1989 (26 page)

Now, at long last, even in downtrodden Romania there were fresh rumblings of discontent. A group of senior party figures purged by Ceausescu began to stir against him. In Transylvania, which until 1918 had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was not just a German-speaking minority but a much larger Hungarian-speaking population which now, inspired by the sudden transformation of their ‘mother country’ began fleeing across the frontier. The regime moved to deport László Tökés, an ethnic
Hungarian
pastor considered to be a troublemaker and based in the town Hungarian-speakers called Temesvar and Romanians,
Timisoara
. When local people gathered around him, refusing to let the police pass, Ceausescu ordered in the troops backed up by the hated Securitate. What should have been nothing more than a tough exercise in crowd control turned into bloodshed. But instead of the brutality causing the trouble to abate, it escalated. Ever more people came out into the streets. Securitate ordered the troops to fire point blank into the crowds. Those few who refused were
summarily
executed.

In the midst of all this Ceausescu, thinking himself omnipotent,
went on a three-day state visit to Iran, leaving his Securitate thugs to put down a crisis he refused to acknowledge. When he returned he was astounded to find the global condemnation of events in
Timisoara
included his erstwhile allies in Budapest, Warsaw and now even East Berlin. Ceausescu made a dramatic television speech blaming the trouble on ‘hooligans’ and ‘external agitators’, banned all foreigners from entering country, and declared a state of emergency.

Back in London, with reports pouring out from the few
reporters
, notably Reuters, permanently based in the country, nobody was watching the situation more anxiously than me. I had just returned from East Berlin yet again, watching the preparations for the
ceremonial
opening of a crossing point at that so symbolic focus of
division
, the spot where I had taken Jackie on her fist night in Berlin to point to our future home on the other side of the Wall: the
Brandenburg
Gate. I had made something like a hundred flights in the course of the past twelve months, spent far more time apart from my family than with them, and now, with only days to go to Christmas, and my parents coming to stay, I was determined to spend it home. So when the phone call came from the foreign desk, as I knew it must, I joined the crowds of those doing the unthinkable: I said no. Politely, but firmly, pleading for understanding. And I got it, up to a point: at least I got the reprieve. Another journalist, Walter Ellis, a friend of mine, but already divorced, was sent instead.

But the story would not wait for him to get there. I took my place on the foreign desk, watching the wires, monitoring the
television
broadcasts, putting in my own knowledge and analysis and pulling together a two-page special. The next day, Thursday,
Ceausescu
organised a demonstration of support outside the presidential palace. Suddenly his placemen realised they were outnumbered. His speech from the balcony, filled with the usual platitudes about ‘the inevitable victory of the socialist revolution’, suddenly
encountered
revolution. The planned applause was weak, and then came the unimaginable: heckling. Within minutes the demonstration designed to illustrate his power proved it had evaporated as the crowd below him began shouting ‘Down with Ceausescu’. Within minutes, a big Securitate man motioned the confused ‘great leader’ back inside his palace. The army moved in against a crowd that had
proved itself unfaithful and within minutes the square rang out with the sound of gunshots and tear gas filled the air. The Ceausescus fled, taking a helicopter from the palace courtyard to a nearby airport of Targoviste. When they landed they were informed that the army had closed all airspace and was not about to reopen it, even for their leader. The tide was beginning to turn, irrevocably.

That was as much as I, or anyone in the Western world, knew as I left
The Sunday Times
office in Wapping on Saturday night, December 23rd, 1989, and went home for a long-anticipated and much-needed family Christmas. There was no holiday however for the reporters on the ground, nor for the people of Romania. The Ceausescus, it turned out, had tried to continue their escape from the vengeance of their ‘children’ by car, a little red Dacia rustbucket rather than the
armourplated
Mercedes limousines they were used to. But they did not get far. With revolution in the air across an entire country, the police were setting up roadblocks. Those outside Targoviste were
astonished
to find who they had stopped. The former ruling couple were arrested and held while the police listened to the radio to find out which way the tide was flowing. Then they made their decision: they handed them over to the army. And the army had already decided it was now behind the people instead of against them.

The Ceausescus were taken to a secret military base as
prisoners
. Amid rumours that loyalists were planning to rescue them and mount a counter-revolution, they were summarily tried on
Christmas
Day, on a confused multiplicity of charges, including genocide, then taken out immediately and shot. Elena allegedly turned on the soldiers to say, ‘I was like a mother to you.’ One replied without thinking, ‘You murdered our mothers.’ Within hours of the event the summary trial and the Ceausescus’ execution were shown live on Romanian television, the station itself having been the scene of bloody battles between Securitate and the rebels. The broadcast effectively ended the battle for the old guard who had lost their figurehead. By that stage each and every one of them knew there was no point looking towards Moscow for backup. A message from Gorbachev’s Kremlin advised Ceausescu loyalists to lay down their arms.

It was a cruel, nasty, but probably necessary codicil to a year of
miraculous and largely peaceful revolutions. On New Year’s Eve – I had managed almost a whole week with my family – we held a party at home that became a celebration of the end of the Cold War. It was a party already full of journalists when at five minutes to midnight – the mythical hour that the doom-mongers had warned us the Cold War had brought the human race to – the bell rang and in came a horde of revellers straight from the front line. ITV had chartered a plane to get their crew out of Romania in time for a New Year’s celebration, and onto it had piled virtually every British
correspondent
who could fit. The all now tried to squeeze inside our kitchen, champagne mingling with vodka and
tuiça
, fiery Romanian plum brandy. Amongst the decorations strung across our living room that heady night was a string of bunting, bought in East Germany eight years earlier on the occasion of a Warsaw Pact summit, in the form of the flags of all the countries of the communist military alliance. Now, as the revolutions on the ground had done, I took a pair of scissors and cut out the communist symbols from each: last but not least, the ‘Hammer and Compasses’ from the flag of the German Democratic Republic. So modified, it alone became identical to the flag of one other country: the Federal Republic of Germany. That the two would become one now seemed inevitable. The only questions were how and when?

But before I could turn my attention back to the ‘wrapping-up’ of what had to be Germany’s march to reunification, I needed – and the paper needed – a visit to the scene of the year of miracles’ bloody ending. January 3rd, 1990, therefore found me sitting once again in the departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, waiting for the Tarom Romanian airlines flight to Bucharest. I would have preferred to travel by another airline – any other airline – but with the
situation
on the ground still uncertain, nobody else at all was flying into Romania. When, four hours late, the few of us foolish enough to want do so went out on the tarmac we were not exactly reassured. I had flown in many a Boeing 707 before, although by then the
enduring
workhorse of air transport was considered a relative antique. But never before had I flown in one streaked with mud. We were only allowed to get on board after they had unloaded stretchers bearing the injured. The flight was delayed because it had been diverted
via Timisoara to pick up several seriously wounded civilians who needed urgent medical treatment only available in London.

As we tried to settle down in our threadbare seats I noticed one young couple almost in tears who had been on the flight and not disembarked. Gently I tried to coax them into conversation, only to find they spoke little English. They did, however, speak French, which was not unusual for Romanians, whose own language was Latin-derived. It turned out, however, that they were not Romanian at all, but Belgian, and on their way home from their honeymoon. Not in Timisoara – or even Bucharest – needless to say. They had got married in early December and booked a honeymoon in
Thailand
. Their only mistake had been to go for the absolute cheapest flights they could find, offered, unsurprisingly, by Tarom, itinerary Brussels-Bucharest-Bangkok. Lazing on the beaches of Koh Samui, they had heard nothing about the revolution in Romania and were horrified to land in the middle of a capital in chaos, then be diverted to Timisoara where they had picked up moaning bloodied bodies which were laid in stretchers in the aisles. They had been in the air already for more than twenty-four hours.

I wondered how they were going to get home, until the obvious truth dawned on me, a few moments after take-off. Take-off in itself was a hair-raising experience, not least because I was seated across the aisle from a British Airways ground agent I had known in Moscow. He was now on his way to Bucharest in the hope of
discussing
a better deal on routes and landing fees with the new regime (I had to admire the capitalist nerve). I made a few remarks on the state of the plane, but he laughed it off as ‘mere cosmetics’; he had lived in Somalia for several years with experience of their national airline, never mind our mutual grim tales of Aeroflot. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said with a laugh. Which was why, when we lurched along the runway, heaved up into the air and then suddenly seemed to drop, and then maybe a few thousand feet above West London, did it again, that I looked across to him for moral support. Only to see that his face was every bit as white as mine, and his knuckles were if anything whiter as we both clutched our armrests as if they
contained
the controls to ejector seats. Barely an hour later we landed, as I had reluctantly come to anticipate, in Brussels. Though I could
not help feeling relieved on behalf of our poor honeymooners who literally ran off the plane as if they feared it might at any moment take off again with them still on board.

I could all too easily understand their terror. It was not as if our aircrew exactly inspired confidence. Ever since our upsy-daisy
take-off
from Heathrow I had been waiting for them to bring round the booze to calm my nerves. In vain. Now, as we repeated the same antics to get airbound in Brussels – think of a small child playing with a model airliner, going ‘Vrooom, vrooooom’ – I was beginning to seriously look forward to a stiff gin and tonic. When the alcohol finally did emerge, however, it turned out all they apparently had was
tuiça
, that Romanian plum brandy which had spiced up our New Year’s Eve cocktails. There was a bigger problem, however: the aircrew weren’t offering it around. They were drinking it. For the next several hours we watched two lumpen air stewardesses standing in the aisle, leaning over the backs of empty seats – there were by now only a dozen passengers on board – and getting solidly pissed out of their minds, while puffing on endless cigarettes. Kent, of course. Not once were we even offered a drop – of anything – and when I made an attempt to ask, they waved a finger at me, as if I were a naughty schoolboy asking if I could leave the room during lessons.

This was bad enough but it seemed to be taking an
unconscionably
long time to get to Bucharest. I had expected the flight to take between three and a half and four hours. From London. Brussels was already part – admittedly a small part – of the way there. But after nearly five hours on board, I was beginning to wonder what the hell was going on, with vague visions of having become trapped in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
, possibly entitled ‘Flight into Infinity’, when the less than totally slurred voice of a male
attendant
(the captain?) asked us to fasten our seat belts, as we would be landing in ten minutes, ‘in Constanta’. The BA man and I turned to one another, our mouths simultaneously making the expression, where? Not that we didn’t know where: Constanta was Romania’s biggest city on the Black Sea, and had for years been fighting a – relatively doomed – battle to make it into the catalogues of British packet tour operators.

‘Why not Bucharest?’ I tried getting something, in elementary
English, out of the
tuiça
-sodden stewardess. She did that
finger-wagging
thing again, and said, ‘Not possible.’

‘Why?’ I tried, more in hope than expectation.

‘
Tanki
,’ she said, ‘tanks. On the runway.’

‘Oh,’ I said, because it was, after all, not a bad explanation.

We piled off the aircraft, relieved at least to be back on
terra firma
, to find ourselves in an unheated waiting room with temperatures hovering around minus five degrees Centigrade. For half an hour we stood there, our teeth chattering, while they roused a customs and immigration man to stamp our visas. ‘Tonight,’ a bleary-eyed Tarom ground agent told us, ‘you will stay in motel. Here. Then
tomorrow
, when we get clearance from Bucharest, we get back on plane. Okay?’ The BA man and I looked at one another and thought the same thing: no, not okay. Not okay at all. Not only would we have to spend the night in some undoubtedly freezing, flea-ridden motel room, but the next day we would have to get on that damn plane again. We weren’t doing it. Not if they threatened us with a firing squad, though under the circumstances we decided not to raise that option. ‘No thanks,’ we said together, firmly. ‘We’ll take a taxi.’