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Colonel Mugurel Florescu, head o f the Military Procuracy Directorate.^®® The commander of another much suspected unit, USLA, Colonel Gheorghe Ardeleanu, appeared at the shoulder of Diescu during the meeting held to formally constitute the NSF at the Central Committee building suggesting that this unit also rapidly came onto the side of the new regime and this supposition is sustained by all avail able circumstantial evidence.^®® Depositions made to the Senatorial Commission o f Inquiry state quite clearly that troops from the Officers School of the Ministry o f Interior at Baneasa returned to barracks on 22 December and were confined there from thence onwards and, from the available evidence concerning events at
O topeni, the troops of the School for Non-Com m issioned Officers of the Securitate
troops were also deployed on behalf of the revolution as were the Securitate troops
and other Securitate units in general.^®^ Further evidence suggesting the bulk, if
not all of the Securitate, imm ediately aligned themselves with the revolution also
comes from the night of 22 /2 3 December when Diescu appears to have spoken with
a number of Securitate commanders including M ajor-General Ovidiu Diaconescu,
head of the Technical and Transmission Command, and Major-General Alexandru Tencu, head of surveiUance operations.^®®
Uncertainty as to which units might have been involved was reflected in the continuing confusion over the number of ^terrorists'. Brucan speaking on 28 De cember mirrored Diescu by suggesting they were few in number when he said that
perhaps no more than ninety Securitate m en were still loose in the capital; how
ever, on the next day, 29 December, Cazimir lonescu suggested that far greater numbers were involved saying that although * several thousand security policemen' had surrendered, several thousand were stiD estim ated to be at large.^®® After the end of the flghting Colonel-General Vasile lonel, although adm itting that the ex act number of ‘terrorists' was stiU unknown, suggested that several thousand had been involved in the flghting and, indeed, there was an im m ediate post-Ceau§escu tendency for army sources to play-up the number of ‘terrorists’ and their capa bilities largely, it seems, to legitim ate their own position and to ‘explain' the high levels of material damage and destruction.^®®
At first sight, firmer evidence for the existence of ‘terrorists' comes from the incontrovertible fact that large numbers of suspects were arrested during the rev olution with countless reports speaking of dubious characters being held, and the new political leadership reassuring an anxious population that thousands were under detention.^®^ Indeed, Brucan in his efforts to prove the existence of the ‘terrorists' has produced detailed Ministry of Defence breakdowns o f the number of arrests. One of these purports to show that on 4 January 1990 the army held
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608 suspects. The vast majority of these were detained in four cities: Bucharest where 179 were held; Sibiu, 171; Braila, 134 and Timi§oara, eighty-nine with the remainder spread across a few other centres: Alba Julia where three were held; Arad, one; Bra§ov, seven; Caran§ebes, one; Curtea de Arge§, seventeen; Foc§ani, three and Gala^i, three.^*^ However, by August 1990, the picture was fast be coming extremely clouded with the vast majority of cases not being brought to trial. By that date proceedings had started against 147 defendants, 134 of whom
were under arrest including nine Securitate generals, thirty-four Securitate offi
cers, forty-seven officers of the militia together with six other ranks, three army officers together with three other ranks and thirty-five senior Party officials. Of the seventy-nine cases already judged thirty had been convicted whilst investigations were continuing into a further 638 cases tw enty-tw o for acts of terrorism.^**
Contemporary accounts of the revolution give a vivid picture of an atm o sphere of aU pervading paranoia in which the level of mutual fear and suspicion reached such a pitch that it sparked off an apparently never ending cycle of arrest and release. This comes over particularly strongly in the accounts contained in
Revoîuiia Rom ânà tn direct where it seems that, at one tim e or another, nearly every civilian in the TV centre was detained as a suspect ‘t e r r o r i s t W i t h the mushrooming of checkpoints and barricades, both official and unofficial, across the country vast numbers of people were detained if only temporarily. The Mil itary Procurator’s office from 26 December 1989 began to investigate the case of some 200 of those held in Bucharest. Of these they discovered that some were held for specific crimes relating to stealing from the Central Committee building, RCP offices or other state owned premises, whilst others were armed civilians who had participated in the events and been detained for intem perate behaviour. A few others seem to have taken advantage of the situation to settle long-standing scores by denouncing enemies to the authorities, although these of course may have
sometimes been members of the Securitate. However, m ost arrests seem to have
been related to the general climate of suspicion. Often on the flimsiest o f excuses men lying wounded in hospitals were detained for wearing different clothes, whilst others were held for being in a different zone from where they lived, or perhaps because without any valid reason they were near a building from which gunshots had been heard. More controversial were those who had been released after be ing held for flghting with supporters of the revolution — Florescu is not specific what is implied here but presumably these disputes were at the level of public arguments and fisticuffs rather than counter-revolutionary activity — and most
contentious of all were those detained because they belonged to the Securitate
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the crux of the problem, because the accusation is that many of those who were guilty of crimes were surreptitiously released by their own com rades-in-arm s once they were transferred to m ilitia stations and other places of detention. Following this line, Brucan and Militaru have charged that in this way many of the ^terror ists’ were allowed to escaped through Hungary and Turkey.^** Certainly, at the TV General Tudor seems to have either released those held or sent them to local m ilitia stations where they were freed by others. At that tim e and since, Tudor re ceived much criticism for this but a prosecutor’s report says that of those released by him and subsequently investigated none were found to have com m itted acts of a terrorist nature, and the many eyewitness accounts from the TV also seem to suggest that the vast majority of those detained were the victim s of revolutionary enthusiasm.
The passage of tim e has rendered the ‘terrorists’ little more visible than they were during the darkest hours of the revolution. Although, not all of the many
units of the Securitate have been fully accounted for and the circumstances proba
bly varied in each city, the picture that emerges from Bucharest is of no organised opposition to the incoming NSF from any of the Ministry of Interior forces. A
more apt scenario may be that from the flight of Ceau§escu members of the Secu
ritate, like many of those in positions of authority, waited with bated breath to see which way the tide would turn. In their various institutes and other places of work
Securitate members broke open arms stores and took up guard positions, as they would say ‘on behalf of the revolution’, but, in reality, with as much a thought to securing their own protection as anything else, for they had much to fear hav ing become so closely identified in the public mind with the sinking Ceau§escu regime. Adhering to neither one side nor the other they rested in an ambiguous void, and it is this very ambiguity that may have led to some of the violence as they were challenged by or, indeed, challenged the revolution. The behaviour of Gçneral Vlad, first staying close to the attem pts to reform the faltering RCP and, only after this had failed, rather belatedly coming to the side of the Diescu group
mirrors this process. However, by the tim e Vlad and the other Securitate leaders
had made fuU protestations of loyalty to the new regime both the public and the
new leaders had embraced the idea of the Securitate ‘terrorists’ and once set in
m otion this idea proved impossible to halt, largely because the proffered image so closely matched popular mythology.
The image of the ‘terrorists’ as portrayed by the leaders of the NSF gained
public acceptance because it fitted popular perceptions of the Securitate as a sinis