By: Christina Andronache
Ten years ago, on December 15, 1989, Father Laszlo Tokes protested the
injustices of the Romanian government.
Hours later, Father Tokes’ protest would turn into a revolution that
would change the course of history in Romania—a communist satellite of the
Soviet Union. In a lot of ways, the
future looked brighter for Romania, but as with everything that’s good, there’s
the proverbial “silver lining.” Yes,
Romania seemed to be moving gradually to a free market economy, but other grave
problems that did not exist before started to arise soon. Romania started seeing its first street
children. Before, the totalitarian
government of Ceausescu had kept all these children locked up in the infamous
Romanian orphanages, but once the Revolution started, the children, maybe
feeling a bit of the revolutionary euphoria, broke the gates of the orphanages
and took to the streets. However, never
having had any parental guidance and with very limited school teaching,
sniffing glue, pimping for prostitutes, prostituting themselves, and living in
subway stations became these children’s pastime—or means of survival.
To understand where these children
suddenly came from and to understand why they have become limited to being
street children, one needs to look at Romania and its political situation. These children are not a spontaneous result
of the Romanian revolution; rather they are a lingering and surviving hallmark of the Ceausescu
regime.
Brief
history of Romania
Romania
during the WWII
In
the years leading up to WWII, Romania sought security in an alliance with
France and Britain, and joined Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in the Little
Entente. Always having had close ties
with France, Romania was isolated from the European community after the fall of
France in 1940.
Shortly after, in June 1940,
the USSR occupied Bessarabia which had been taken from Russia after WWI. To aggravate the situation even further, on August 30, 1940, Romania was forced to
cede northern Transylvania to Hungary by the order of Nazi Germany and Fascist
Italy, and in September southern Dobroja was given to Bulgaria. These changes
created mass hysteria and on the advice of one of his councilors, the king
called the General Marshall Ion Antonescu.
In order to appease the masses, General Antonescu convinced the king,
Carol II, to abdicate in favor of his 19 year old son Mihai. Soon thereafter, General Antonescu allowed
German troops to enter Romania and in June 1941 Antnescu joined Hitler’s anti-Soviet
war. Antonescu’s aim was to recover Bessarabia and this was accomplished in
August 1941. During this time, 40,000
Jews were sent to Auschwitz (Randolph). However, throughout WWII, anti-Nazi
resentment spread among the Romanian soldiers and people who had witnessed the
atrocities of the Antonescu goernment.
Hence, as the war went badly and the Soviet army approached Romania’s
borders, a surprising national consensus was achieved. On August 23, 1944,
Romania suddenly changed sides, captured 55,000 German soldiers who were in
Romania at the time and declared war on Nazi Germany. By October 25, the Romanian and Soviet armies had driven the
Hungarian and German forces from Transylvania. The Romanian army went on to
fight in Hungary and Czechoslovakia (Costin).
The
Communist Era
Before 1945,
Romania’s Communist Party had no more than 1,000 members and had little
influence in the political and social schemes.
After the war, however, the Communist party’s membership soared to over
one million due to direct backing from Moscow. The Soviet-engineered return of
Transylvania greatly enhanced the prestige of the left-wing parties, which won
the parliamentary elections in November 1946.
Just a year later, again with the backing of the Soviet Union, Prime
Minister Petru Groza forced King Mihai to abdicate. The monarchy was abolished and a Romanian People’s Republic was
proclaimed.
Soon thereafter, a period of
state terror ensued in which all the pre-war leaders, prominent intellectuals
and suspected dissidents were imprisoned and interned in hard-labor camps.
Peasants who opposed the integral plan
of the communist party to collectivize the agriculture were also thrown into
these labor camps. In 1948, the
Communist and the Social Democratic parties united as the Romanian’s Workers’
Party. On June 11, 1948 a law on nationalization was passed paving the way for
the state control of the country’s industrial factories, mines and businesses
which came to represent ninety percent of the country’s production by
1950. At the same time, a new
constitution mirroring the Russian model was introduced, thus pre-emptying the
intense period of the Russification of Romania. By 1953 even street names were being changed to honor Soviet
figures (Dinu).
Romania’s loyalty to Moscow
continued until the late 1950’s when Romania started to gradually distance
itself from the Communism proscribed by Moscow. When Soviet troops were withdrawn from Romania in 1958, street
names where once again changed, but this time to reflect the Roman
heritage. After 1960 Romania adopted an
independent foreign policy under two national communist leaders, Gheorghe
Gheorghiu-Dej and his protégé Nicolae Ceausescu, both of whom had been
imprisoned during WWII. Under the
leadership of Gheorgiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceausescu a national Socialist state was
flaunted.
Unlike other Warsaw Pact
countries, Romania was allowed to deviate from the official Soviet line. While it still remained a member of the
Warsaw pact, Romania did not participate in joint military manoeuvres after 1962.
Romania, unlike China or Yugoslavia, never broke with the Soviet
Union. Even when ordered by Moscow to
help in the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ceausescu refused. He even condemned the invasion and publicly deemed
it a “shameful moment in the history f the revolutionary movement,” earning him
praises and economic aid from the West.
In 1975 Romania was granted MFN status by the US which yielded more than
one billion US dollars in US-backed credits in the decade that followed. When Romania further aggravated the Soviet
leadership by condemning the invasion of Afghanistan and participated in the
1984 Los Angeles Olympic games despite a Soviet bloc boycott, Ceausescu was
officially decorated by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth.
Although Ceausescu’s early foreign policy was successful, his domestic policies were at best chaotic. Ordinary citizens were kept in check by the Ministry of the Interior’s security police whose informers were also ordinary citizens. The personal liberty of Romanians was further infringed on by a 1966 law which made abortion illegal. Childbirth became nothing more than another of the nations’s great industries. Women were required to have at least four children and the use of contraceptives was forbidden. Routine gynecological Party checks were carried out on women in an attempt to stop illegal abortions (Kligman).
By the 1980s with the
disintegration of the Soviet Union, the West no longer appreciated Ceausescu’s
efforts to oppose the Soviet communism.
The U.S. no longer gave money to Romania and it withdrew its MFN status. However, Ceausescu continued to spend large
sums of money to make Bucharest a showcase socialist capital. At the same time, Ceausescu decided to pay
off all his foreign debts. Thus, food started to be exported and bread
rationing was introduced in 1981.
Rationing on eggs, flour, oil, salt, sugar, beef, and potatoes quickly
followed. Thus, after 1980, it became
increasingly difficult for families to support their “mandatory” four children
(Dinu).
1989
Romanian Revolution
As the Soviet bloc was disintegrating and the world
was watching the collapse of one communist regime after another, Romania’s
dictator, Ceausescu was still going strong. On November 20, 1989, during a six
hour address to the 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party,
Ceausescu denounced the political changes
sweeping across Eastern Europe and vowed to resist them (Deletant).
However, the spark of the
revolutions of Eastern Europe would soon ignite in Romania too. On December 15,
1989 Father Laszlo Tokes spoke out publicly against Ceausescu in his small
parish. The following evening people gathered outside Father Tokes’ home to
protest his removal from his post. By
9p.m., the gathering turned into a noisy demonstration. When the police began to make arrests, the
demonstration was a full scale revolution that was spreading through the major
Romanian cities (Deletant).
Miscalculating the masses
once again, on December 21, 1989, Ceausescu decided to address a mass rally in
front of the Central Committee building in Bucharest, to show the world that
the workers of Romania approved of the military action against the “hooligan”
demonstrators in Timisoara. Factories
around Bucharest dutifully sent their workers to applaud Ceausescu’s speech;
however, when they arrived they were told that Ceausescu changed his mind about
making the speech. A few hours later,
Ceausescu once again wanted to make the speech. When Ceausescu finally began addressing the crowd of 100,000 from
the balcony of the Central Committee building, youths who were being held back
by three cordons of police started booing.
Ceausescu stopped in the middle of his sentence when he heard the
“murderer” shouts. With a 100,000
people gathered in the same place, the Romanian police could do very little to
stop the pandemonium
that had erupted (Deletant).
For a week, the meek, submissive, fear-stricken
Romanians, took to the streets and told the world that something new had to
replace the oppression they have been enduring and nothing less than Ceausescu
gone would appease them. On December 24 Ceausescu and his wife were tried by an
anonymous court, condemned and promptly executed by a a firing squad
(Deletant).
Romania
between 1990-1997
Many people now argue that
reformers in the Communist Party had been preparing a coup d’etat against Ceausescu and his family for at least six
months when the December 1989 Revolution forced them to move their schedule
ahead. When Ceausescu fell, the
National Salvation Front was ready to take over under the leadership of Ion
Iliescu, a former Communist leader.
Assuming power right after the first
hours of the December revolution, the FSN claimed to be the caretaker of the
government until a new government would be elected. It also said that it would not field any candidates. On January
25, however, the FSN declared that it would run in the upcoming elections
(Iliescu). This prompted mass demonstrations both for and against the FSN amid
charges of neo-communism.
On May 20, 1990 the election race
was won by Ion Iliescu of the FSN who had gotten 85% of the vote. The FSN also won control of the National
Assembly and Senate. In the meantime students, communism’s most staunch opposers,
occupied Piata Universitatii to protest against the FSN’s ex-Communist
leadership. On June 13, protesters started burning police headquarters. In
desperation, Iliescu called into Bucharest the miners of Jiu Valley for a
counter-riot. The miners promptly arrived and with sticks as their only
weapons, managed to beat and kill many of the Iliescu protesters. Now by
force, Iliescu once again won Romania’s
leadership (Deletant).
The miners returned once again in
September to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Petre Roman, whose
free-market reforms had led to worsening living conditions. Roman’s departure was a serious setback for
Romania’s economy and reform process.
In October 1992, Iliescu was
re-elected president, leading a coalition government under the banner of the
Party of Social Democracy. Iliescu’s
government was slow in making reforms and integrating Romania into the free
market of the West. Thus, despite a
period of relative political stability under Iliescu, most Romanians remained
disillusioned. Although abortions had
been re-legalized in 1990, and freedom of speech and travel re-instated, this
served as little compensation for the vast majority. In 1993 subsidies on food,
transportation and energy were scrapped prompting inflation to spiral out of
control (500 to 600% inflation). Declining
living standards, rampant inflation, high unemployment, and corruption in a
government perceived by most as a neo-communist bureaucracy, was the primary
angst of the people that went to the 1996 elections (U.S. Congress).
Sluggish reforms and pre-election
spending in late 1996 by Iliescu’s neo-communist brigade had led to the halt of
the International Monetary Fund and World Bank lending programs. Also, during the seven years Iliescu was in
power following Ceausescu’s fall, foreign investment in Romania remained
thinner than in any other eastern European country—attracting just over $2.5
billion dollars.
Thus, in 1996 it was a bitter and disillusioned
electorate that went to the polls. They
voted overwhelmingly for a new government led by Emil Constantinescu, the
leader of the reform-minded Democratic Convention of Romania.
Romania
Today
Since early 1997 Romania has been a country on the
move. Romania has gone through many
economic and social reforms, the majority of which have not made any
significant impact on the poor people’s lives.
Poverty is still a major gripe—over 1000 street children squat in
Bucharest’s train stations, the number of children infected with the HIV virus
continues to rise, prostitution is yet to be curbed, and the average monthly
salary remains at no more than $80 (U.S. dollars).
From
Ceausescu’s Orphans to Today’s Street Children
In 1966 Ceausescu’s regime made abortion illegal and
each family had an obligation to the state to have at least four children. In a world where 10 eggs, 4 kilos of flour,
1 kilo of meat, and a pound of butter per person was the norm for a month’s
supply of food, many Romanian families could not possibly support more than the
required minimum quota of children, and that too was done with great
efforts. However, with abortion being
illegal, many parents could only keep their first four children and put the
rest in orphanages.
Also, during Ceausescu’s reign, frequent
malnutrition and low standards of living caused the life expectancy rate to be
significantly lower than in most developed countries. This led to many parents dying at an early age. Hence, many relatives, being as poor as the
parents that died, had no choice but to put the surviving children in
orphanages. Moreover, the malnutrition
of mothers during pregnancy and the lack of routine pregnancy drugs/medical
attention led to many babies being born with birth defects. These unfortunate children would be
immediately put into orphanages not only because they would require expensive
and unavailable medical attention, but also because they would be a burden on
the family later on in life by not being able to support themselves and the
family.
Many other children would end up in orphanages
because of abusive family situations.
During the communist regime, drinking oneself to oblivion was a way of
life when nothing else was available. When bread was scarce, Russian vodka was
not only readily available, but it was also very cheap. Although a way of life, vodka led to many
abusive family situation. With no
institutions or laws to protect the children, Romanian parents were not only
allowed but were entitled to beat their children—in their attempts to
discipline them. Hence, many terrified
children would take to the streets and wonder far from home. Being too young to remember how to get back
home and without their parents making a concerted effort to retrieve them,
these children would be found by Ceausescu’s police and immediately placed in
state orphanages. During Ceausescu’s
regime, people were not allowed to linger in the streets. Thus, if the police came upon a drunk
individual this individual would immediately be imprisoned and punished for
loitering. Punishments could include
corporal punishments or money deducted from the person’s salary. In the same
vein, if children would be found on the streets, the police would put them in
an orphanage until some family member would make an effort to claim them. In
most cases, however, the family members of these children would not be too
concerned about the disappearance of one of their children.
Thus, it is not surprising that Romania is mentioned without fail in conjunction with
the word “orphanages.” Along with hard
living conditions and a nationalist anti-Soviet Communism, orphanages are the
hallmark of the Ceausescu dictatorship. Maybe, most disturbingly, was that these orphanages were not a
safe haven for these children. In
Ceausescu’s Romanian orphanages, medical care was lacking, hygiene was nonexistent,
food and warmth were in short supply.
Orphanages were the “skeletons in the Romanian Socialist State’s
closet.” While Ceausescu was spending
enormous amounts of money building the model socialist capital, Romania’s
orphanages were multiplying. Ceausescu
failed to see abandoned children as real people and did not think they would be
important to Communism’s survival. Thus, not wanting to waste money on such an
inconsequential matter such as the personnel of these orphanages, the children
were mistreated and often abused by the impatient staff (Delaney).
Romania’s dramatic revolution of 1989 caught the
imagination of the world. In the
aftermath, TV images of neglected infants in barracks-like state orphanages,
their metal cribs lined up end to end, pricked the conscience of Westerners,
many of whom streamed into Bucharest in search of children to adopt. Hence some children were adopted by the
horrified foreigners. However, the vast
majority remained behind.
Yet, for a little while there seemed to be hope even
for those children who weren’t adopted and remained behind in Romania. Soon
after the revolution offers of financial aid also poured in from the IMF and
other lending institutions to help Romania transform its economy into a
free-market system. The IMF, however,
suspended all loans to Romania after June 1990 because of Romania’s
failure to implement economic reforms.
Facing an economy whose inflation rate was 300%, Romania’s officials
(1994) admitted that they had more pressing problems than dealing with
Ceausescu’s legacy—Communism’s orphans, today’s street children (Davis).
Therefore, many of the children that were imprisoned
in Romania’s orphanages took to the streets after the 1989 Revolution. Various estimates put their numbers from
several hundred to 10,000. Romania’s
forgotten children come alive in groups around the subway stations when the
adult world goes to sleep. It takes time and patience to get to know the
characters who are bound together by a complex dynamic in which the oldest and
the strongest are the rulers. Louise
Branson, an American reporter says that
It is a terrifying experience to follow Dan into the
hole he considers home. The door is a manhole on the edge of a park near
Bucharest’s Gara de Nord subway station. He squeezes through and descends on
iron rungs into a dark, stifling and dirty space. Huge, warm pipes along one
wall make hissing noises. Rats scuttle past his feet. The stench of urine and
excrement is overwhelming. ‘Here it is,’ he shrugs. It is difficult to read any
emotion on his young face. Dan and three other ragged boys, all in their
mid-teens, have spread torn cardboard boxes on the floor. They are grateful to have this warm place
for the coming winter. In other tunnels under the Romanian capital, homeless
children have even managed to rig up electricity for makeshift lights.
Many of these young street
urchins sniff glue to pass time. The sniffers smear solvent inside a plastic
bag, then place the opening over their mouths and inhale. Some of these glassy-eyed children can be
recognized by the burns on their faces that they get from the solvent touching
their skin.
Outside of the occasional visit from the police,
these street children are abandoned by Romania’s society. They sleep in the cracks of the subway
station and, for money, they either beg, steal, sell glue, or prostitute
themselves. Many of the older children buy glue solvent for 50 cents a bottle
and sell it in smaller amounts to younger children. Some of the stronger ones control entry to the warmer entrances
of the tunnels, sometimes exhorting payment.
Some pimp for some of the prostitute girls (Davis).
Although tough on the outside, many of these
children are aching for some sort of a human touch. One reporter says that
younger children appear desperate for human
contact—even with strangers. Nine-year-old Ciprian, for example, holds a
foreign visitor’s hand tightly and calls her ‘Mama.’ He is one of the few kids
from the tunnels not visibly high on glue solvent. Ciprian shows a cut on his head where, he says, an older boy had
hit him. He tells of having run away from his Bucharest home at the age of
eight after his mother died and his father turned to alcohol. As Ciprian
huddles with the visitor over a heating vent at the entrance to the train
station, the ragged boy is suddenly accosted by a cleaning woman, who hits him
with a broom and berates him for ‘bringing shame on our country to foreigners.’
He responds with a torrent of foul language. But a few minutes later, when the
woman is out of sight, the bravado subsides and the child bursts into tears.
Their
vulnerability and need for human contact is only understandable. From a very early age, these children have
known nothing but abuse. If they were
part of Ceausescu’s hallmark orphanages they were underfed and abused. Once on the streets, they are further abused
by the people that abandoned them in the first place. Rather than taking the
blame themselves for abandoning them, these people not only abuse the street
children, but also—hypocritically enough—place the blame on the children
themselves for ruining Romania’s image.
The majority of these street children have various
diseases—ranging from tick-borne encephalitis, to syphilis, to HIV and
AIDS. There was a syphilis epidemic in
Romania in late 1997, prompting calls yet again for prostitution to be legalized
in the country where many of the prostitutes are street children. When the legalization of prostitution was
being debated, many of Romania’s leaders argued that street children are an
area which cannot be taken care of at the moment. “When you are converting to
capitalism you have to kick start the more prosperous areas of the economy,”
said one official. “You can’t afford to worry about poor people until later.
That is the way capitalism works.” Therefore, it seems that the burden of
Romania’s street children falls upon the international community (Davis).
Though many international children organizations are
currently in Romania, there are just not enough of them to be able to take care
of the rising number of street children.
Since the 1989 Revolution, families with children have done worse than
pensioners from Eastern Europe’s transition.
The reason is that wages plus welfare have fallen sharply in real terms,
hurting families, while pensions have generally stayed high enough to keep
pensioners out of penury. The United
Nations Children’s Funds has looked at 18 countries of Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union and it argues that pensions have kept ahead of the average
wage in ten countries—of which Romania is part—since 1989.
Pensions have kept their relative value while most
other benefits have declined because post-communist countries wanted the
fifty-something generation to retire early, and used generous pensions
provisions to bribe them to make way for new generations at work. In contrast, children’s
welfare is dependent on real wages, which has fallen everywhere. Hence, many families are simply not able to
support their children on an average monthly salary of eighty dollars, so many
children take to the streets to find other means of supporting themselves
(Davis).
Another factor that has worsened the plight of
families with young children is the rise in unemployment. The newly elected government has decided to
clean up Romania’s state industry sector by closing down loss-making factories and
coal mines. In autumn 1997 the oil
sector was undergoing major restructuring with the creation of the new
Societatea Nationala a Petrolului (Petrom) to replace the oversized National
Oil Company set up by the previous government.
Petrom’s restructuring plan would mean that it would only keep 39,000 of
its 60,000 staff. These cuts have inevitably created mass unemployment in these
regions which, in turn, has had an upward effect on the numbers of street
children in these particular regions.
Although the facts seem very grim, there seems to be
hope for Romania’s street children. In
contrast to Ceausescu’s or Iliescu’s
leadership, the newly elected government is doing a great deal in
helping the situation. The government
has launched its Strategy for Protection of Children’s Rights—brainchild of the
newly-created State Secretary for Child Protection, Doctor Christopher
Tabacaru. As Romania’s youngest minister, he seems to be ideally
qualified. He is a pediatrician and
formerly ran a charity for abandoned children.
His plan—encouraging foster care and adoption, aims to reduce the
100,000 children in institutions and the 10,000 in the streets by thirty
percent.
Furthermore, it seems possible that the rise in
number of street children is a direct reflection of Romania’s economy. It is extremely difficult to transition from
a state-owned economy to a free-market economy. In comparison to the other Eastern European countries Romania was
set back by the seven years of the
neo-communist leadership of Iliescu.
The newly elected government has been trying hard to improve the image
of Romania to Western investors and so far it seems to have achieved a great
deal. Just in the summer of 1998,
Romania’s president was offered to speak before the Joint Congress—an honor that only a few other foreign leaders
have received. Also, Romania is now part of the North Atlantic Cooperation
Council (NACC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the
Danube Commission, Interpol, the Wassenaar Group, the Australia group, the
Black Sea Economic Cooperation Forum, the Central European Free Trade
Association, and most importantly it is an associate member of the European
Union. The newly elected Romanian
government has been lobbying hard for the acceptance of Romania to the European
Union (U.S. Department of State).
Moreover, the government of Constantinescu has been
making huge efforts in reducing the fiscal deficit and it was able to reduce it
by 3 percentage points. The inflation
rate has also been going down. Also,
with the shifting of more and more percentage points to the industrial (33%
Products: oil manufacturing, machine building, mining, construction materials)
and agricultural (23% Products: corn, wheat, potatoes, oilseeds, vegetables,
live stock) side of the economy, Romania is making huge leaps towards improving
its economy and the standard of living of its people which inevitably means
reducing the number of street children.
Thus, although the Ceausescu regime has left behind
an infamous hallmark—the orphans—things seem to be getting better. With a government that is making a concerted
effort to be part of the European Union and NATO, it is inevitable that the
plight of the Romanian street children will be alleviated in the near future.
Romania has not been trying hard to integrate itself with the rest of the
Western world. It has gradually diverted trade from the Soviet Union and it has
created trade with Western Europe and the U.S. I believe that if these reforms
will keep up, Romania should be able to avoid the second generation of street
children.