ROMANIA
Miners win in the streets
By
Andy McInerney
"The government has capitulated."
That was the extraordinary newspaper headline in Bucharest,
Romania, on Jan. 23 after details emerged of a settlement with
coal miners. Fifteen thousand miners had been marching toward
the capital from Petrosani, 210 miles away, since Jan. 18. They
had been on strike since Jan. 5.
By the time of the settlement, the miners were within 100
miles of the capital. They had already fought two pitched
battles with riot cops, smashing through police barricades that
the government had set up to stop them. They were demanding a
35-percent wage increase and a halt to closing two pits in
Petrosani.
Clashes erupted soon after the miners left their home city.
On Jan.19, workers armed with clubs faced off against riot
police with tear gas and batons. They smashed through the first
barricade, sending the cops running.
Holding a spent tear-gas canister, miners' leader Miron
Cozma called for the dismissal of the interior, justice,
transport and industry ministers. "They fired on us, and they
must pay for that," he warned. His confident tone is a reminder
that not too long ago Romania was a workers' state.
Two days later, the government deployed 3,400 elite police
troops to try to block the miners again at Costesti. These are
the "new" kind of police that the U.S. has been organizing in
Eastern Europe.
Villagers supply dynamite
Again, the mine workers charged through the lines, this time
with homemade bombs made from dynamite provided by sympathetic
residents. Many of the residents in the region work in
explosives plants for the Petrosani mines and the surrounding
Jiu Valley.
"Miners are attacking us in an organized way, like an army,"
complained government spokesperson Rasvan Popescu.
As the march descended on Bucharest, tearing through
barricade after barricade, President Emil Constantinescu
prepared for all-out war. Just before the settlement,
Constantinescu dispatched an armored convoy that stretched 1.8
miles, including tanks and armored trucks. He threatened to
declare a state of emergency and introduce military rule--a
"legal dictatorship," as the government called it--if the
miners did not turn around and go home.
But in this showdown, it was the government that blinked,
not the miners. The settlement reportedly keeps the two pits
open and grants the workers a 30-percent raise.
IMF demanded pit closures
Romania was part of the socialist camp until 1989, when a
palace coup ousted and murdered then-President Nicolae
Ceaucescu. Since then, successive governments have pushed, at
varying rates, for the dismantling of the former socialist
economy.
Ex-President Ion Iliescu was one of the engineers of the
anti-Ceaucescu coup. However, he favored a slower pace of
dismantling the planned economy. When what the capitalist media
calls "democrats"--those favoring a rapid transition to
capitalism based on support from the imperialist
powers--demonstrated against Iliescu's slow pace in 1990,
miners marched on Bucharest and won back the streets.
The coal miners marched on the capital again in 1991 when
the prime minister refused to meet the workers' economic
demands. That prime minister resigned after the march, showing
the instability of the new capitalist regime.
Miron Cozma, the leader of the most recent march on
Bucharest, was a leader of both the 1990 and the 1991 marches.
He spent time in prison for his role in those actions after
Christian Democrat Constantinescu took power in 1996.
Constantinescu, an advocate for rapid dismantling of the
socialist state, settled a deal with the International Monetary
Fund in 1997. The IMF, a superbank dominated by U.S. finance
capital, offered the government $430 million in credit if it
promised to cut subsidies that were holding down prices on some
necessities.
It also had to pledge to privatize the state-owned sector of
the economy. In the final months of 1998, the Romanian
government announced the closing of some 30 mines, including
the Jiu Valley pits.
These moves put Romania's workers on a collision course with
the IMF and Western imperialism, the Romanian government's only
prop. Imperialist support for Constantinescu is guided not by
any love for him and his "democrats," but on the belief that
they can break up the state-owned economy most effectively. By
1997, almost 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product
came from the private sector.
In this recent confrontation with the miners, the European
Union saved Constantinescu's neck. Hours before the settlement
was announced, the EU Council promised a "substantial increase"
in aid--essentially paying for the settlement. Union leader
Cozma says the workers won "substantial aid from the EU for the
mining industry." Romania has applied for membership in the EU,
but the European imperialists are in no mood to bail out
Romania's entire state sector.
Whether this settlement is anything more than a temporary
truce is far from certain. An IMF team is due in Bucharest in
coming weeks, and will certainly be looking for evidence that
the government is determined to resist further workers'
demands.
Debt trap weakened Ceaucescu
Romania's working class knows what indebtedness to the IMF
costs. Even before the 1989 counter-revolution, Ceaucescu
himself had taken IMF-backed loans to develop the country's
industry. He attempted to pay them off quickly to get the
imperialist bankers off the country's back. But to do this, his
government demanded onerous sacrifices from Romania's working
classes.
At that time the imperialist media was sympathetic to every
sign of popular opposition to the austerity. The U.S.
government took advantage of the discontent to encourage the
overthrow of the government. Now that there's a pro-capitalist
regime in place, however, the imperialists are fearful lest the
miners' militancy turn into a political challenge to the
regime.
The Jiu Valley miners say they are prepared to resume their
struggle, and they are wary. "If we have been betrayed, we are
prepared to resume our movement tomorrow," 31-year-old miner
Cornel Suceveanu told the French news agency AFP on Jan.
23.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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