Andrei Postelnicu on Romania's struggle with its past

Writing in the daily newspaper Evenimentul Zilei, Andrei Postelnicu examines the hidden dangers of the process of coming to terms with the past in Romania. "Without further ado the parliament has whitewashed [former Romanian dictator] Nicolae Ceauşescu, claiming he had no foreign bank accounts. Ex-president Ion Iliescu is also to be spared the inconvenience of criminal prosecution for an abominable moral genocide: the [organised] violent march of the miners in Bucharest in 1990. Both gestures are very much in keeping with an old and extremely destructive trend the repercussions of which we will feel for decades to come. One can see how seriously these two semi-acquittals are to be taken by examining other gestures society has had to put up with in the past two decades - such as the Church's decision to ignore the fact that many priests collaborated with Securitate [the secret service of Communist Romania] or the trivialisation of the moral component in the process of restitution of property confiscated under communism. Taken together they [the acquittals] reflect Romania's propensity to sweep unpleasant chapters of the past under the carpet - facts we don't feel comfortable with and which, if we could, we would simply obliterate from our history. ... Our repeated failure to make sense of our own past only deepens our collective emotional paralysis. ... Society as a whole must bear the burden of anger and disappointment - an obstacle on the path to honesty in Romania's dialogue with itself."    

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