International Affairs / Ambassador Adrian Vierita Reconciled With Communist Past, Romania Confronts New Turmoil by Larry Luxner Adrian Vierita will never forget the events of December 1989 as long as he lives. At precisely 6 p.m. on Dec. 22, the 27-year-old engineer — who worked at a Bucharest factory that made computer monitors and keyboards — was ordered to attend a rally in support of beleaguered Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu. The previous evening, police had opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators nearby, an event Vierita witnessed personally. That had followed a massacre in the western city of Timisoara, in which more than 1,000 protesters were killed by Ceausescu’s soldiers. Vierita had heard about the Timisoara massacre by tuning into Radio Free Europe. “The Communist Party was not very much in love with people like us, but we were obliged to go to Ceausescu’s rally anyway and express our support of the working class, and say how bright he was,” Vierita recalled in a lengthy interview with The Washington Diplomat. “But it was clear that, after the bloodbath in Bucharest the night before, things would never be the same again.” Vierita and his friends were standing in that crowd of 80,000 people — listening to Ceausescu explain the benefits of living in a socialist society — when all of a sudden, the mood turned and things got ugly, taking even the dictator by surprise. “A woman started screaming, ‘They’re going to shoot us like they did in Timisoara!’ Ceausescu tried to calm down the crowd, but he couldn’t. They started destroying flags and banners. Then Ceausescu disappeared, and we saw a helicopter taking off. We were told that it was his helicopter. It was total chaos,” Vierita recalled. Three days later, the dictator and his hated wife Elena were put on trial, found guilty and executed by firing squad — marking the end of half a century of communism for Romania and paving the way for democracy in this long-suffering land. “Please don’t misjudge me, but we were relieved when we heard the news,” says Vierita, who today is Romania’s ambassador to the United States. “Was it better that the guy was sentenced to death by that ad hoc tribunal, or would it have been better for him to witness the changes of the last 20 years? I don’t know.” To be sure, Vierita is glad he was a part of history in the making, but he says the events unfolded so quickly that nobody realized what was going on. “Frankly speaking, my generation cannot be compared to the generation of my parents. We were born during communism, so we knew about democracy only through books,” he explained. “Occasionally we received a magazine smuggled from friends in the West. We were not in complete ignorance.” Vierita told The Diplomat that for him, the events of two decades ago constitute nothing less than a miracle, “because back then, if you had asked me what were the chances of Romania becoming part of the free world, I would have probably said, ‘Don’t provoke me.’ This change was really a dream come true.” In a sense, Vierita’s own rise from factory engineer to ambassador parallels Romania’s transformation from dictatorship to democracy. In the spring of 1990, the young man wanted to advance his academic career, so he returned to his alma mater, the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, to prepare himself for the entrance exam. “But then I saw an advertisement for a vacancy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and said to myself, ‘Let’s try this.’ It was a kind of hobby of mine, international relations,” he recalled. Since his entry into the Romanian Foreign Service in March 1991, Vierita has held a variety of positions, including chief of staff to the state secretary coordinating Romania’s relations with Asia, Africa, Middle East and Latin America; deputy director of the United Nations and International Organizations Directorate; director of the Central and Southeast Europe Directorate; and general director for European and transatlantic affairs. Vierita also spent four years in Vienna, where he headed Romania’s Black Sea negotiations in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and he was Romania’s ambassador to Germany from 2002 to 2006. Prior to his current assignment in Washington, Vierita served as state secretary for European affairs. In November, Germany celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the following month, Romania marked 20 years since Ceausescu’s overthrow. All these anniversaries make Vierita, 47, wonder what took so long. “When I think back how many years we survived and didn’t speak out, I ask myself why. What is the limit of pain that people can bear? It’s unbelievable,” he said. “We could’ve done it five years before, or even 10 years before.” Yet Vierita has little time for reliving the past. Lately he’s been consumed with his country’s worsening economic crisis and Romania’s recent political battles in the wake of the Nov. 22 general elections and a contentious Dec. 6 runoff. Officially, the incumbent, President Traian Basescu, won 50.3 percent of the votes, against 49.7 percent for Mircea Geoana, who was Romania’s ambassador to the United States from 1996 to 2000. Both sides claimed victory, with Geoana officially contesting the election as fraudulent — but the government eventually certified Basescu as the winner. “What we see happening today in Romania is the expression of democracy,” Vierita suggested. “It is totally democratic to have the right to contest an election.” The ambassador insists that irrespective of who won the runoff, Romania’s foreign policy and its transatlantic vision won’t change. “That vision includes strengthened relations with the United States. We now also have the Lisbon Treaty, which enters into force in January, so it’s important for Romania that the EU has a strong voice in international relations.” Vierita said the Nov. 22 election elicited a 53.6 percent voter turnout and for the runoff it was 59.3 percent — which by Romanian standards is very high. “We would have preferred to have 100 percent, but that’s unfortunately not possible,” he said. “This is proof that people are interested in exercising their right to vote. It’s far from perfect, but at least it’s an improvement over the past.” However, Romania’s president has many challenges facing him. The country is experiencing its worst recession since the fall of communism — and that’s Romania’s biggest concern at the moment. In the first 10 months of 2009, Romania’s gross domestic product tumbled 7.4 percent compared to the same period in 2008, contracting more than many of its European neighbors. And even though the country expects to see a slight recovery this year, the current crisis has largely reversed the astonishing GDP gains of the last several years. The boom was fed by massive foreign direct investment and capital inflows — much of it facilitated by foreign banks that had set up subsidiaries in Romania. All this capital fueled consumer spending and Romania’s deficit, as imports outstripped exports. Next Page

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