Romania Ends Crackdown but Vigilante Mobs Linger

BUCHAREST, Romania —  Prime Minister Petre Roman said Friday that his government had ordered miners to leave the capital, but the vigilante mobs beyond the control of any authority continued menacing the city until dusk.

Roman defended a civilian crackdown by miners and other angry workers armed with clubs, pipes and metal-tipped rubber hoses as a “correct and justified” response to what he called an organized coup attempt against his government.

Hordes of miners roamed the streets for a second straight day, focusing their wrath on foreign journalists attempting to photograph the roving melee.

At one point, miners became so enraged by a television crew’s filming from a 10th-floor balcony of the Inter-Continental Hotel that about 200 of them tried to storm the building. Uniformed police officers, who did little to hinder arbitrary attacks and beatings a day earlier, held them back while a hotel manager raced up to the camera crewmen’s room and forced them off the balcony, screaming, “They are crazy! They will kill you!”

Roman had met with journalists only an hour earlier, assuring them that the miners had already begun heading back to their homes in northern Romania and that they would all be gone by evening.

Battered buses dispatched by the government to collect the miners and take them to train stations stood idle for at least an hour while the mobs pursued their targets. Television crews were repeatedly kicked and beaten until police interceded to extract them from the forest of flailing rubber hoses.

The miners finally boarded the buses after 6 p.m., but few were seen at the central train station. One miner told reporters that some were staying in Bucharest to enforce order.

Roman conceded that there had been “unpleasant moments” caused by the miners, but said the workers were the only force capable of thwarting the coup attempt.

He was reluctant to condemn the brutality, but when asked if the government promised not to recall the rowdy miners, Roman responded: “Yes. This will never happen again.”

The 43-year-old prime minister declined to specify who he suspected was behind the violence Wednesday that left five dead and led to the persistent unrest that has injured nearly 400.

President Ion Iliescu appealed in a radio address late Wednesday for help from “conscientious and responsible citizens” to defend government facilities from attack, which drew the miners and others encrusted in industrial grime to the capital.

They patrolled the city’s central squares and boulevards, brandishing their crude weapons and threatening or beating people at random.

Adrian Nastase, a spokesman for Iliescu’s National Salvation Front, said the leadership was forced to rely on the makeshift militia because Bucharest police and the national army failed to respond to the government’s orders to defend public institutions.

Anti-government protesters firebombed police headquarters, the Interior Ministry and the national television station late Wednesday, ostensibly in retaliation for a police sweep before dawn that dispersed a 53-day protest at University Square. The original protesters were objecting to Iliescu’s government, charging that the nation is still in the hands of old Communists hiding under a new label.

Roman fueled various conspiracy rumors by stating that the raid on the protesters’ encampment was part of the alleged attempt to overthrow his government.

“We were not informed about the clearing of the square,” said Roman, making a cryptic allusion to coup organizers’ desires to “move up the time schedule.”

But the crackdown was thought to have been ordered by the government.

Most of the participants in the University Square demonstrations that have blocked traffic through the central artery since April 22 were students and pacifists.

It was not clear who organized or took part in the violent attacks Wednesday night.

Roman contended that the miners flooded into Bucharest on their own, after becoming outraged by the anti-government rampage, which was broadcast on national television until the attackers seized the station.

He said the rioters’ methods were “legionnaire,” a reference to Romania’s Iron Guards who terrorized the nation in the years before World War II.

While the Wednesday anti-government riots frightened many residents of Bucharest, the miners’ destruction of opposition party headquarters and infiltration of a newspaper that had been critical of the Salvation Front bore closer resemblance to the prewar Fascist squads.

Journalists at Romania Libera, the independent daily that has been prevented from publishing since Wednesday, said they had been informed by Roman’s government that they would be allowed to reopen, but with no guarantees that the state-controlled printers union would work.

Miners broke into the newspaper early Thursday and tore up files and back issues, said reporter Paul Gheorghui at the littered office where he said a secretary was molested during the daylong siege.

“I think there will be more and more violence,” Gheorghui said. “I’m taking my babies to the countryside today so they will be safe.”

In the early hours of Friday, miners also ransacked the home of Ion Ratiu, a 74-year-old millionaire emigre who returned to Romania earlier this year to challenge Iliescu in last month’s presidential election.

“Uniformed police stood outside, but they did nothing to interfere,” said Ratiu, who was manhandled but not beaten.

The intruders smashed his personal belongings and emptied out drawers and boxes, but left no scratch on the furnishings or interior of the home that Ratiu rents from the government. Ratiu said he spoke with Roman by telephone late Thursday from a hiding place in the country and had been assured that his residence is under government protection.

The retired shipping magnate has been accused by Salvation Front officials of instigating the student demonstration at University Square that sought to disqualify all former Communists, like Iliescu and Roman, from running for public office.

Several of the victims of the miners’ attacks met with reporters at Bucharest Emergency Hospital on Friday.

Marion Munteanu, a leader of the student demonstration broken up by police early Wednesday, described from his hospital bed how vigilantes tracked him down and beat him with clubs. Munteanu suffered four broken ribs and a concussion.

Bill McPherson, a Pulitzer-prize winning American author who is in Romania to write a book, was also beaten by thugs outside the government headquarters Thursday.