Program to systematize the villages
The program for the systematisation of the villages ( Romanian sistematizarea satelor ), also the village systematisation program or the village destruction program , was a program for the forced relocation of the population of smaller towns with mostly less than 1000 inhabitants to agro-industrial centers and for the razing of their villages in communist Romania in the 1980s.
history
In 1971 the Romanian ruler Nicolae Ceaușescu visited communist North Korea on a trip abroad . He took a liking to the local Chuch'e ideology , which is a combination of Marxist-Leninist social transformation with strong nationalism and the goal of economic autarky. Ceaușescu wanted to adapt this system to Romanian conditions. In 1972 a systematisation program was passed by the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party and in 1974 was confirmed by the parliament as Law No. 85/1974. This extensive renewal program was intended to promote the country's social and economic development.
With regard to land use, the main aim of the program was to stop or reverse the restructuring of agricultural land, which had been rampant up to then, into settlement, economic and traffic areas to increase agricultural production. As a result, municipal or city areas were no longer allowed to grow and were partially reduced, which led to a considerable densification of the cities, or, as in the case of the Freidorf industrial platform in Timișoara, to dismantle projects that had already started.
This program was intended to promote the elimination of bourgeois housing structures in the cities and to enable them to be replaced by new socialist city quarters. In many cities this led to the construction of apartment blocks in old suburban single-house quarters, in some, as in Piatra Neamț ( German Kreuzburg an der Bistritz ), to the elimination of almost the entire old town. Initially, the law served as the basis for the radical redesign of the capital Bucharest , in which entire streets fell victim to the construction of the new government district with the Parliament Palace , ministries and apartment blocks.
In rural areas, the systematisation envisaged, as the last phase of this program, the concentration of the population and economic activity in two to three central villages per administrative municipality. By relocating a large part of the rural population to 558 new agro-industrial centers, the Romanian government hoped to increase the arable land by the areas gained from the abandoned villages. Between 5000 and 7000 of the total of 13,000 villages in Romania should disappear by the year 2000. In the 1970s and early 1980s, this was limited to indirect measures. In the central villages that were supposed to survive, industries and services were specifically settled and apartments were built, while in the small villages to be eliminated no more investments were made and even building bans on private houses were issued. These villages should bleed to death over a longer period of time. In 1988 the so-called bulldozer tactic was announced , with which around 7,000 villages were to be actively razed to the ground.
The first of these centers was completed in 1989 near Bucharest. The apartments consisted of two rooms with a four-square-meter kitchen without a water pipe, which had to be shared by at least six people, since each family was required to father at least four children. Bathrooms were not available, but the only toilet in the apartment block was in the courtyard. The militia officer responsible for the block lived on the ground floor and woke the residents up in the morning. He distributed spades, scythes and pitchforks, accompanied the residents to work in the fields and locked the front door in the evening. At lunchtime, the common LPG food was distributed from canisters , but the militia had a separate canteen.
After the Romanian Revolution in 1989 , the systematisation program was discontinued.
Protests
National protests
In her third open letter to Ceaușescu, the anti-communist dissident and human rights activist from Cluj-Napoca , Doina Cornea , strongly criticized the systematisation program, among other things. 27 well-known people from Romanian public life signed this letter.
In early 1989, six former leaders of the Romanian Communist Party ( Silviu Brucan , Gheorghe Apostol , Alexandru Bârlădeanu , Grigore Răceanu , Corneliu Mănescu , and Constantin Pîrvulescu ) initiated the open letter known as the Letter of the Six , in which they violated the Ceaușescu government for disregard criticized civil rights and the desperate economic situation, and openly called for reforms. Systematisation was listed as one of the key points in this letter. Although the group did not receive much public support, this letter was one of the most important and momentous measures taken by the opposition during this time and was considered a break with the tradition of strict party obedience.
Pastor László Tőkés , one of the key figures in the Romanian Revolution of 1989, also criticized the village systematisation program in his sermons, but at the same time called for solidarity between Hungarians and Romanians.
A very small group of engineers and architects refused to support the program, which resulted in reprisals.
International protests
On June 27, 1988, between 40,000 and 50,000 demonstrators marched in what was then still socialist Hungary to protest against the oppression of the Magyars in Romania on Heroes' Square in Budapest . This was the largest public demonstration in the country since the Hungarian uprising in 1956.
In a debate in the Hungarian Parliament, the Central Committee Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, Mátyás Szűrös, expressly approved the protests against Romania and claimed that Hungary was also responsible for the Magyars in Romania: “We are responsible for the whole nation.” The Hungarian Consulate General in Transylvania Cluj-Napoca ( German: Klausenburg ) and a Hungarian cultural institute in Bucharest were closed in the wake of the protests.
The then Prime Minister of Hungary, Károly Grósz , called this action a violation of the norms of European cooperation and the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe 1975. The Hungarian Parliament decided on July 1, 1988 to call on Romania to accept the program to review and adjust. This would overcome a major obstacle to understanding between the Romanian and Hungarian nations. The destruction of all that is of value in the villages and their dissolution in the name of socialist progress would mean an irreplaceable loss not only for the Hungarian and German minorities, but also for the Romanian people themselves.
In the following exchange of blows Romania sharply criticized the reforms within Hungary towards democracy. In addition, the Deputy Minister of Defense and brother of the Romanian President, Ilie Ceaușescu , named the Hungarians of Transylvania as one of many nomadic tribes who would be on a lower level of civilization than the Romanians. The Hungarians had shown boundless cruelty in their history against the peoples they had conquered, and their descendants now tried to continue these conquests. They would never have been satisfied with what they occasionally obtained through cruelty, armed force, deceit and mutual understanding. He made a connection between the reform process of the Hungarians in their country and what he described as their urge towards territorial revisionism.
Because of these circumstances and not least because of the enormous economic hardship, thousands of people of Hungarian origin moved from Romania to Hungary. Their number rose from 6,500 in 1987 to 15,000 the following year (for comparison: 1,700 asylum seekers in 1985 and 3,300 in 1986). In 1988, 13,400 refugees received temporary residence permits in Hungary, of which only 8% were Romanians, the vast majority consisted of Transylvanian Hungarians. The number rose to 25,000 by August 1989; at times more than 300 people arrived within a week. The number of Romanians rose to 25%. From January to May 1989, 5,000 people fled to the former Yugoslavia. In November, the Hungarian authorities registered 24,000 refugees, one sixth of them Romanians. The Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci was one of the most famous Romanian emigrants of this time .
On March 9, 1989, the UN Commission on Human Rights adopted a resolution investigating violations of human rights in Romania by 21 votes to 7, which emphasized the systematization efforts and the treatment of ethnic minorities. The abstention of the allies in the Eastern bloc such as the German Democratic Republic , the People's Republic of Bulgaria , and the Soviet Union were a sign of the growing isolation of Romania. Hungary voted for the resolution.
The Opération Villages Roumains was founded on February 3rd 1989 in Brussels by graphic designers Paul Hermant and Vincent Magos with like-minded journalists, photographers, artists, architects and trade union representatives in association with the International League for Human Rights . 231 towns and cities in Belgium, 95 in France, 42 in Switzerland, and 52 in Great Britain, where Prince Charles also supported this measure, adopted Romanian villages. The local people were asked to write to Ceaușescu and express their concern about the plans and their support for the villages. In this way tens of thousands of letters of protest were sent to Romania.
The Bonn government at the time, however, was noticeably reluctant to protest. The reason for this was the upcoming extension of the contract that regulated the ransom of Romanian Germans .
rating
The research society Flight and Migration described the program of the regime under Nicolae Ceaușescu as the "state terrorist destruction of social networks" with the aim of forcing the rural population into wage labor. “On the weekends, ... (the rural population) ... additional unpaid weekend work was on the agenda: Thousands of standardized apartments were built on the construction sites on the outskirts and in new settlements. The “systematisation” program was initially associated with social improvements, but hardly anything worked in the new apartments. Sometimes the electricity went out, sometimes the heating or the water supply. With the program, under the dictates of the International Monetary Fund , state social spending was also rigorously cut. In the end, the displaced people from the villages were poorer than ever before, because without land they couldn't even have a fruit and vegetable garden. "
The systematization also aimed to standardize the way of life in towns and villages through the nationwide introduction of the same living conditions. For the International Council on Monuments and Sites , heritage conservation was “to be built into any program as a fundamental, necessary and irrevocable part. This is not just about protecting a few isolated monuments or places, not just a few examples of rural cultural heritage - it is about saving a living rural heritage in all its cultural diversity. "
The intended side effect was the destruction of the cultural diversity and the regional characteristics of the rural regions. The writer Richard Wagner noted that the program was designed to destroy regional identity and to restrict and ultimately abolish individual freedom. The regime sought total control.
Der Spiegel commented that critics in Hungary as well as in the western world feared that it would also have been part of Ceaușescu's intentions to use the bulldozer policy to destroy the last refuges of a centuries-old, historically grown village culture and the architectural evidence of German, Hungarian, but also Romanian To make settlement history disappear irrevocably. Other plausible reasons could not have been identified either; Before the Second World War Romania would have been one of the granaries of Europe with an area the size of the then Federal Republic, but only 22.9 million inhabitants in the late 1980s. The country would have enough arable land to feed 100 million people. The harvests would still have had to be enough if the majority of agricultural products (especially meat) had been exported because of the high level of foreign debt.
In her video documentation Checkmate - Strategy of a Revolution or Case Study of American Politics , the filmmaker Susanne Brandstätter shows that, among other things, the program for the systematisation of the villages during the time of the revolutions in 1989 was hyped up to a topic in the international power game. The background to this was the turnaround in the western position regarding the person of Ceaușescu, from a former ally in the Eastern bloc to a dictator and violator of human rights.
The television reporter and writer Dagobert Lindlau , who reported from Romania at the time of the systematisation program, expressed the opinion that the legislation on the rehabilitation of the villages had led to rural exodus. This was " stylized into the destruction of the village " by the Hungarians who had their eye on Transylvania , and "the whole western press fell for it". Lindlau carried out research on site and found: "Villages that were supposedly razed to the ground [...] were standing, they were healthy, were intact". In addition to on-site observations, the journalist based his opinion on sources from the Federal Intelligence Service and the German Embassy in Bucharest .
The Munich Marxist controversy and magazine praised the program in 1989 as a real socialist recruitment of a working class and the fight against backwardness and mysticism .
Since the program could only be partially implemented due to the fall of Ceausescu in 1989, there were also different assessments in retrospect. The majority of historians and other observers are of the opinion that the plan would have largely destroyed the traditional rural structures and would have amounted to a " social collectivization ". Others doubt that such a large number of villages would actually have been destroyed and believe that the abandonment of a limited number of remote small settlements would actually have created better conditions for healthy village development. In principle, the question was also raised as to whether the economically troubled country would have had the resources at all to build the agro-industrial centers in the required number. Ceaușescu himself claimed in the trial shortly before his death that he did not want to destroy the villages but rather modernize them.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lidia Anania, Cecilia Luminea, Livia Melinte, Ana-Nina Prosan, Lucia Stoica, Neculai Ionescu-Ghinea: Bisericile osândite de Ceaușescu. Editura Anastasia, Bucharest, 1995, ISBN 973-97145-4-4 . (Romanian)
- ↑ a b c Hans-Heinrich Rieser: The Romanian Banat: a multicultural region in upheaval: geographic transformation research using the example of the recent development of the cultural landscape in south-western Romania . Volume 10 of the series of publications by the Institute for Danube Swabian History and Regional Studies . Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001, ISBN 3-7995-2510-6 , p. 133.
- ↑ a b c ICOMOS Pro Romania. Exposition - exhibition. Paris, London, Munich, Budapest, Kopenhm agen, Stockholm 1989/1990. baufachinformation.de, series: ICOMOS, booklets of the German National Committee, 65 pages
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Dennis Deletant : Ceaușescu and the Securitate: coercion and dissent in Romania, 1965–1989 . ME Sharpe, 1995, ISBN 1-56324-633-3 , pp. 134 ff .
- ↑ Hans Vastag, György Mandics, Manfred Engelmann: Timisoara. Symbol of freedom . Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-85002-311-7 , p. 30.
- ↑ Wifo.ac.at (PDF; 2.0 MB) Austrian Institute for Economic Research, article Painful transition to the market economy , Stephan Barisitz: Romania: New beginning with many uncertainties , monthly reports 5/1990, p. 11.
- ↑ Peter Siani-Davies: The Romanian revolution of December 1989 . Cornell University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-8014-4245-1 , pp. 29 (English).
- ↑ Vladimir Tismăneanu: Stalinism pentru eternitate: o istorie politică a comunismului românesc . Polirom, 2005, ISBN 973-681-899-3 , pp. 263 (Romanian).
- ↑ a b c d Romania - Commanded death . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1988 ( online ).
- ↑ ffm-berlin.de (PDF; 288 kB), Research Society for Flight and Migration (FFM), Issue 2: Romania. At the gates of Fortress Europe.
- ↑ hci-online.de ( Memento from May 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Hope for the Children International, Romania - The country at a glance
- ↑ zag-berlin.de (PDF; 53 kB), ZAG - anti-racist magazine, Albert Zecheru: Roma in Romania - a conversation with the writer Richard Wagner
- ^ Susanne Brandstätter: Checkmate - Strategy of a Revolution or Case Study of American Politics. 1, 2004, p. 16.
- ↑ "I would not be a reporter again" . In: Markt und Medien , deutschlandfunk.de , May 10, 2008, accessed on November 17, 2018.
- ↑ Dagobert-Lindlau.com , Dagobert Lindlau : Notes on the Vita
- ^ Subjectpunkt.com , The Romanian Systematization Program
- ↑ Thomas Kunze: Nicolae Ceaușescu: A biography. Ch. Links Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-562-1 , p. 328.
- ↑ Dagobert Lindlau: Thank God it's not dragged. In: Die ZEIT. Edition 48/1988