An Irony of History

After Easter, history promised itself to play a little. King Mihai I consented to have a meeting with President Ion Iliescu, at the latter’s proposition. In December 1947, the same king was forced to leave his country that became the communists’ property. He was leaving together with the last hopes of a democratic regime. One year after the king abdicated, Iliescu was joining the first Central Committee of the Union of Pupils’ Associations in Romania and two years later he was leaving for Moscow, proving to be, at his return, a sedulous agent of Romania’s communization. The king was going to a hurtful exile. For forty years, one of them was felling like the fish in the water in the middle of the most diabolic barbarousness directed against people, the other watched it all with pain, sending messages of helplessness when possible.
What should the public understand of the current state of facts? How do Romanians see this encounter? A month ago, more than 20% of the ones who were asked how they see the King’ s first answer said the King’s gesture might be interpreted as an "non-permissible impoliteness". Watch it! One fifth of the Romanians. About as many as the ones who thought Iliescu was not right inviting the former sovereign. The first two categories could be framed well into the group of those who learned well a communist history lesson, even more false and ideologized as the aversion in their attitude is bigger.
Half of the interviewed people stated President Iliescu did well when he thought to make this invitation.
It was less commented which were the reasons that urged the presidential staff to make such a gesture. It was only the initiative of the team of councilors, meant to promote a new presidential image? Or the President really regrets his past, or at least portions of it? Until several days ago, a wall of mysteries was resisting in front of our curiosity. But we finally have Iliescu in a TV show, swallowing his pride and affirming he "reached a more lucid and realistic judgment", admitting he "might have made mistakes once, influenced by the general state of spirit too, the feeling of being trammelled and the tension under which he was working". As usually, the President doesn’t get to details. He doesn’t say under the pressure of which events he acted so "unskillfully", or why he was feeling trammelled. Institutionally, the Romania of the year 1991 or 1994, when the King was chased in the Romanian highways and hunted at the airport Otopeni, is the Romania today. But now, the President can afford this gesture. Iliescu risks nothing by it. It is, in fact, nothing but a challenge. If the former sovereign had refused it firmly, Iliescu could have posed as the historic reconciler, whose held hand was refused. If the meeting takes place, the President will enjoy exactly what he hopes to: the interest of the blitz. In fact, for his personal experience, a Bulgarian model would not harm. And yet, the dialogue will be one of the most uncomfortable in the recent history. What could tell each other two people, one of them being able to tell many things about his family’s role in Romania’s Europeanizing, the other with fresh memories about its communization?
Iliescu goes through a special period in his biography. He is no more the tough and intransigent nomenklatura representative, but the human and reconciling president. A schizophrenic style, in which the market economy and the "property as a caprice" coexist, former Securitate agents are considered optimal for the stability of democracy and the European integration is made by appeals to general mobilization. Why shouldn’t there exist, in this carnival scenario (or "common front"), an encounter with King Mihai I too?
(Mihai CHIPER)