ROMANIA:Opponents of Romanian president Traian Basescu fear a political purge after he condemned the country's former communist regime as a "criminal and illegitimate" dictatorship that killed or persecuted as many as two million people.
To the applause of allies and jeers from critics who accuse him of trying to sideline the left wing, Mr Basescu presented parliament with the first official report denouncing the communist government that ruled Romania from 1947 to 1989, when despot Nicolae Ceausescu was ousted and executed.
"I categorically condemn the communist system in Romania," he said. "The regime condemned the entire nation to misery, starvation and despair. . . and exterminated people by assassination and deported hundreds of thousands of people." Compiled over eight months by a state-appointed panel of academics and analysts, the 660-page report found that some two million Romanians may have been executed, jailed or deported by a regime installed and supported by the Soviet Union.
"I ask forgiveness from all the people who had their lives ruined by communist dictatorship," Mr Basescu said, insisting the study would help Romanians "stop carrying the corpse of our own past" as they prepared to join the European Union next month.
"From January 1st, 2007 we have to start anew, without the ballast of communism." But Mr Basescu's opponents - some of whom are named in the report as key officials and ideologues of the communist regime - immediately accused him of using a biased and incomplete study to launch a witch-hunt against his critics.
Amid warnings that ex-communist officials could be prosecuted for the crimes of the regime, Ion Iliescu, who was twice Romanian president between 1989-2004, said the report was intended to "demonise the left".
"I cannot accept being presented as a pillar of communism," said the one-time Communist Party propaganda chief, after the report accused him of helping "indoctrinate the people" and "impose and perpetuate a regime based on illegalities".
The report also labelled far-right leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor as Ceausescu's "court poet", and he responded in parliament by waving a placard depicting Mr Basescu behind prison bars and by blowing a football referee's whistle and showing him a red card. "It is a false, politically orchestrated report," said Mr Tudor, who nonetheless hailed Ceausescu as "one of the great Romanian patriots."