Romanians' New Year's toast to the end of 25 years of dictatorship was made even cheerier by government declarations eliminating capital punishment and proposing a shortened work week.
Interim President Ion Iliescu announced in a New Year's address Monday that Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were the last to face execution in Romania, indicating that the lives of other family members and aides to the ousted dictator would be spared.In another proclamation aimed at promoting private enterprise, the government authorized the dismantling of state-run cooperative farms and the assignment of plots of land to individual farmers for private use.
"May the year 1990 . . . mark a genuine leap in Romania's and the Romanian people's lives toward a new stage of progress and welfare, a radical renewal in the country's economic, social and spiritual life," Iliescu said in a nationally broadcast speech.
The fledgling government lost one of its senior officials Monday with the death of Deputy Foreign Minister Corneliu Bogdan, who had been coordinating news conferences for the new government.
Bogdan's son-in-law, Washington attorney Chris Hoge, said the 68-year-old former ambassador to the United States died following an aneurysm.
"He had been working very, very hard around the clock," said Hoge, who is married to one of Bogdan's three daughters, Svetlana.
Bogdan, who had been living with his daughter and son-in-law in Washington since November 1988, returned to Romania three weeks ago in anticipation of the upheaval.
He was Bucharest's representative in Washington from 1967 to 1976, during which time he negotiated Romania's most-favored-nation trade status with the United States. He split with Ceausescu in 1982 and "essentially had been a dissident ever since," Hoge said.
In the snow-covered capital of Bucharest, the prevailing mood was jubilant as Romanians celebrated the new year as well as the downfall of Ceausescu, who was driven from power Dec. 22 and executed by pro-democracy forces after 25 years of iron-fisted rule.
Army and police units patrolled the streets in unusually high numbers over the weekend amid rumors that Ceausescu loyalists might launch a counteroffensive. But by late Monday, there were no reports of violence, and the soldiers' ranks thinned.
Iliescu's declaration of an end to capital punishment was interpreted in part as a gesture to renegade members of Ceausescu's Securitate, or secret police, who have gone underground and waged occasional sniper attacks against pro-democracy forces.
The provisional government had previously threatened to execute any Securitate officers who continued to resist. There also had been widespread speculation that relatives and top aides to Ceausescu might also share his fate.
"The leadership of the National Salvation Front has decided to abolish the death penalty. . . . The two dictators were the last persons that deserved this fate," Iliescu said in his speech.
But, he added, "This does not mean less vigilance. All those guilty of crimes will have (a) tough trial."
Western diplomats said the banning of the death penalty may have been in response to the United States, other Western countries and organizations such as Amnesty International, which criticized as undemocratic the new government's brand of summary justice for Ceausescu and his wife.
U.S. Embassy officials and other Western diplomats in Bucharest, drawing on reports from government and other sources compiled over the past few days, estimated that a total of 7,000 people died in Romania during the two-week revolution. The figure includes those killed in a massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators Dec. 17 in the western city of Timisoara.
The diplomats also said the new government now appears to have enough medical supplies and equipment to treat the thousands wounded in the fighting, thanks to donations from foreign countries and relief organizations. What is needed now, they said, is money to help repair damage to buildings, infrastructure and the economy.
The proposal for a five-day work week and other measures benefiting Romanian workers follows the new government's pattern of striking down some of the more unpopular laws of the Ceausescu regime and liberalizing economic and labor policies.
"The government has been instructed to investigate and come up with measures for the passage next March (of a) work week of five days," Iliescu said in his speech. Currently, most Romanians work six days a week.
In keeping with its program of dismantling the centrally controlled economic system, the government will offer plots of land to families for long-term private use "in order to stimulate the agricultural units and the peasantry," Iliescu said.
Cooperative farms can decide to disband, assigning up to 1.2 acres of land to individual farmers, he said. Other Romanians, including peasants who moved to the cities under Ceausescu's forced relocation programs, could be assigned up to 0.6 acres, providing they "commit themselves to pay tax and cultivate the land well."