On This Day - December 25, 1989 - The first couple was executed

[burythehatchet]

in Rumania.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/25/newsid_2542000/2542623.stm

Deposed Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena have been shot by a firing squad after a secret military tribunal found them both guilty of crimes against the state.
They were charged and convicted of genocide and undermining the national economy among a series of other offences, officials said.

News of their death was announced to the people of Romania on national television amid reports the couple had been found smuggling large amounts of money out of the country.

A stunned reaction from the public gave way to scenes of delight and a public outpouring on the streets to celebrate.

[Greeby]

1. My memories as a 7 year-old in those days

Were of Blue Peter's numerous Romanian appeals. I of course had no clue what it was about then

[pretzel4gore]

2. a ghastly crime...

murdering them 2 helpless people was done to protect gangsters who feared what they knew-how convenient, eh? and the outpouring of joy? well, lookit how iraqis celebrated saddam's overthrow...

[tabasco]

3. They should have just turned them over

to some of their victims.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. actually they should have been brought to the Int. Court

and tried for crimes against humanity rather than convicted and executed in secret by some ad hoc process, or tossed to the mob for instant justice. We are only as civilized as we behave, and right now we are tumbling away from enlighted civilization.

[tabasco]

5. Same with Mussolini I suppose.

Sometimes the lamp pole or up against the wall just seems appropriate.

But if it would have helped prosecute other criminals, you are absolutely correct.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

8. Yes, it IS the same.

Don't you think he should be with his German pals in Nuremberg in 1946?

[tabasco]

9. Yes, in a perfect world in which war criminals are apprehended

by a disciplined police force, you are absolutely correct.

However, I don't plan a lawsuit against the people who strung up Mussolini.

[Warren Stupidity]

11. Nor do I, but how many Italian fascists got off and got away?

And how many did so because there was no due process to deal with the end of that tyranny?

[David__77]

6. Why international?

Isn't this Romania's sovereign right to try individual's via its own legal statute?

[Warren Stupidity]

10. Precisely to avoid the appearance of regicide.

The collapse of the regime in Romania, as it does in almost any similar circumstance, leaves a void in which civilized notions of justice are difficult to practice. Thus a secret procedure resulting in essentially summary execution (or as noted above, the tyrant hanging upside down as in Italy when that regime collapsed) is a typical way of disposing of the former head of state. But is it the best way? Was there any institutional process functional in Romania at the time capable of handling a real trial?

Is it not better, does it not further the interests of an enlightened global human civilization, to deal with the collapse of a tyranny not in an ad hoc fashion but in a just process? The initial precedent is of course the Nuremburg Trials, and while flawed in some respects I insist it is a better way to deal with the injury to all that the tyrant incurs, than the summary execution, the act of revenge that leaves out the evidence, the trial, the deliberation and the just sentencing.

We have the spectacle of Hussein's trial in Iraq as an example of what happens when the wrecked nation attempts to deal on its own with the former tyrant. I submit that justice has not been served there, that the cause of an enlighted global civilization has been impaired by the dismal farce of that process.

More mundanely, how many of Ceauşescu's co-conspirators in that tyranny participated in his murder and in doing so covered up their own misdeeds?

[Crunchy Frog]

7. Justice isn't always pretty

but I can't think of many executions that were more just than these were. How many Romanians were killed when Ceausescu ordered massive numbers of demonstrators to be fired on?