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REMEMBER ROMANIA
ON PAGE TEN we print an open letter to President Ceausescu, which was smug- gled out of Romania last month. The decision to make this protest without the protection of anonymity was an act of extraordinary bravery on the part of indi- viduals who live in the most repressive police state in Europe. The degree of courage they have shown indicates, there- fore, the degree of desperation which is felt in Romania at the prospect of Ceausescu's latest criminally megalomaniac policy: a plan to 'systematise' the country, which will involve the destruction of 7,000 vil- lages in the next 12 years and the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of people in new agglomerations of concrete blocks.
Usually, when this plan is mentioned in the Western press, it is presented as an attack on the Hungarian population in the Transylvanian region of Romania. That the Hungarians are severely discriminated against is not in doubt; but this particular policy is indiscriminate in its application across the whole country. The Western media find it easier, more conceptually comfortable, to classify a brutal policy in terms of the familiar brutality of ethnic discrimination. The idea that a ruling power should wage a campaign of violence and oppression against its entire subject Population is apparently much less easy to grasp.
And yet the purpose behind this policy should be all too familiar to anyone with any knowledge of the history of this century. It is, purely and simply, Stalinist. It is inspired by a hatred of the peasantry, whose independence of outlook and stub- born attachment to a vestigial market economy fail, infuriatingly, to fit into the Marxist-Stalinist scheme of things. Where Stalin broke the will of the peasant popula- tion through famine and terror, Ceausescu alms to achieve the same effect through mass destruction and relocation. The West's wilful blindness to the effects of Stalin's policies in the 1920s and 1930s was a moral failure of colossal proportions; but all the signs suggest that it is quite content to repeat that failure, on a slightly smaller scale, today.
`Systematisation' is only one of a wide
range of inhuman policies directed against the Romanian population. To take just one other issue which is dear to the liberal consciences of the West: how many of the people in this country who demonstrated against the Alton Bill either know or care that abortion — and contraception for that matter — is prohibited in Romania? Even when a doctor believes that the operation is urgently necessary to save the mother's life, he cannot go ahead except in the presence of an official from the Ministry of Justice. The official's career prospects de- pend on keeping the authorisations he gives to a minimum; so he adopts the simple expedient of making sure that the doctors can never get in touch with him when they need him. Many women are known to have died as a result of this policy.
Of course it is right and proper that citizens of the United Kingdom should devote more energy to protesting against impending legislation in this country, which their protests can influence, than to demonstrating against the enacted laws of foreign states. One wonders, however, how many of the protesters shouting 'Fight the Alton Bill' had also taken part in demonstrations against South Africa. A recent advertisement for the ANC in the Guardian quoted Nelson Mandela's elo- quent refusal of the South African govern- ment's conditional offer of freedom: 'What freedom am I being offered when I must ask for permission to live in an urban area? What freedom am I being offered when I need a stamp in my pass to seek work?' Residence permits are just as tightly con- trolled in Romania, more the direction of labour is even more strict; Romanian workers are also required to labour outside their working hours (for three Saturdays each month, for example) without pay, in a system which can only be described as total enserfment. But, needless to say, there are no pickets to be seen outside the Roma- nian embassy in London.
The moral blindness of the West in the inter-war years was largely a product of
ideological prejudice on the part of writers and intellectuals, who were keen to give Stalin's 'new civilisation' the benefit of the doubt. That prejudice may survive in some quarters, but the major reason for our modern blindness is something even more deadly than ideology: indifference.
We bolster our indifference with two comfortable untruths. One is the old argu- ment, 'They've always been like this, so we shouldn't expect them to be any better.' They were serfs under the boyars, so serfs they must remain. This ignores the obvious truth that political systems can change for the better, and the equally obvious truth that the Romanian system has changed immeasurably for the worse during the past 42 years.
Our other comfortable argument is a more recent one, and one which has benefited from Mr Gorbachev's careful cultivation of the doctrine of moral equiva- lence. It says, 'They're really just like us, only poorer': their problem is a purely economic one, to be measured in shortages of meat or soap or washing-machines. All that is needed to set things to rights is a few more consumer goods on a few more supermarket shelves. With this argument, we close our eyes to the intrinsic connec- tions which exist between an economy which cannot respond to people's needs and a political system which will not respond to, or even recognise, their sim- plest and most desperately heartfelt de- sires.
We in the West can do little to change that political system through our protests. Yet in the case of Romania, world opion- ion may turn out to be an unexpectedly powerful weapon. Throughout the last two decades, Ceausescu has devoted enormous energy to presenting himself as a statesman on the world stage (and even, in the mid-1970s, as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize). His motives for this have been partly personal megalomania and partly a desire to give a greater air of legitimacy to his regime — both in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of his subjects. The West has unwittingly helped to create this monster; it is, at the very least, a debt of honour we owe to the people of Roma- nia that we should repudiate him now.
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