Romania Reborn

With the inability of the state to invest, large-scale plunder has taken place. Also, complicity in crimes with the U.S.

Anti-corruption is symptomatic of a deeper problem. Neither side of the political spectrum ever bucks their shared Atlanticist bent. In late 2014 Romania’s growing European diaspora propelled Klaus Iohannis—a nonentity in national politics, but heralded as an efficient German by the mythologizing middle classes.

In 1990, 86 per cent of Romanians went to the polls; in 2008 and again in 2017, a mere 39 per cent.

Once the badlands of neoliberal Europe, Romania has become its bustling frontier.

"The Romanian banking system was taken over by Société Générale, Raiffeisen and the Erste Group. Its energy sector fell to Österreichische Mineralölverwaltung of Vienna and České Energetické Závody of Prague. Its steel manufacturing went to Mittal, its timber production to the Schweighofer Group, its national automobile, the Dacia, to Renault. Much of what isn’t yet owned by Western concerns has been laid bare for their disposal. In 1999, the Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources won dubious rights to excavate Roşia Montană, the largest open-pit gold mine in Europe. Its exploitation requires the stripping away of its status as a UNESCO heritage site, the demolition of four surrounding mountain peaks and a handful of nearby villages, and the carving out of a pit half the size of Gibraltar for holding cyanide-laced run-off; the Romanian state is being sued by Gabriel Resources for $4.4 billion in profit losses for forestalling this process. By 2010 the largest private owner of trees in Romania was Harvard University, which six years earlier had started buying up enormous swathes of forest that had themselves been seized by mafia intermediaries on bogus claims of pre-communist ownership; sold off to Ikea, tens of thousands of acres were sawn down, probably never to be recovered. In 2012, residents of some fifty villages in the Banat, the fertile corner of western Romania that brushes up against Serbia and Hungary, woke up to find that their ancestral plots of land had been seized through another legal subterfuge by Rabobank of Utrecht. There are dozens of such cases. Few have been compensated.

Adrian Năstase [prime minister under Iliescu] ... lost no time privatizing steel to Mittal, and refashioning the PSD into a conduit for Romania’s Euro-Atlantic integration. Populated with former apparatchiks, swarming with Securitate agents with long experience of spying on Western security services, his government backed the invasion of Iraq, hosted a clandestine prison near Constanţa for CIA torture, and oversaw Romania’s entry into NATO.

The Direcţia Naţională Anticorupţie’s chief prosecutor, Laura Codruţa Kövesi,  who has been lavished by awards from France, Sweden and the U.S., "imprisons, on average, three Romanians per week and has another five thousand awaiting trial at any given time... The power of the DNA rests on its ability to offer something to a range of constituencies. For the protesting middle classes, it is an unimpeachable vehicle of progress that does not require them to vote; it does their work for them. Six out of seven Romanians trust it more than they do their elected ministers. For the European Union, the DNA is a reliable handmaiden of austerity. It is restoring the police procedures of communism even as it dismantles the modicum of economic justice it managed to effect. Kövesi’s jurisdiction does not extend to multinational corruption. But she does oversee the targeting of public services in villages which disproportionately supported the PSD in a 2012 referendum. For the secret services, the DNA is a front behind which they can operate in comfort; it is convenient that NATO, which has demanded that Romania’s spooks be reined in, supports the DNA.

Romania Redivivus
Or "Romania Reborn", an analysis published in December 2017