Slaughter In The Streets

Let them hate. So long as they fear.

-- Caligula

In the end, all dictators govern by fear. Long-suffering citizens obey orders only because they are convinced that a single individual has no hope of opposing the overwhelming forces loyal to the state. A dictator falls when fear changes sides, when individuals coalesce into crowds and defy him. Emboldened by the discovery that they are not alone, they take to the streets and squares to protest, and they learn -- though sometimes at great cost -- that no tyrant can kill or arrest an entire nation. At that point, despots lose the special combination of visible authority and legitimacy that the Chinese call "the mandate of heaven." In 1989 it happened all over Eastern Europe, where the accelerating pace of reforms gave birth to the observation that Poland took ten years, Hungary ten months, East Germany ten weeks, Czechoslovakia ten days.

The people's overthrow of President Nicolae Ceausescu's paranoid dictatorship last week seemed to take ten hours. On Thursday night the megalomaniacal leader and his wife Elena were ensconced in the presidential palace in Bucharest; by Friday morning, they were gone. But unlike the bloodless revolutions in the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries, the Rumanian convulsion was soaked in blood. The number of casualties is still not known, but if the estimates of thousands killed turn out to be correct, Ceausescu's name will be indelibly linked to one of the largest government-inflicted massacres since World War II. Ceausescu fled his grandiose palace only after the army refused to shoot demonstrators and many troops switched sides, joining them.

Hundreds of thousands of Rumanians took joyously to the streets, running, jumping, riding on tanks. "The army is with us!" they shouted. "We are the people!" Crowds stormed Ceausescu's palace and rushed to the state television studio to put out the message "We won. The dictator has fallen." Ceausescu's son Nicu, party chief in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu (pop. 173,000), was captured and paraded before the cameras. His face was bruised, and his eyes flicked in terror from side to side, as if seeking a way to escape.

But the country's joy quickly turned to dread. Progovernment forces staged a fierce comeback in Bucharest and other cities, plunging the country into civil war. In the heart of the capital, troops of the well-equipped 180,000-member security forces, the Securitate, battled army units for control of the fire- gutted presidential palace. At one point, members of the security forces reportedly burst into a meeting of demonstrators at the Opera House and sprayed the room with submachine guns. The violence assumed its own macabre rhythms. Whenever the fighting lessened, citizens would flood into the streets to celebrate Ceausescu's downfall; when the fighting began again, they would flee for cover.

The death toll soared, with hundreds of bodies lying in the streets. There were even unconfirmed reports that Syrian and Libyan mercenaries were aiding the pro-Ceausescu forces. As the fighting intensified, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev offered to send medical aid to the anti-Ceausescu forces, and Western diplomats suggested that the growing bloodshed might even lead to direct Soviet intervention on the side of the revolutionaries.