Romanians take their anger to streets

ANGER over austerity measures and corrupt politicians used to be discussed privately in this ex-soviet bloc country but slowly the street has become the stage for Romania's winter of discontent.

Thousands of protesters have been braving freezing temperatures over the past two weeks across the country, calling on the centre-right government and President Traian Basescu ( to step down. Their slogans display both irony and disillusionment towards politicians.

Young Romanian playwright Mihaela Michailov and director David Schwartz have joined the protesters for several nights in a row.

"People's revolt was usually expressed only in private but the ' apartment revolt' took to the street this time," Michailov, 34, said.

Michailov's plays, which

pictured)

have been staged at Romania's major theatres and have been translated into French, English and German, deal with discrimination or the negative effects of mass consumerism.

Together with Schwartz, 25, she has written plays about the mass street protests that took place in Romania in 1990 or people losing their homes when communists con scated property.

If the recent protests have only drawn a maximum of 10,000 people a day in the whole of Romania, a far cry from the masses turning out at similar rallies in France or Greece, the numbers are signi cant for this eastern European country with a history of authoritarian regimes and not a strong tradition of grassroot opposition.

"The open door exercise of democracy is only budding in Romania," Schwartz said, stressing that the Balkan country knew successive authoritarian regimes for more than half a century.

Unlike other former Soviet bloc countries like the Czech Republic, where Vaclav Havel managed to form a strong dissident movement around himself, in Romania very few people dared voice their opposition to the communist regime, Michailov stressed. Today's protesters may not be numerous, but they are "very per- sistent," she said.

And they can already claim a victory, forcing the government to reinstate a respected health of cial, Raed Arafat, who had been pressured into quitting after a row with the president over healthcare reforms.

Basescu himself admitted to having made "blunders", referring to the way he treated Arafat.

"The crowd is very diverse and heterogeneous, it includes students, pensioners, workers, artists, university professors," Schwartz said, stressing however that he did not identify himself with the protesters' demands.

The spontaneity of the protest is worlds apart from the rallies organised by political parties and trade unions here, were lists of participants are carefully drawn up in advance.

To Schwartz, people's discontent has been triggered by widespread poverty and the "huge divide between a very rich minority and the rest of the population."

"Romanians are also sick and tired of a certain rhetoric coming from politicians," Michailov said.

The latter "seem to know nothing about ideas and strategies leading to public debate. All they do is throw insults at each other and use key words such as corruption and unemployment, but do nothing to deal with them."

Like many of the protesters, the two artists feel they are not represented by any political party.

"How can one recongnise oneself in a political system that is only based on criticising what the others are doing or saying?" Michailov said.

Despite all this, are the two artists still optimistic about their future in a country from where thousands of university graduates have emigrated over the past several years?

"There is still a lot here," Michailov said.

to be done