Interview what the generation should know that Ion Iliescu / Alina Mungiu-Pippidi should not know about “sin that cannot be forgiven” to the former president

The national funerals for Ion Iliescu I cannot delete the rupture left in society, says the political science teacher Alina Mungiu-Pippidi. In an interview for the Hotnews public, she speaks of the “guilty silence” of the former president and how the violence of the 1990s has left to Romania an innocent wound: “Society's tearing remains the sin that cannot be forgiven.”

• What should the young people know about Ion Iliescu? “We can only tell the truth about him or tomorrow the Romanians vote on one who wants to abolish all the political parties,” says Mungiu Pippidi.

Former President Ion Iliescu was buried on Thursday, with military honors, at the Ghencea Military III Cemetery, after two days of state funerals.

Professor of political science Alina Mungiu-Pippidi speaks, in an interview for the public Hotnews, about the public significance of the moment and about how Ion Iliescu's figure is reflected in today's Romanian society.

“A huge confusion”

– HotNews: What is the symbolic power of state funerals and the day of national mourning decreed for Ion Iliescu: historical reconciliation or another innocent wound?
– Alina Mungiu Pippidi: The national funerals are granted on the Romanian legislation to all the heads of state, who are taken to the pit with military honors, whether they collaborated with the Security, they called the miners to destroy the political opposition and the press, they were fired with two million euros on the people's money and further. To be chosen in the supreme function becomes a rent, with a protocol house and at the pension and with the army that draws salve after death.

What is significant at the death of Iliescu is the enormous confusion: you would say that Iohannis was a criminal that he went with expensive aircraft, and Iliescu, whom nobody invites anywhere, because he was not frequent, was a hero that he saved the money of external transport. In fact, Iohannis was only a weak president, and who was criminally investigated for crimes against humanity when he died is Iliescu.

The image calculations of politicians

– How do you interpret the political reactions that accompanied the death of former President Ion Iliescu?
– The positions of the actors are pragmatic. PSD needs that Iliescu is respected, because, without him, they did not exist. And that's how they entered the water, the coalition partners and the prime minister need a parliamentary majority, and not the scandal, so they also pay tributes. And USR makes some scandal, however, there is a great anti-PSD electorate, which chose them. Nicușor Dan positioned well.

But ignorance and lack of discernment are so great that neither admiration nor hatred towards Ion Iliescu are not based on facts. The Romanian society has never been able to become a society of the truth, and Iliescu's posterity is another episode of the series from elections, in which the fact that the Dacians had a greater contribution than the Romanians to the Universal History, and George Soros, not Nicolae Ceausescu, brought Romania to the wooden dig are no longer an aberration.

But let's not forget, in 1990 I had 83% Romanians who believed to have only one party was better than more, who voted Ion Iliescu on May 20. Many are still alive, and politicians get to where they get to tell the people that they never make mistakes.

What the generation should not know that Ion Iliescu knows

– For a generation that did not live the 1990s and does not understand the influence of Ion Iliescu, what are the essential things he should know about him and about the impact of his decisions on today's Romania? For example, did Romania deviate from a faster development path or was it one of the artisans of Euro -Atlantic integration?
– Ion Iliescu made several fundamental contributions, but most of the evils. The good one is that he did with Stănculescu (General Victor Ataches Stănculescu – no) an understanding that the army would take down Ceausescu. Unfortunately, the Security was a bit opposite, and then they made an understanding. I was the only revolution in the east that paid with a thousand dead the change that came from Gorbachev anyway.

Major Florescu (Major Mugurel Florescu participated, in 1989, in the trial of the Ceausescu spouses, in which the verdict was the conviction of the two dictators-no), who arrived in a year and decided in all the dead not to do ballistic examination so that we never found out, was a boy of Ion Iliescu. The burial of the truth from the beginning led to accusations of stolen revolution and mined the Romanian democratic transition, actually started in 1996.

I did not agree that Iliescu nonagenar would be investigated by the prosecutors, but he never came out to say clearly what choices he made then, to be a conclusion for the dead and their families.

At the miners from 1990 and 1992 he was even more guilty, that he was the only actor, called a population faction, led by civilians in civil, to destroy a peaceful opposition, students, journalists and people from the capital who happened on the street. At the end he thanked them and the police closed the aggressors, not the aggressors.

“According to the mine of 1990, I fled to Switzerland, that their party newspapers were unmasking me on page 1 “

The president of France, Francois Mitterand,, in the summer of 1990, to be released and encouraged Iliescu, whom the Americans did not want to see, to build a democracy with French support. He promised to open the door to the west.

If the coup in Moscow did not fail a year later, we would all get to prison. According to the mine of 1990, I fled to Switzerland, that their party newspapers were unmasked on page 1 (I was a 25 -year -old resident) and I advised with Dr. Vianu, one of the few signatories of “Charter 77” with Paul Goma, whether or not to ask for political asylum. Only I returned from all my colleagues, and from the young people who worked with me in the student opinion, everyone was beaten by miners, one remained with epilepsy.

Hardly, with pressure from the Council of Europe, Romania progressed to democracy and Iliescu was convinced that the road is to the EU and NATO. Because most of the population wanted in the EU and NATO, that's why Iliescu went in this direction, not the other way around.

With the economy, his merits are even smaller, Ion Iliescu, an uncorrupted man, obsessed with power and control, not by wealth, is the creator of state capitalism, in which the state, not the market, decides who enriches. He didn't do it. He wanted only an economic transition to control.

While the Estonians simplified the laws to give the power of the simple man, the land or houses were given to us to return the land or houses, which only led to corruption. Millions of people have reached the courts for two decades. Even today who buys something in us can not be sure of whom it is, has created only conflicts between categories of valid titles and on one side, and on the other, as I told in my book about Scornicești and Nucșoara, “Secera and Buldozer” (Polirom 2002).

“He died without any bad opinion. We can only tell the truth about him ”

The fence of society remains the sin that cannot be forgiven. Not even in Russia was shouted after 1990 “Death to the intellectuals!” Or “Death to students!”, As it was in us in 1990, when the women at the Apca factory encouraged the miners to beat in whom we wore glasses.

Maybe Ion Iliescu, an educated tone, should have told us to tell us that he regrets that the price of his power was so high? I was against the lustration, that we would have divided the society, and I defended it by prosecutors, that justice does not solve secrets and do not fight with nonagenari, so we did not treat it as he treated us.

But he died without any bad opinion, without a word of regret for the victims. Because of this we can only tell the truth about him, it is not the time to be compliant. The truth – or tomorrow the Romanians vote on one who wants to abolish all the political parties.