DOINA CORNEA
ON 17 September The Spectator published an open letter to President Ceausescu of Rumania written by Doina Cornea, a former lecturer at Cluj university in which she appealed to him to stop the demolition of the country's villages. At the end of October an English traveller was detained by the secret police near her home in Cluj and told repeatedly that, 'Mrs Cornea is suffering and will continue to suffer,' as a result of her protest. The fate of her nine co-signatories is unknown, but reliable sources repeat that Mrs Cornea was taken to the Securitate headquarters in Bucharest where she was badly beaten. The Rumanian authorities detained many others at the same time in order to forestall demonstrations to mark the anniversary of the Basov rising of 15 November last year. The Rumanian authorities' insistance that Western publicity is the cause of the sufferings inflicted on these innocent peo- ple is as hollow as it is revealing. They have let it be known that continued interest in the fate of Doina Cornea and 'others' will damage the relations between our two countries. The British Government should insist that relations cannot continue in the face of such brutality.
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