms with
the activities of the communist security forces, especially the
Securitate secret police.

Police issued a national arrest warrant for the
two and warned border guards not to let them leave the country. The
men fled their homes in Bucharest before police arrived to take
them to prison. Bucharest police chief Marian Tutilescu said on 18
July that the two, Tudor Stanica and Mihail Creanga, were thought
to be still on Romanian soil and traveling together. On 21 July
police spokesman Ionel Voiculescu confirmed that the two were still
at large.

In 14 July a Bucharest court found the two men,
both former officers in the regular police, guilty of the murder of
Ursu, a dissident who fell foul of the authorities for keeping a
diary critical of the regime. Ursu never attempted to publish it,
but friends and colleagues who knew of the diary informed police.
Ursu died in police custody.

COMEDY OF ERRORS

Three years ago parliament voted to create a
National Council for Study of the Securitate Archives as a
politically independent body charged with analyzing and making
public personal files held by the Romanian Intelligence Service
(SRI) and other agencies. The council is bogged down in squabbles
with the SRI and political infighting among its members.

Events took a farcical turn when the SRI said it
couldn’t even find the file on President Ion Iliescu. As one
of the highest-ranking dissenting communists under Nicolae
Ceausescu’s regime, there can be no doubt that the secret
police kept tabs on Iliescu.

At a 17 July press conference Iliescu said he
had lost interest in finding out what the Securitate might have
said about him, adding that he couldn’t care less if all
files were made public.

The real meaning of his words, some said, was
that if the president can do without reading his own file, so can
any other Romanian.

The trouble is a lack of courage to tackle the
issue, said the military prosecutor who built the case against
Stanica and Creanga.

“If a case against communism was ever
desired, there have been sufficient grounds, material evidence, and
witnesses since 1990 to send intelligence officers who committed
abuses to trial,” said General Dan Voinea.

“But there was and there is no political
will, and the wheels of justice cannot roll if no political will
gives them the green light,” Voinea told TOL.

Voinea said that, beyond the cases of Stanica,
Creanga, and the third officer charged in Ursu’s death,
Stefan Burcea, he knew of no other comparable instance.

Voinea has also charged a serving intelligence
officer, General Eugen Grigorescu, with abuse of office for failing
to turn over 800 pages of Ursu’s writings to
investigators.

A member of the council studying the Securitate
archives echoed Voinea’s sentiments, saying that none of the
administrations in the 13 years since the fall of communism has
been able to come to grips with the past and allow access to the
archives.

The problem is one of weak political opposition,
Horia Roman Patapievici said. “The only efficient opposition
in Romania is the one posed by NATO and EU institutions, as it is
the habit of the Romanian state to not take into account the
opposition posed by its own citizens.”

WHO WILL SPY ON THE SPIES?

The SRI now finds itself in open conflict with
part of the Securitate council over whether the agency is in
compliance with current transparency laws.

In June, several television stations carried
footage of SRI head Radu Timofte saying the agency would not
provide any data on the activities of officers who may have been
involved in political investigations so long as the law did not
oblige it to do so.

SRI spokesman Marius Bercaru told TOL he could
not recall any such statement by his chief, but he maintained that
the Securitate council could get “tomorrow, if they had the
means to deposit them, over 12 kilometers of files the SRI has said
from the outset contain no information that could damage the
national interest.”

“That is dust in the eyes,”
responded Patapievici, one of the council’s critical voices.
He said that the foreign intelligence service is the only security
force still working with the council on opening up files in its
custody, while the SRI had stopped cooperation altogether.

Making matters worse, four council members
appointed by the ruling Social Democrats and one of its junior
allies stopped attending council meetings, rendering it unable to
muster a quorum to decide which files should be made public.

Earlier this year council members engaged in a
public row over whether to release a list of 5,000 former informers
and intelligence officers.

The council is also squabbling with the SRI over
its claimed right to participate in the process of giving security
clearance to former communist intelligence officers who now work
for the SRI.

Timofte recently stated that 12 to 15 percent of
counterintelligence officers are holdovers from the Securitate.

At the rate the council is presently able to
check the files, Patapievici said, “It will take 150 years
for Romania to open its Securitate archives for public
scrutiny.”

The solution, he said, is simply to hand over to
the council the entire security archive “together with the
building housing it.” Those who fear the disclosure of
sensitive information about ongoing cases have nothing to worry
about, he said, so long as the files on active, lawful
investigations are separated from the “dead” files.

“Then there should be no danger of
disclosing the identity of currently active intelligence officers
working on legitimate targets under democratic law,”
Patapievici said.

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