Romania lays to rest divisive first post-communist president Ion Iliescu

Romania's first elected president after communism, Ion Iliescu, was buried Thursday amid stark divisions over his legacy.

A religious ceremony was held at the presidential Cotroceni Palace before Iliescu's casket was transferred to a cemetery for military honours. He died Tuesday at age 95 after a lung cancer diagnosis following years of declining health, after retiring from public life in 2017.

Yet, even in those years, President Iliescu continued to symbolise Romania’s violent transition from communism to democracy in the 1989 revolution, followed by years of convulsions as Romanians embarked on and succeeded in their pro-Western journey.

He dominated over a decade of Romania’s post-communist evolution, with his shrewd mastery of navigating the endless crises that gripped the country over and over again, often with tragic results.

His personality, actions and legacy remain too complex to be explicated in black and white terms to the point that Romanians remain divided whether Iliescu saved Romania in 1989 and thereafter by keeping it together, or if he destroyed the extraordinary impression Romanians made with their courage in confronting dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s repressive system with their bare hands.

Man of the hour

Educated in the USSR and initiated by the Soviets as the Gorbachev-type of alternative to Ceaușescu, Iliescu turned out to be the man of the moment in the 1989 Revolution.

Iliescu first served as a minister in the communist government but was sidelined in 1971. He then held de facto military authority during the anti-communist revolt. He assumed power and his first major decision was to order that Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena be executed by firing squad on 25 December 1989.

In the first hours after dictator Ceaușescu fled, Iliescu surfaced with the support of the security apparatus to grab power and start Romania’s painful transition towards a prudent democracy.

Iliescu’s legacy is now for the historians to dissect, as he evaded a major war crimes trial that would settle the record on the tragedies of the Romanian revolution, including the accusations that a coup d’etat led by the Communist party apparatchiks and the repressive military and security forces confiscated the real revolution of 16-22 December 1989.

More than 1,100 people died during the revolution, 862 of them after Iliescu had seized power, in a national psychosis that the so-called “terrorists” organised by Ceaușescu to keep him in power were fighting back and killing the revolutionaries.

He denied any wrongdoing and refused to be interrogated by military prosecutors, claiming his actions were for the success of the revolution.

In the meantime, he ended up being the one cautioning that a country of 23 million emerging overnight from decades of a harrowing, debilitating dictatorship cannot jump face forward into a capitalist European democracy.

He was both loathed and loved by a divided Romania, a polarisation that still grips the society to this day.

With his apparently suave and warm display, Iliescu was on one hand projecting a calming safety to those afraid of an overnight change of the world around them, but he was equally combating, often in violent, tragic manners, those who wanted to decisively cut the communist umbilical cord and move fast towards a Western society.

He did it all in his own way, carefully manoeuvring the levers of society with his true Socialist beliefs.

As some still claim he was a political visionary, Iliescu gradually shifted his eastward sympathies to his own library and decisively pushed for Romania to join the European Union and NATO, with success.

One last political rift

While many former leaders and officials paid tribute to Iliescu on Thursday, in contrast to the Save Romania Union party, a governing coalition partner that opposed the day of national mourning and said party representatives would not attend the funeral, triggering a rift in the recently sworn-in government.

USR’s decision drew the ire of coalition partners from the Social Democratic Party, or PSD, which Iliescu founded and has been the most dominant party since the revolution.

“These are just shameful attacks from people who will never live up to the legacy left by the founding leader of the PSD,” Marcel Ciolacu, a former PSD leader and prime minister, said in a post on Facebook, adding that it “demonstrates only sick hatred and lack of decency.”

A notable absence from the funeral was Romania’s recently elected President Nicușor Dan, who founded the USR party in 2016, and sent a short statement after the former president’s death, stating that “history will judge Ion Iliescu.”

The heated national debate over whether he should be given a national funeral proves that the deep wounds of the post-1989 Romanian society still linger on to this day, as many painful chapters of the last decades are still awaiting their truthful, honest conclusions.

Ultimately, after being elected twice as president in two completely different political moments, in the first democratic elections and then in the middle of Romania’s efforts to join the EU and NATO, Iliescu remains a much-debated, towering personality for Romanians, but clearly one of the decisive figures of the Romanian state.