3/28/2023 0 Comments Shout it out slaughterVisibly astonished by this face-to- face encounter with rebellion, Ceausescu froze. His rasping voice was rising to a shout when the crowd suddenly drowned him out with boos, jeers and demands for the truth about Timisoara. Thousands of workers had been assembled to applaud and wave flags on cue as he called for unity and tried to blame the riots on Hungarian "revanchists" bent on recapturing Transylvania. In Bucharest, Ceausescu appeared before a contrived propaganda rally outside the presidential palace. They reported that Rumanian army troops had joined in some of the protests, that more soldiers had been executed by the Securitate for refusing to fire into crowds, and that striking workers were threatening to blow up their factories. East European news agencies such as Yugoslavia's Tanjug and, in the new world of glasnost, even Moscow's TASS and East Germany's ADN, became important sources of news. Because of the government's total control of travel and communications, rumors often replaced information. As word of the killing spread, marchers turned out in towns throughout the country. Three days after the massacre in Timisoara, demonstrators shouting "Give us our dead!" filled the city's bloodstained streets. Garbage trucks were seen hauling corpses out of the city after Ceausescu's fall, searchers in a nearby forest uncovered three mass graves that they said may contain as many as 4,500 bodies.įed-up Rumanians had ignited riots before, but they had been stifled quickly. At least 2,000 men, women and children were killed, they said. The scene was so bloody that witnesses compared it with Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where the Chinese army crushed pro-democracy demonstrators last June. After a barrage of warning shots, the security forces mowed down a line of children standing in front of the crowd before shooting the adults. The Securitate summarily shot three army officers for disobeying orders, then sent in troops from its Special Assignment Brigade. Eyewitnesses who spoke by telephone with Vladimir Tismaneanu, a Rumanian specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, said that army units in Timisoara refused to fire on the protesters.
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