APPEAL FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNATION
Data: Monday, May 22 @ 22:41:25 CEST
Topic: Apeluri. Societatea civila


APPEAL FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNATION
OF THE CRIMINALITY AND ILLEGITIMACY OF COMMUNISM


O p e n l e t t e r t o :

THE UNITED NATIONS
CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES
THE PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY OF THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE
THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


Sorin Iliesiu (the author of the present letter): “Communist Romania was like
a huge political prison, from which there was no escape, a gigantic penitentiary in which twenty-three million
innocent people endured a criminal and absurd sentence handed down by the fatality of history.”


“Communism seemed to have been installed definitively and irrevocably. Its collapse seemed possible only theoretically, in a much too distant future. Nevertheless, we dared to dream, at least for the future of our future grandchildren. Only our dreams eluded the omnipresent censorship, because they could neither be controlled, nor denounced, nor even subjected to self-censorship. But unlike dreams, our hopes were conscious and lucid, and thus inevitably subject to self-censorship. This is why we did not have very high hopes.”

George W. Bush, Riga, May 7, 2005: “The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition
of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated,
the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake
of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe
will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.”

“We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny,
and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability. We have learned our lesson. No one’s liberty
is expendable. In the long run, our security, and true stability, depend on the freedom of theirs.”


Excerpt from page 7 of the report attached to this letter: “Victims were transformed into executioners; prisoners were tortured by their own friends, by their fellows in suffering. The purpose: “re-education” through physical and psychical destruction, the transformation of young people into atheists, into informers on their friends. Examples of psychological torture: a) On Easter Night, prisoners who refused to make a total self-denunciation (to tell everything that they were supposed not to have declared during Securitate interrogations) are forced to take a ‘holy communion’ of faecal matter; b) Those suspected of having concealed information about participants in anticommunist actions have their heads thrust by their torturers into chamber-pots full of urine; c) Prisoners are forced to spit in the mouth of their anticommunist leader, in order to force him to revenge himself by unmasking them; d). On Christmas Day, a prisoner is forced to go to stool on a bedpan, to ‘symbolise’ the nativity of Christ, while the other political prisoners are forced to kneel and cross themselves before him. (…) The Pitesti experiment is regarded as unique in the panoply of methods designed to destroy the human person. In his celebrated book The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn refers to the Pitesti experiment as the ‘most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world’”.

Sorin Iliesiu: “In the end, communism fell into its own trap, deluding itself that the total lie
could function even against human nature and – why not – even against God Himself, Who, obviously,
had to be replaced by something and somebody. What and who could be a replacement for God?
At the same time as they negated Him, the communist dictators attempted to take His place.”


André Malraux: “The Twenty First Century will be religious or not at all.”


“Universal history is nothing more than the recurrence of catastrophes in the expectation of one final catastrophe”, wrote Emil Cioran, reflecting, probably, on the apocalyptic death toll of the catastrophes that occurred last century: ten million victims in the First World War; fifty-five million victims in the Second World War; ten million people murdered in the name of Nazism; one hundred million people murdered in the name of communism.
We must make it impossible for such catastrophes to reoccur. Nazism has been condemned in just and exemplary fashion. Communism and its crimes must similarly be condemned. This will only be possible through knowledge of the whole truth. Due to lack of knowledge, or superficial knowledge, at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 25 January 2006 many parliamentarians of the highest European forum for the defence of human rights and the rule of law voted against the motion to condemn communism, ignoring the arguments put forward by Mr Göran Lindblad, the initiator of the motion. We are convinced that only when the whole truth is known can such a vote be just.
In this highly necessary motion, Mr Göran Lindblad referred to the figure of one hundred million people killed in the name of communist ideology. However, as well as those murdered, there were also billions of victims of other crimes against humanity. In the communist bloc, human rights were concealed precisely in order to be flagrantly and systematically violated. In Lenin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Ceausescu’s Romania, communism signified continual, indirect murder for the majority.
In the name of all the victims of communism, we solicit that the United Nations, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Congress of the United States of America should firmly condemn the crimes and illegitimacy of communism as soon as possible and should take decisions that will ensure that such crimes will never again be possible.
I propose that the representatives of civil society in the former communist countries should solicit from national and international authorities the firm condemnation of the crimes and illegitimacy of communism. The official arguments necessary for such international condemnation can be obtained by following the most natural path, in the same way as we have proceeded in Romania. Thus, as representative of civil society, I launched an appeal for the official condemnation of the crimes of communism in April 2005. The President of Romania, Traian Basescu, affirmed that he would condemn these crimes on the basis of an official report. In October 2005, I presented him an unofficial report (of 11 pages), attached to the present letter. Subsequently, my Appeal was signed by hundreds of prestigious intellectuals and by leading civic organisations.
In response to the Appeal, the President of Romania decided to establish a presidential committee in order that an official report might be drawn up. Of course, this report will be much more comprehensive than the one I have drawn up, inasmuch as it will benefit from access to still secret archives, as well as the competence of the twenty members of the committee, co-ordinated by the prestigious Vladimir Tismaneanu, professor of political science at the University of Maryland (USA). Thus, at the end of this year, Romania will be the first country in which there will take place, in full knowledge of the facts, an exemplary condemnation of the illegitimacy and criminality of communism.
I consider that the whole world should recognise the extreme forms taken by the criminality of the communist regime in Romania. Here are two examples: 1) Relative to the size of the population, Romania had the highest number of victims subject to extermination; 2) during the anticommunist revolution of December 1989, unarmed and panic-stricken masses of people were massacred: more than 1,100 dead and over 3,300 wounded, whereas in other communist countries the totalitarian regimes collapsed with no (or almost no) victims. It was not by chance that, four months after the revolution, the longest anticommunist meeting in history took place in the capital of Romania (fifty-two days and nights without interruption), a demonstration that was repressed with unprecedented brutality.
I should underline the fact that, fifteen years after the fall of communism, while researching the unofficial report presented to the President of Romania, I discovered terrible things of which I had previously known almost nothing. I could not believe that so many and so terrible atrocities had been possible. Most of them were hidden. Some horrors we experienced personally, of others we was aware only partially. We knew only little about the whole. Our parents hid the truth from us precisely because they feared for us: any form of protest could have been fatal. Today, young people know nothing or virtually nothing about these horrors.
Ultimately, all these horrors will be rigorously analysed and summarised in the future official document for the condemnation of the communist regime in Romania.
We therefore propose that the representatives of civil society in the former communist countries should follow the example of civil society in Romania, so that the entire world might recognise the whole truth about the crimes of communism, in order that they will never be possible again anywhere.
The international condemnation of the illegitimacy and criminality of the communist regime must take place in full knowledge of the facts, within a global conference. In symbolic fashion, such a conference might take place in Romania, in the huge palace built by Ceausescu, the last Stalinist in Europe.

Sorin Iliesiu, vice-president of the Civic Alliance of Romania (since December 2005), member of the Group for Social Dialogue, one of the former four million bit-part players of the Romanian Communist Party. I point out that my parents, grandparents, and wife were not political prisoners.


Romania, Bucharest, 17 May 2006

Translated by Alistair Blyth







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