ABSTRACT
Since 1989 a combination of factors concurred to delay and then block the Romanian process of coming to terms with the recent communist past. While calls for lustration accompanied the December 1989 regime change and featured prominently in the political program of the budding opposition, the country as a whole opted against banning former communist officials from post-communist politics. Legislation adopted in 1999 allowed citizens to view their secret files, and empowered a state Council for the Study of Securitate Archive (known as the CNSAS) to examine past involvement with the communist secret political police, the Securitate, of electoral candidates, governmental officials, and candidates to or holders of public posts. Unfortunately, months after its creation, the council became embroiled in a public scandal from which it never fully recovered. Today few Romanians trust the council, most of them believing that it has deliberately or unwittingly blocked an honest search of the communist past, and that its activity has been rendered meaningless by legislative loopholes and lack of political will. Because until 2006 it was denied direct access to the secret archive, the council allowed only a fraction of the petitioners to read their files, passed a number of incorrect verdicts the courts later overturned, and cleared thousands of candidates in the 2000 and 2004 elections without full verification. Progress in the area of trials prosecuting human rights abuses has been equally disappointing, with most cases relating to the 1989 bloody events, not the atrocities of early communist rule.
