Camp chief accused of genocide

BUCHAREST: A Romanian institute has urged the general prosecutor to bring genocide charges against the communist commander of a former Romanian labour camp, saying he was responsible for 103 deaths.

Ion Ficior, 85, was the commander of a camp in the remote Danube Delta village of Periprava, which held up to 2 000 prisoners, from 1958 to 1963.

Romania had about 500 000 political prisoners under the communists, about one fifth of whom died while in detention. Historians say most prisoners were people who had fallen foul of the regime.

Andrei Muraru, the head of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes, formally handed the request to prosecutors on Wednesday

Beatings

He accused Ficior of being responsible for 103 deaths at the camp from malnutrition, beatings, a lack of medicine and from drinking dirty water from the Danube, which caused dysentery.

The youngest person to die was 19 and the oldest was 71, Muraru said, adding that the institute had spoken to 21 former prisoners to build its case.

Ficior could not be reached for comment, but in a June interview he insisted that only three or four people had died under his command.

He was unrepentant, saying his prisoners were militiamen – known as Legionnaires – who supported the Nazis during World War II and who deserved to be incarcerated.

“Ficior beat us every day with a wooden stick,” former prisoner Ianos Mokar said in June, adding that he terrorised inmates by “jumping over us on his white mare”. – Sapa-AP