Left Behind By The World Despot’s Legacy Of Despair Grips Romania, Its Kids

In Bucharest, Romania, the dust never settles.

It whirls down narrow streets, blinding and choking, the dirty legacy of Nicolae Ceausescu’s monument to himself.

The Romanian despot bulldozed a quarter of the historic capital and drove 40,000 people from their homes to build his Palace of the Republic, so lavish there was no marble left for gravestones for several years.

An entire nation’s wealth was emptied into a building now rented for weddings and conventions.

The palace, surrounded by vacant lots, is a grim reminder of the shoemaker-turned-tyrant. But hardly the only one.

Six years after he was executed, orphanages the American Medical Association once called “a repository for the diseased and severely damaged” remain packed.

“I can’t shake the image that in the West, we are entering the 21st century. Here they are just getting established in the 20th,” said Tom Norris, pastor at Spokane’s Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church.

Norris was one of 19 Americans on an August flight to Bucharest - 17 of them on humanitarian missions. He traveled with a dozen other Spokane volunteers to repair an aging orphanage.

Since the revolution, volunteers like Norris and economic development aid from the United States and Western Europe have flowed in to help. President Clinton granted Romania most favored nation status, opening the door to even greater opportunity.

Now the world is waiting for Romanians to help themselves.

As Romania wobbles toward democracy and privatization, its orphans barely squeeze onto the list of dire problems facing the nation’s candidates this fall.

Nearly half the country’s 23 million people live near the poverty level. The average monthly salary is $100. Inflation runs at 28 percent.

Romania’s infrastructure, stubbornly erected with no outside influence or technology, crumbles block by concrete block.

“In Romania, everything is broken and keeps on breaking,” says an American who has lived there five years.

Electricity and water service are interrupted daily. Former tennis star Ilie Nastase ran for mayor of Bucharest last summer after reportedly hitting a pothole there so large it wrecked his car. He lost. The miles of ruined streets are now the opposition party’s problem.

Time has worn down donors and frayed the patience of a people ashamed of needing help.

After six years, it is very hard to keep the enthusiasm alive, said Sorina Darabantiu, program director for the Romanian foundation that collaborates on relief with Portland’s Northwest Medical Teams International, the agency that sponsored the Spokane volunteers.

“They wonder where all the help is going,” Darabantiu said. “You support an orphanage for years: it was dirty five years ago, and now it’s a little less dirty. But it is still dirty. They struggle with this.”

Whether Romania can overcome its history remains a question. Writer Andrei Codrescu wrote that was precisely why the 1989 revolution was so hopeful, because so much of Romania’s past was not: “Romania has always been a completely baffling place to most Americans,” he said in “The Hole in the Flag.”

A Latin people in the midst of a Slavic region, Romanians did not form an independent, unified country until 1859 - 2,000 years after the area was settled. Allied with the Nazis during World War II, then overrun by the Russians, it became a Soviet satellite in 1947. All industries and banks were nationalized and farms collectivized.

In 1965, a poorly educated shoemaker’s apprentice rose to general secretary of the Communist Party and became president two years later.

Nicolae Ceausescu was an Eastern Bloc renegade, alone opposing Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, even sending a team to the 1984 Olympics during the Soviet boycott.

He was also a tyrant, demanding that all typewriters be registered with the government, that Romanian Orthodox priests inform on flocks and that police question anyone buying paper.

He outlawed birth control and abortion, a policy the American Journal of Public Health said caused the death of 10,000 women from illegal abortions and dumped 200,000 children into orphanages.

His economic policies were disastrous. Gigantic steel and aluminum industries run at half capacity because there was no market for their products.

Bread, milk and meat were rationed so food could be exported. Office temperatures could not exceed 57 degrees except when it dropped below zero outside.

Living in what was once the breadbasket of Eastern Europe, Romanians starved. People over 60 were told not to seek medical help.

Meanwhile, millions were poured into Ceausescu’s palace, what writer Edward Behr calls “not the largest building in the world, but certainly the ugliest.”

At 13 stories, it is second only to the Pentagon in size worldwide and it is not finished. Parliament meets there and its vast meeting rooms can be rented. But as Spokane volunteers found on a recent Saturday, not a single public telephone works.

Despite the construction, Ceausescu was planning to move the capital to Targoviste, 50 miles northwest of Bucharest. Bulldozers were leveling neighborhoods when he and his wife were arrested and shot by firing squad on Christmas Eve, 1989.

President Ion Iliescu, who has held power since, is favored to win re-election Nov. 3. A former Ceausescu adviser, he promises to continue the slow reform, and gain entry into NATO and the European Union.

But charges of nationalism and corruption, and the sheer number of former Communist officials still holding office, temper the hopes once held for the new era.

Romanians say it will take years to undo decades of oppression, to empty the orphanages and repair Bucharest.

“It seems the generation raised in Communism is lost,” said one Bucharest doctor. “But for the generation after, there is hope.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color photos

MEMO: This story ran the same day as the special report Into the Heart of Darkness.