TEN DAYS ago thousands of miners from the Jiu Valley poured into Bucharest to besiege the government of president Iliescu and prime minister Petre Roman, who has since resigned. PATRICK CAMILLER, a member of the New Left Review editorial board was in Romania last year. Paul Clarke and Sam Inman talked to him.
Troops prop up regime Q. Just over a year age the Romanian miners were defending the National Salvation front government, then under attack. Last week they came to demand the overthrow of that government. What has changed?
A. In June 1990 the miners came to Bucharest, a short time after the election were held giving the Salvation Front a two-thirds majority, and liescu a huge majority in presidential elections. They came to Buch arest because the results of these elections were not accepted by the ight wing opposition.
Iberal Party and the National Peasant Party - nor by some radical students.
he opposition occupied Universil Square, he central crossroads in th centre of Bucharest for two months after the election. When it was wound down and cleared by the police, there was semi-insurrectionary attack on the anti-Ceaucescu revolution.
At that time the miners from the Jiu valley saw a threat to their government by the parties of the Romanian right ving - a government which was promis ing to defend their social interests, arid to some extent actually doing so -Anti-communist sentiment rides high in Bucharest against the rising bourgeois elites and their international allies.
What has changed since then is the government has itself adopted much of the social and economic programme of the opposition - a radical marketisation.
Subsidies on a wide range of goods and social services have been wound up. A big privatisation programme has begun.
This has seriously worsened working class living standards - they have fallen 0 per cent this year alone, as a resuit of nflation and lack of adequate compensation in workers wages.
This is what has undermined the sup. port of miners, and other sectors of workers, for the government. No systematic attempt to explain this magramme and consult workers was I don't see the evolution of the miners as a great mystery. The miners, like other sections of the masses, had great hopes in this government.
hese expectations have been cruell!
Led, in a very difficult domes tic and international political situation. The miners have attempted to stamp their mark on government policy again, but in a desperate and one off way; they hieved very much. Q. Is the Salvation Front government just the old Ceaucescu regime with a 'human face?' A. The project of Iliescu and the National Salvation Front is best seen not as a continuation of the Ceausescu regime but as an attempt to repeat the initial Gorbachev project in the Soviet Union. In other words attempting to unite ele ments of the old apparatus, together with a project of political reform and reform of the economic system - in the wake of the devastating legacy of Causescu. Q. How do you analyse the National Peasants Party and the National Liberal Party?
A. These two parties are the historic right wing parties, which continued to exist in emigration during the Ceasescu years. For many people they had become just a faint mer ry, but of course their leaders returned from emigration with the December 1989 revolution.
The National Peasants Party, as its name suggests, sees its main base among the peasantry; and although it did get a lot of peasant votes during the last elections, in the main the peasants have given short shrift to its programme of de collectivisation.
party supporters trying to regain rights to ancestral land, now collectivised, have been seen off by local peasants. asked the authorities what their reac-