The trial was a farce, it lasted only an hour and the verdict was already decided in advance. Thirty years ago, on Christmas Day 1989, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, the hated rulers of Romania, stood against the wall of a military barracks. The footage shows Nikolae in his last moments looking stoic, or perhaps confused, while Elena screamed in fear and terror.
Bullets tore through the winter air. Nikolae and Elena fell, and blood spilled on the ground. The revolution triumphed. But is it really so?
The Romanian uprising was the bloody end of a year of revolutions that shattered the Soviet bloc.
Today, the longing for freedom is stronger than ever. From Hong Kong to Tehran, Beirut to Baghdad, protesters are demanding an end to corrupt and tyrannical regimes. Today's revolutionaries use social media to organize protests and encrypted digital channels to avoid arrest and communicate secretly. However, an important lesson can still be learned from the uprisings of 1989 - and 2000 in Serbia: don't let them appropriate your revolution.
Old regimes are much more resilient than they appear, even when their leaders are executed. They sense what is coming and plan ahead.
In the case of Romania, December 1989 did not so much mean the destruction of the old system, as its consolidation, albeit in a new form. Many Romanians believe that the events of 1989 were actually an intra-party coup led by Ion Iliescu, a former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The conventional wisdom was that if lower-ranking regime officials sacrificed leadership, they would retain power and privileges.
It was like that in the beginning. Iliescu - now on trial for crimes against humanity for his role in the post-revolution period - was elected president in May 1990. In the years that followed, a network of Communist Party officials, and the brutal Sekuritate secret police, essentially ran the country. They have retained their influence even today.
Their Hungarian neighbors played smarter. There, as part of a "peaceful transition", the ruling party agreed to hand over power without violence. However, the communists turned out to be more adept at business than the conservative intellectuals and student dissidents - among whom was the young Viktor Orbán - who took the helm of Hungary's fledgling democracy. Political power doesn't mean much when you can simply use the state's wealth. Who owns a state-owned factory or a beautiful mansion when the state collapses? Whoever grabs her first.
A number of high-ranking communist officials became extremely rich very quickly. It was this general looting, which he witnessed at the time, that influenced Orbán to centralize economic as well as political power when he became prime minister.
In Serbia, in a popular uprising on October 5, 2000, President Slobodan Milošević was overthrown. That morning, long lines of demonstrators, tens of thousands of them, arrived in Belgrade from all parts of the country, among them were many farmers and miners, ready to fight, shouting "It's over, it's over". Protesters occupied the parliament, defying tear gas and shots fired into the air, then stormed the state television building and occupied it.
By 6.30:XNUMX in the afternoon, half a million people had gathered in front of the Belgrade City Assembly to hear Vojislav Koštunica proclaim himself the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
However, as the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote that every battle is already won or lost in advance, the same is true for every revolution. Psychological operations are crucial. Young activists wrote the slogan "It's Done" on walls across the country long before October 5, 2000. Opposition radio stations reported on Serbia beyond its borders.
President Ceausescu's reign actually ended on December 21, 1989, while he was giving a speech in downtown Bucharest. The crowd laughed at his promises. He stumbled. It's done.
In Serbia, "blocking the response mechanism" was of key importance. When Milosevic asked for help from the police, the army and the notorious security services, no one responded. An agreement was made with the Western powers in advance. On the plus side, there was no bloodshed. The downside is that, as in Romania in 1989, the military, police and security services have remained largely intact. This had dire consequences. In March 2003, Zoran Djindjic, Serbia's reformist prime minister, was killed by a special forces sniper.
The current Serbian president, former Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, is a conservative populist. He was also the Minister of Information during the Milosevic regime.
For the revolutionaries of 2019, as for their predecessors in 1989, the key to regime change is the same and simple: seize the center of power and hold it, for as long as necessary, at any cost. As Leon Trotsky observed: "Revolution is impossible until it becomes inevitable."
The text is taken from "Financial Times" Translated by: Nada Bogetić
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