COAL BLACK PROPAGANDA
Noel Malcolm on the
motives of Rumania's miner thugs and their xenophobic President
WHEN 10,000 coal-miners began their pogrom in the streets of Bucharest last week, commentators and politicians in the West were quick to say that President Iliescu's government had reverted to the tactics of the Ceausescu regime. They were wrong. The strategy may be familiar; the mentality may be almost the same; but the tactics on this occasion were quite diffe- rent.
Ceausescu used the police and the secret police to do his dirty work; he did not use gangs of workers. True, the workers were often brought in from the factories round Bucharest to cheer at his speeches (egged on by pre-recorded cheers from loudspeak- ers). But that was all. They were not required to rampage through the streets, smashing the faces of those whom they judged to be dissidents or students. In using a private army of 'guardians of morality', the new President of Rumania has gone further than his predecessor. Ceausescu only had his Securitate; Iliescu now has his Tonton Macoutes.
The choice of these workers in particu- lar, however, has a special significance. There was a strong element of political theatre in the use of coal-blackened miners in their working clothes and helmets: it supplied an almost operatic vision of 'the workers', Alberich-like, rising up. But the most important message in the script of this performance may have been lost on the Western public. For the miners of the Jiu Valley are famous in Rumania for the stand they once made against Ceausescu. In August 1977 they went on strike, protesting at their low pay, poor housing and inadequate food. When Ceausescu came to parley with them they shouted 'down with proletarian bourgeoisie': it was the last such act of public defiance until December 1989. For Iliescu's purposes, these workers have the same talismanic importance that the shipbuilders of Gdansk, say, might have in Poland.
Much can change in 13 years, however. Ceausescu's crackdown on the Jiu Valley miners was exceptionally severe. The lead- ers of the strike were, imprisoned, and many of them were murdered (though one, Costica Dobre, surfaced in Bucharest last month, on hunger strike against the Iliescu government); 4,000 strikers were dismis- sed, and many more transferred to distant regions.
To ensure that such unrest would never happen again, the miners were heavily infiltrated with agents and paid informers of the Securitate. Commentators who sug- gested last week that these so-called miners were Securitate men 'in disguise' were missing the point. Some of these people were both Securitate men and genuine miners.
'1 suppose that after all the chasing this, to say the least, is a bit of an anticlimax. But many of them, on the other hand, were ordinary miners who had not sup- ported Ceausescu in the past and do not now think of themselves as defending a continuation of his policies. So what do they think they are doing?
They think what they have been told to think: that the National Salvation Front is in danger, and that since the Front made the revolution, the revolution itself is at risk. The enemies of Iliescu are the ene- mies of Rumania's glorious revolution.
And who are these enemies? They are capitalists, intellectuals, drug-addicts, Hungarians or Gypsies. All these categor- ies have something in common. They are tainted with foreign-ness: foreign lan- guage, descent, economic status, mentality or habits. In developing its own ideology, the Front has cleverly concentrated on the one aspect of Ceausescu's public doctrine which was genuinely popular: a kind of xenophobic nationalism which asserts that Rumania will be beholden to no one. It is a doctrine which, although closely associated with Ceausescu, can take Ceausescu's downfall in its stride. The Rumanian re- volution too, it argues, was autochthonous and unique; and each succeeding stage of the country's development will also follow a uniquely Rumanian path.
During the election campaign, when Iliescu's two rivals for the presidency were both returning emigres who had spent many years abroad, the immediate political purpose of this doctrine was obvious. Iliescu: Of Us, With Us, For Us', said one ubiquitous poster. But the long-term aim is to fend off not just individual politicians, but the whole Western economic and political system. In the televised debate between the three presidential candidates. Iliescu made this comment on the sugges- tion that Rumania should copy the econo- mic system of Western Europe: 'We don't want to borrow a foreign system. We tried that before, and it didn't work.' In other words, the Soviet system did not work not because it was communist, but because it was foreign. Therefore the opposite foreign system will not work either. If there seems to be a certain even- handedness about this ideology, the im- pression is misleading. The Front's cleverest achievement is to blame the whole communist tragedy on the Western powers too. Take this stirring comment on Yalta, for example, from Azi, the Front's daily paper, of 11 May:
The bones of a whole Rumanian political class, cynically sold to Stalin by the expo- nents of the British-type democracy some are preaching in University Square, lie in a common grave. The survivors of this ship- wreck should nurture only one thought of vengeance: not against the effects but against the causes and causers of the Rumanian tragedy.
Consider those alternative objects of vengeance carefully: 'the effects' signifies senior Rumanian communists, and 'the causes and causers' stands for Britain, America and their sympathisers. The Front's propagandists were so pleased with this article that they also issued it in a press bulletin to foreign journalists, describing its author, Dan Zamfirescu, as a disting- uished historian. They omitted to mention that his last published work was a toadying compilation of essays in praise of Ceauses- cu's 'Golden Epoch'.
As time goes on, and as the epoch of Iliescu becomes more tarnished, the Front will look for people to blame for its own economic failures. It may blame Hunga- rians, Gypsies, speculators and tourists; it may even blame the Soviet Union; but above all, when addressing its private shock troops, it will blame the West. The most poignant report last week was by the Independent's correspondent in Bucharest, describing a miner who emerged from a ransacked university building brandishing a piece of subversive foreign propaganda which he had found there. It was a copy of the American constitution.
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