Category Archives: Romania

Iaşi [= Jassy, rhymes with Josh] was the location of the first large-scale massacre of the Romanian Holocaust. In addition to its anti-Semitic traditions of over a century, because of its proximity to the Soviet fronter, “it became the focus of many of the anti-Semitic measures that accompanied plans to join Germany’s invasion of the USSR.” The terms “Jew” and “Communist” were virtually interchangeable, as in the order by Ion Antonescu, the Romanian head of state, to compile lists of “all Jews, Communist agents, or sympathizers in each region.” Worse was Order No. 4147, issued at about the same time, which demanded the expulsion of all Jews between the ages of eighteen and sixty from northeastern Moldavia (the Iaşi region) in expectation of fighting there. The presence of large numbers of Jews in the region was anathema to both the German and Romanian officials. Fully half of Iaşi’s population of 100,000 was Jewish. In cooperation with the German Gestapo and the SD (the intelligence arm of the SS), the Romanian Secretariat of the Secret Intelligence Service (SSI) prepared the expulsions. At the same time, former Iron Guardists (also called legionaries because of the virtually equivalent organizational name of Legion of the Archangel St. Michael) were informed of the impending expulsions and likelihood of a pogrom.

A raid against Iaşi by the Soviet air force provided the spark for the pogrom. Damage was minor but rumors spread that the entire Jewish population of Iaşi was in league with the Red Army. Further rumors of Iaşi natives flying Soviet aircraft fanned the flames still further. On June 20th, four days after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the pogrom began in earnest. It lasted over a week, until June 29. Although it is difficult to gain accurate estimates of the number of Jews killed, the minimum is probably around 900, with a more forthright testimony from a witness estimating the number of dead at 3,000–4,000.

But worse was yet to come. Several thousand Jews had been interned in police stations and special camps as “dangers” to Romanian security. At the end of June, these Jews were loaded onto death trains to be transported out of the region. The cars were decorated with signs stating that inside were “Communist Jews” or “killers of German and Romanian soldiers.” Several destinations were chosen and ultimately few survived the densely packed, poorly ventilated cars. No food or water was allowed. Jews, who frantically jumped from train cars to drink at a river crossing were shot or forcibly drowned. Those who survived were forced to hand over their valuables in a pattern of voracious looting that would be characteristic of the entire Holocaust, and of other genocides as well. Of 2,530 Jews who were transported in the first train, some 1,400 died. Of 1,902 Jews who boarded the second train, 1,194 died.

Iaşi was only the first of many massacres of Jews that were to take place in nearby Bessarabia and Bukovina, territories that had been transferred to Soviet control in 1940, but were now under German and Romanian authority. Mihai Antonescu, a relative of Ion Antonescu and deputy premier, supported the forced “migration” of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina. The attitude of “blame” for the loss of these territories in 1940 was to characterize much of Romanian Jewish policy. Frequent massacres occurred immediately after the German invasion. During July alone, Raul Hilberg estimates that more than 10,000 Jews were murdered by the Romanian and German military, as well as the native Ukrainian peasantry. These massacres were to be followed by mass deportations to work camps in Ukraine and ultimately death camps in Poland. At first, the Germans resisted the massive relocation of Jews from northern Bessarabia into German military-controlled districts. The number of Jews in each of these attempted transports was in the tens of thousands. The Germans conjured up the specter of more than half a million Jews to be added to the many indigenous Ukrainian Jews now being murdered by Einsatzgruppe D with only 600 men. Consequently, the German legation informed Mihai Antonescu that the Jews were to be eliminated in “a slow and systematic manner.”

Jews were now interned in transit camps throughout Bessarabia. In October, deportations to Ukraine began. During the first months of the war, it is estimated that at least 65,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were killed in mass murders, in the transit camps and during deportation. If we add the number of Jews deported who died in southwestern Ukraine (called Transnistria by the Romanians), the number reaches approximately 130,000. If we add to this the number of native Ukrainian Jews in Odessa and elsewhere killed by the Romanian and German authorities, the number reaches approximately 250,000 murdered under Romanian jurisdiction. According to Raul Hilberg, “no country, besides Germany, was involved in massacres of Jews on such a scale.”

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 205-207

A contrast between the outcomes in Hungary and Romania is puzzling. Despite the barbarity of the Romanian authorities, approximately half of Romania’s Jews survived, a larger percentage than in Hungary. Out of 756,000 Jews in Romania in 1930, 375,000 survived the war, the vast majority of them in Regat Romania [the old kingdom of Moldavia and Wallachia, not the parts of Greater Romania acquired after World War I]. Why? There are essentially two reasons for this outcome, both consistent with the theoretical framework put forward here emphasizing losses at the outset. First, as Radu Ioanid put it,

In regard to the experience of the Jewish community of Regat, one thing was clear during the Holocaust: not having come into contact with the Soviets in 1940, the Jews were not held accountable for the loss of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and therefore not singled out for prompt punishment at the beginning of the war.

Thus, Jews in the Regat were not murdered in the same extent as those in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, because they were not held responsible for the Romanian territorial losses and consequent refugee migrations.

Second, despite Romanian refusals to initiate these deportations, the Germans might still have intervened directly in Romania to effect deportations under different geopolitical circumstances. And here we find one of the crucial distinctions between Romanian and Hungarian behavior. Whereas the Romanians could refuse the German requests for deportation for their own reasons, having to do principally with the fear of Allied reprisals after the increasingly likely German defeat, the Hungarians could not. In contrast to Romania, Hungary lay directly in the path of the Soviet westbound march. In the Nazi view, as we saw earlier, the large concentrations of Jews in Hungary constituted a potentially collaborating fifth column that could ease the Soviet advance to the Reich heartland. Hence, direct German intervention was required.

Although geopolitically important principally due to the Ploesti oil fields, Romania did not lie directly in the path of the main Soviet advance and was not required for a strategic defense of the eastern reaches of the Reich. At this stage in the war, after Allied bombing of the oil fields and the absence of a perceived direct strategic threat Germany of Romania’s remaining Jews, an intervention was not required for strategic defense. It is ironic that a country with a far more virulent and barbaric anti-Semitic tradition could save a larger percentage of its Jews than one with an earlier history of strong Hungarian-Jewish collaboration. Yet here we see the importance of geopolitical imperatives, an important component of realpolitik (as identified in the three models [brute-force imprudent, prudent, and cynical] of realpolitik in chapter 5)….

Finally, the pattern of Hungarian-Jewish deportations suggests a transition even within imprudent brute-force realpolitik. Whereas the choice of genocidal behavior clearly was imprudent at the start of Operation Barbarossa in mid-1941, three years later, even to German opponents of Nazism, it could now appear to be prudent. By this time, the Germans could reason, many Hungarian Jews would have heard of the genocide elsewhere in Europe and would have become determined opponents of the Nazi regime. Aid to the oncoming Soviets would have been forthcoming. Having created this body of potential fifth columnists by their own unbridled brutality, the Germans were forced to live with the consequences. Deportation and death of this Jewish population then could easily have been seen by the Germans to be absolutely required in order to protect the German state and its population from Soviet revenge.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 258-259

I’m standing on million-dollar grass in front of a million-dollar restaurant overlooking a million-dollar beach at the million-dollar Australian beach resort, Noosa, my home town.

I’m home, in between contracts in Yangon [Rangoon], and I’m taking part in a media event ushering in the high point of the year for Noosa’s well-heeled culturati: the Noosa Longweekend Festival….

I am waiting for John Pilger because we have a mutual friend, and I’ve sent the message that I’d perhaps like to have a coffee with him and talk about Myanmar. Pilger is a strong campaigner against the Myanmar military junta and I figure I can update him on the political machinations and manoeuvrings….

Meanwhile, back at the million-dollar restaurant in million-dollar Noosa, the star has arrived, scowling and skulking, looking very much like the creative director of a fashionable ad agency. He chats for a while with a fan-cum-journalist. During a lull in proceedings, I slip over and introduce myself.

He looks at me reproachfully and accusingly. He says, ‘If you are working for a newspaper in Burma, then you must be working for the military. They own the newspapers.’ I explain that some newspapers and journals are owned by private enterprise, including the Myanmar Times, which employs me as a journalism trainer. He counters by saying that all press is subject to military censorship, and I tell him how different factions censor different publications and that the Myanmar Times is censored by Military Intelligence.

‘Military Intelligence! Then you are working for Military Intelligence.’

‘No. I’m working for a privately owned newspaper that is censored by Military Intelligence.’

The conversation goes nowhere. Pilger scowls and raises his eyebrows in an exaggerated manner. He stalks off across the million-dollar grass.

So much for heroes. I admire Pilger’s work, but I understand from this exchange that he is not a journalist with an inquiring mind. He is an advocate with a set agenda, a pre-written script. And I’d begun to worry about advocates, understanding that in the new emerging world such black-and-white thinking is outmoded. He stands for good against evil, but in the new world good and evil are often the flip sides of the same coin.

Leftists (and I’m a sympathiser in that house of cant, but not a worshipper) are usually by their very nature infracaninophiliacs–given a struggle they’ll almost inevitably, and nearly always emotionally, champion the underdogs, the minorities or perceived minorities, the powerless or perceived powerless. In some cases the stance is merely fashionable, the ’cause of the day’ amongst the chattering classes, as they’ve been dubbed, or the chardonnay socialists. But in the modern world there is no doctrine that is pure, unerringly fair to all, and universally applicable, and the world isn’t left or right or even wrong, just as it isn’t black or white or always right. It’s all sort of shades in between and, at times, as with the attitudes towards such nations as Myanmar, the left unwittingly converges with the right: it virtuously lashes out against oppressive regimes in a manner that prepares the path for the right to invade, invoke regime change, and impose democracy.

On the subject of left and right and what is wrong and what is right, what difference is there really, I wonder, in the day-to-day life of the grassroots people of Myanmar as compared to their counterparts in, say, Cuba? Both are repressed by a militaristic centralist regime, yet the people of Cuba are regarded by many left-leaning thinkers and liberals as beneficiaries of the leadership of a glorious socialist revolution, while the people of Myanmar are viewed as the hapless victims of a cruel military junta.

My stance could be perceived as the stance of a person who is prepared to do nothing but that’s not the case; I’m a person who believes we should do something, but something that’s different from what we’ve already been doing with such harrowing consequences.

Saving the world seems so clear-cut when watching world news through the filter of a television screen in the safety of a cosy Western domicile, but I was no longer watching Yangon via remote control. I was up close and personal. Very personal. There were people I knew and loved in Yangon and I didn’t want to see them die in a revolution that would prove to be bloody. Or in an invasion that would also exact ‘collateral damage’, as the Americans so coyly describe the civilian slaughter of war.

I didn’t want to sit in front of a TV set in ten years time watching a heartfelt and moving John Pilger documentary about the evils perpetrated by invasion forces entering Myanmar, intent on bringing about regime change and imposing democracy. There has to be a better way, a more subtle way.

SOURCE: Land of a Thousand Eyes: The subtle pleasures of everyday life in Myanmar, by Peter Olszewski (Allen & Unwin, 2005), pp. 82-83, 89-91

Although I sympathize a bit more with Olszewski than Pilger in this instance, especially in equating Myanmar with Cuba (both socialist in name, dictatorial in practice), neither of them have any adequate answer to Lenin’s burning question, What Is to Be Done? Nor do I. It’s much easier to achieve near-universal consensus on What Is Not to Be Done. Just ask the U.N.

Unfortunately, Olszewski indulges in a lame running joke throughout his book, wherein he repeatedly manages narrowly to escape yet another Burmese citizen who wants to talk with a Westerner about democracy. What exactly was he trying to accomplish in Myanmar? Whatever it was, it all went down the drain in the wake of a massive purge in October 2004, with examples provided in the book’s epilogue.

It was during my year in Romania in 1983-84 that I became acquainted with the term “actually existing socialism” used by true believers to distinguish their utopian ideals from the cynical implementations of socialist principles by so many real-world regimes. I’m sure libertarian true believers similarly distinguish “actually existing” market economies from their utopian ideals. Although far from a utopian idealist, Olszewski is the type of person who sneers at “actually existing democracy” without offering any better alternative.

Yodok and the hard-labor camps did have several points in common, the first of these being the snitches. During the first days and weeks of our detention, my father and uncle felt most oppressed by the physical demands of forced labor and the looming threat of punishment. The slightest wrong move, it seemed, could mean extra work or a stint of solitary confinement in a sweatbox. This fear, they soon realized, was the consequence of the network of snitches that pervaded the camp. The informants were at every turn. There was no one to confide in, no way to tell who was who. The veteran prisoners sometimes laughed at my father and uncle because of all the naive questions they asked, which only made them more depressed. The only advice their fellow prisoners could offer was to have patience: they would learn to pick out the snitches soon enough. Until then, they would do well to keep their thoughts to themselves. The camp’s common wisdom turned out to be true. Within a few months, we all developed a sixth sense–a snitch radar, if you will–that told us who could be trusted and who could not. Yet a snitch is not necessarily a bad guy. The prisoner is usually picked for the job without being asked his or her opinion, and, in most cases, the honor is not one for which he or she is proud.

SOURCE: The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, translated by Yair Reiner (Basic Books, 2001), p. 77

My impression, during my year in Ceausescu’s Romania (as a privileged foreigner, not a prisoner!) was that many of the Romanians who befriended us, and thus had to report periodically on our activities, were among the more interesting and entertaining of our small circle of local acquaintances there. The building manager who lived just across the hall from our apartment, however, was a complete sleazeball. I went out of my way not to ruffle his feathers.

Matt Welch has another update on Romania in the October 2005 edition of Reason that reprises the theme of his 17 July 2004 essay in Canada’s National Post headlined “Rapping the Commies Away: A New MTV Generation in Romania Tries to Drive out Corruption.”

Welch’s current title is perhaps a tad overoptimistic: “The Second Romanian Revolution Will Be Televised: The TV show Dallas helped overthrow Ceausescu. Now gangsta rap and pop culture are driving out corrupt post-Soviet thugs.” But he gives a vivid account of developments in Romanian pop culture during and after the Ceausescu era. Here’s how it ends.

Pop culture, once beaten down to virtual nonexistence, has now become a valuable export. In the summer of 2004, the Moldavian-Romanian boy band O-Zone scored Europe’s No. 1 pop and dance hit, the unbearably catchy single “Dragostea Din Tei,” which topped the charts in at least 27 countries and sold more than 8 million copies. (You’ve probably heard it—think relentless Euro disco, and the phonetic phrase “Numa numa yay.”) And popular gangsta rap bands like Parazitii [‘The Parasites’], despite suffering greatly from domestic piracy and the censorious ways of the National Audio Visual Council (which banned one video simply for the reasonable couplet “alcohol is life/life is alcohol”), have still managed to sell nearly 1 million CDs since Ceausescu was shot.

Unlike the 1989 generation of anti-communist students, these twentysomethings didn’t taste the clubs of miners, didn’t help overthrow an odious tyrant, and didn’t worship at the altar of a 1980s TV show that glorified a morally corrupt business tycoon. “We were more into Seinfeld,” Parazitii manager Munteanu says. Not to mention foul-mouthed 1990s Compton rap sensation N.W.A. “You really need freedom to do this kind of music, you know?”

But their revulsion at corruption, coupled with a government that shares it, offers serious hope that post-communist Europe’s red-headed stepchild will finally emerge from its long, dark shadow and create a country far more free, successful, and interesting.

“On a recent and fairly rare venture into Bucharest’s club scene, I looked at the trendy crowd and felt for a moment that I could have been in Manhattan or South Beach,” said former U.S. Ambassador Michael Guest, who led a daily crusade against Romanian corruption during his three-year tenure, in an exit interview with the monthly magazine Vivid, one of nearly a dozen English-language publications in Bucharest. “Then a series of young people brought me back to reality, stopping one by one at the table to thank me for speaking [out]…. Those who think they’re getting away with corruption are just fooling themselves. A new generation is coming, and it will demand, and indeed create, change.”

And maybe some new wealth. But are the music and film industries really going to help eliminate corruption? Only by motivating voters without fostering cynicism. Otherwise, I would guess that straight-laced bankers are going to be a lot more critical in the fight against corruption than pop musicians.

The Wall Street Journal has a harsh editorial today.

Ten years ago today, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic entered the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica, then being defended by Dutch peacekeepers. General Mladic made three demands: that the townsmen surrender their weapons; that all males between the ages of 12 and 77 be separated out for “questioning”; and that the rest of the population be expelled to Muslim areas. Within two days, 23,000 women and children had been deported. Another 5,000 Muslim men and boys who had taken refuge on a nearby Dutch base were also delivered to the Mladic forces.

As we now know, most of the people surrendered by the Dutch to the Serbs were slaughtered, as were more than 2,000 others, bringing the estimated tally of the Srebrenica massacre to 7,200. Yet the scale of the atrocity alone is not why we remember it. We remember because the men of Srebrenica were betrayed by their ostensible protectors, and that carries some lessons for today.

But Christopher Hitchens is far more brutal.

We still have to endure the disgrace (and the victims and survivors have to endure the humiliation) of knowing that Mladic and his psychopathic political boss Radovan Karadzic are still cheerfully at large. They are not hiding in some dingy cave in the unmapped hinterlands of Waziristan. They are in mainland Europe. Last Friday, when the New York Times covered both the London atrocities and the coming anniversary of Srebrenica, it ran an editorial that smugly inquired “why the wealthy nations have not done enough about the root causes of terrorism and why Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden continue to function after almost four years of the so-called war on terrorism. Many will wonder why the United States is mired in Iraq while Al Qaeda’s leader still roams free.”

Prettily phrased, you have to admit. Others might wonder why the wealthy nations took so long to address the “root cause” of Serbian terrorism-­-the root cause being Serbian fascism and irredentism­–and why it is that Mladic and Karadzic are still gloatingly free after 10 years, not four. The “hunt” for the latter two gentlemen began during the Clinton administration, and on the turf of the sophisticated and multilateral Europeans, as the writer of the above words might have had the grace to admit.

Aljazeera.com also weighs in–and attracts a lot of reader comments.

People in the West who lazily look back on the 1990s as the good old days fail to realize just how much diplomatic, economic, military, and moral credibility the West–the UN, EU, US, NATO–squandered during that halcyon decade before the end of history reversed itself so abruptly at the end of the millennium.

In the summer of 1984, I remember the great relief of returning to normalcy, to the tolerably functional societies of the West after spending a year in Ceausescu’s Romania, the bleakest and most dysfunctional society I have yet encountered. (I know there are, have been, and will be worse.) We could easily endure Romania because we knew that we would eventually escape to a better place. The Romanians, however, remained trapped in their hell, whose brimstone has taken a long time to lose its potency even after the fall of Ceausescu.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, one safe area after another has been attacked from either the inside or the outside, until normalcy has come to include the possibility of yet another outbreak of savage barbarism any place, any time. As last week’s attacks in London reminded us yet again, there is nowhere left to hide. We can only meet those threats head on, anywhere and everywhere, with violent warnings where necessary, as we should have done in Bosnia and Rwanda, while steadily destroying the attraction of the noxious ideologies that feed the barbarism.

Here’s more from David Aaronovitch in The Times Online: ‘If we don’t provoke them, maybe they will leave us alone.’ You reckon so?

Jim Hoagland’s column in last Thursday’s Washington Post exposed an unusual angle on the hostage-taking business in Iraq.

Three haggard Romanian journalists appeared on al-Jazeera television April 22, in handcuffs and with guns pointed at their heads, to beg for their lives. They would be killed if Romania did not immediately withdraw its 860 troops from Iraq, their captors announced to the world….

There is a happy ending to this particular story: The Romanian government, which rejected any troop withdrawals, managed to win the journalists’ freedom a month after their suffering was exploited on al-Jazeera. With the help of Iraq’s besieged authorities, Bucharest has also unraveled many details of the kidnapping plot.

That investigation in turn contributed to the freeing Sunday of French journalist Florence Aubenas and her Iraqi translator, Hussein Hanoun Saadi. They and the Romanians were held on a “hostage farm” north of Baghdad by one of the local networks that traffic in foreign and Iraqi hostages. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin publicly thanked Romania on Tuesday for its help.

Criminality became ingrained in Iraqi society during the long and brutal rule of Saddam Hussein, and it did not disappear with the U.S. invasion. Many of those who finance or commit the bombings and other atrocities that flash nightly on American television screens, where the violence is interpreted uniformly as a political phenomenon, fight to be able to return to crime-as-usual in Iraq.

The Romanian case also casts new light on the strong connections that united the Iraqi dictator — and other Arab leaders — with the intelligence services and political establishments of the Soviet bloc for three decades. As they made cause against the United States together, they also made money together.

The U.N. oil-for-food scandal is in many ways only a small strand in the vast web of international corruption and violence spun around the Middle East’s oil riches….

The [Romanian] election last December of a democratic government headed by President Traian Basescu [who ran as an anticorruption candidate] has finally opened the files of the Romanian Intelligence Service …

O să fie foarte interesant, cred eu.