Vasile Paraschiv

Vasile Paraschiv

Vasile Paraschiv (born April 3, 1928 in Ordoreanu , Ilfov County , † February 4, 2011 in Ploieşti , Prahova County ) was a Romanian activist and dissident .

Life

Paraschiv came from a poor family from the village of Ordoreanu and left his parents' house at the age of 12 to look for an income opportunity in nearby Bucharest . There he worked as a shop assistant from 1940 to 1946 before he found a job at the consumer cooperative "Victoria". This was founded by the Romanian Communist Party (RKP) after the Second World War in order to ensure the supply of the workers with basic food. In November 1946 Paraschiv himself joined the RKP. From December 1947 until he was drafted into the Romanian army on November 20, 1949 in Deva , he was an employee of the Central Post Office in Bucharest. From January 1, 1950 to August 23, 1951 Paraschiv attended the officers' school in Sibiu , from which he graduated with the degree of lieutenant . He was then transferred to the Ploieşti regiment, where he first felt the power of the RKP: the party forbade him to marry because of the “social origin of the bride”. Attempts to study law in Bucharest also failed, so Paraschiv instead attended the Școala Tehnică de Telecomunicații , where he completed training as a telecommunications engineer in 1958 . He then took up a position at the post office of Ploieşti and was first transferred to Câmpina and then to Brazi in 1962 . On December 6, 1963, Paraschiv and his family had to vacate their apartment in Ploieşti and were only able to return ten months later after a successful lawsuit.

Paraschiv resigned from the RKP in November 1968. After exercise, despite massive pressure he refused to retract his decision, he was arrested on 28 July 1969, for five days in the psychiatric hospital of Urlaţi compulsorily admitted. On March 3, 1971 Paraschiv submitted in a letter to the Central Committee of the RKP and the Romanian trade union federation Uniunea Generală a Sindicatelor din România eleven proposals to transform the unions into free organizations. He was then arrested again and sent to a mental hospital. On December 1, 1976, the Securitate discovered a copy of a letter that Paraschiv and Alexandru Ungureanu had sent to Radio Free Europe . Another arrest followed and the forced admission to the clinic of Câmpina, where the doctor in charge Paraschiv certified paranoia .

In February 1977 Paraschiv learned of the action of the writer Paul Goma , who spoke out in favor of respecting human rights in Romania, and decided to support him. After the first attempt to contact Paraschiv ended with another arrest by security officers, on February 5, 1977 he succeeded in the second attempt to sign a letter of protest from Goma to the CSCE follow-up conference in Belgrade . The letter was accompanied by a number of documents that made his case known to the Western public. Before meeting Goma again, Paraschiv was arrested by security forces, beaten and locked away in the Săpoca psychiatric clinic for 45 days . On May 20, 1977 Vasile Paraschiv returned to his workplace in Otopeni . In the meantime, the Ploieşti Public Prosecutor's Office had initiated a placement procedure in order to be able to finally deport Paraschiv to a home for the mentally ill in Călimăneşti . The judge responsible converted this application into an order for outpatient psychiatric care , which Paraschiv eluded. In the autumn of 1977 he asked for a passport to be issued instead for a trip to Austria . This was granted to him in the hope that the uncomfortable citizen would move to the West. Vasile Paraschiv left the country on November 20, 1977 with his son Radu. With the support of a Viennese aid organization, he got a travel visa for France , which he went to on January 27, 1978. At a press conference in Paris , Paraschiv pointed out the abuse of psychiatry by the communist regime of Ceaușescu as a means of political repression and had his health examined by an eight-person medical commission. After he was not diagnosed with any damage, Paraschiv got in touch with leading French trade unionists and, at a press conference on April 18, 1978, again called for the liberalization of Romanian trade unionism. Nine days later he returned to Romania, but was prevented from entering the country in Curtici on the Hungarian-Romanian border and expelled from the country. After Paraschiv made several entry attempts from Vienna, the pressure of public opinion on the Romanian Embassy in Austria became so great that he was allowed to return home on July 9, 1978.

There he was informed that his old employment contract had been terminated due to multiple unexcused absences and that he would be transferred to the Fabrica de Prototipuri și Proiectare Tehnologică in Ploieşti. During a trade union meeting Paraschiv read out the founding declaration of the Sindicatul Liber al Oamenilor Muncii din România , the free trade union of Romanian workers, to the factory workers . This action resulted in several attacks on his physical integrity. In March and April 1979 he was attacked and beaten several times on the open road, on May 28, 1979 he was kidnapped by four Securitate employees in a forest near Ploiesti, where he was brutally beaten and tortured. After several days of hospitalization, that of a solitary confinement tantamount, he took mid June 1979 his work again. Paraschiv's son was meanwhile living in the United States and attempts to visit him there from 1980 onwards failed because the Romanian authorities refused to issue the necessary passport. This case was also taken up by Radio Free Europe and Paraschiv's concerns were read out to the public in October 1986.

On May 7, 1987, Paraschiv's residence was searched by the Securitate to find evidence that was critical of the system. The seized documents were evaluated for a week and on May 14, 1987 Paraschiv was abducted for the second time by the Romanian secret service. Without a valid arrest warrant, he was taken to a remote mountain hut near Câmpina, where he was tortured and threatened with death for four days. Only after he signed a letter that he had been presented with, in which he professed the values ​​of the Romanian Communist Party, was he released again and assigned an employee with the code name "Nicolae" to constantly monitor Paraschiv's actions. Paraschiv wrote a document in which he distanced himself from the statements he had signed under pressure and had to move into a new apartment in which his telephone was tapped and in which he received frequent unannounced visits from Securitate employees. On March 22, 1989, Paraschiv was arrested in the street and taken to the same mountain hut as in 1987, where he was tortured for seven days in an attempt to break his will. In the end, Paraschiv signed a new document expressing his loyalty to the Romanian regime.

In two autobiographical books that were published in 2005 and 2007, Paraschiv described in detail the methods with which the Romanian state apparatus had dealt with him. In December 2008 Paraschiv hit the headlines when he refused to accept the Star of Romania , the highest Romanian honor, from President Traian Băsescu , calling him a "communist" during the ceremony in Cotroceni Castle .

Paraschiv last lived in Ploieşti , where he died on February 4, 2011.

Works

• Vasile Paraschiv: Lupta mea pentru sindicate libere în România. Terorismul politic organizat de statul comunist . Editura Polirom, Iași 2005, ISBN 973-46-0053-2 .
• Vasile Paraschiv: Aşa nu se mai poate, tovarăşe Nicolae Ceauşescu! Editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest 2007, ISBN 978-973-669-467-7 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ A murit Vasile Paraschiv, cunoscut disident român. alpha news, February 4, 2011 (Romanian) ( February 9, 2011 memento in the Internet Archive ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Vasile Paraschiv in the catalog of the German National Library
• Indictment of July 8, 2008 (Romanian)