The Romanian government is sponsoring large-scale frauds by exploiting private properties stolen by the communist regime after 1947. These properties have not been returned to their rightful owners since the events of December 1989, which were supposed to end the Romanian communist regime.
While the vast majority of the Romanian population (22 million) lives at one of the lowest annual income standards in Europe, officials of all branches of government, and their cronies from all political parties, enjoy extravagant privileges. By contrast, young college-educated Romanians have been leaving their country by the thousands each year since 1989 for temporary work, especially harvesting crops in Western Europe. Romanian pensioners have no options, they must suffer under continuously rising taxes, medical bills, and energy costs, which leave the daily food basket almost empty.
In the meantime, many billions in European Union and U.S. funds have been pouring into Romania directly for the use of governmental institutions and their sponsored companies, with no clear international supervision and no visible results for the impoverished population of Romania.
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Question: Why do Romanian officials fight so hard to obtain and keep decisionmaking positions at any governmental level, knowing the salaries are not very high compared with Western democracies?
Answer: The practice is directly connected to the dragging pace of the integral restitution of private properties (houses, agricultural and forest lands, etc.). The longer this takes, the more it profits corrupt officials and their clientele. Hundreds of thousands of privately owned houses and apartments, nationalized by the communist regime in 1948, are occupied by the old and new elite, and profiteers refusing to return them to the legal owners despite decisions of some Romanian courts. Aging legal owners (70-90 years old) spend their last resources on trial fees and are constantly humiliated by public servants and forced to appeal to the international human rights courts.
The Romanian government has purposely kept the National Archives and departmental archives containing private property documents closed to direct public use since December 1989. Deposed owners and their legal representatives have been unable to study original documents at any level — local, county or national. Hundreds of thousands of ongoing judicial trials and appeals for private property restitution are pending in Romanian courts with minimal positive results.
Private property owners, whose original documents have been kept under strict political security rules, have been arrested, deported, imprisoned and sometimes killed for keeping their own copies of original documents. Even keeping copies of the original documents is not sufficient to oppose the powerful state-sponsored companies. A case in point is the state-sponsored Romsilva and its 15.6 million acres of forest land, 75 percent appropriated by the communist regime in 1948 from private owners, including religious denominations.
The main opponent to restitution of private forests to the rightful owners is the state-owned company Romsilva. When opposed in the judicial courts and petitioned to the presidential institution by the private owners, Romsilva could not produce any documents of ownership, kept secret in the National Archives. Romsilva has been responsible for all bids of log cutting and selling in Romania (www.rosilva.ro) and can explain how very successful the multimillion-dollar businessmen of Arab origin (exporting in the Middle East and African countries) have been so far.
The Romanian government should receive no U.S. financial support until integral restitution of private properties of more than 10,000 claimants of American-Romanians is resolved.
The Bush administration and Congress should freeze all U.S. assets of the Romanian officials opposing the full and direct access of American-Romanian citizens, or their legal representatives, to the National Archives and departmental archived documents in the effort to recover their properties stolen by the communist regime. At the same time the U.S. administration should warn potential American investors to be cautious to invest in Romania until the restitution of private properties to the legal owners is accomplished.
IOAN CATON PALTINEANU
Former state secretary for land reclamation works, Agriculture Ministry, Bucharest, Romania.
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