The sister of a teenage boy who was tortured and killed during Romania’s bloody 1989 anti-communist revolution says she has gone on hunger strike after authorities refused to respect the wishes of the families and place a sculpture in the cemetery where her brother is buried.
Ioana Hortensia Vlase and her mother Elena want the sculpture called the Monument to the Heroes of the 1989 revolution to be placed in the Heroes Cemetery, which they say is according to the wishes of the dozens who were killed during the uprising.
The Heroes’ Cemetery, a small, neat graveyard not far from where many were shot, currently has is a large metal cross with the name of those who died in the revolution.
But the Vlase family says a sculpture of a Greek goddess which symbolizes the victory of the Romanian people over the communist regime as well as the sacrifice of young people who died in the violence to stand in the cemetery. Promises to finance the sculpture for the cemetery have not been kept, local press reported. Elena Vlase told Universul.net that the monument was completed in September and should have been moved then.
The 19-year-old who was killed in the central city of Brasov in December 1989 is buried at the cemetery along with some of the other 67 people who lost their lives in the city during the revolution.
Many died when many when unidentified gunmen opened fire on unarmed crowds. The revolution saw the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu and the end of communism.
Trauma has persisted in Brasov over unanswered questions about who opened fire on civilians. Last year, Ileana Negru, whose son Florin was just 12 when he was killed in Brasov during the 1989 revolution, went to a mountain road outside the poured gasoline over her body, and set herself on fire.
Her suicide in May 2023 came after decades of suffering and what she said was humiliation at the hands of the state. She never found out who killed her son, nor was anyone ever held accountable.
In post-Ceausescu Romania, investigations into the more than 1,100 deaths and 3,000 injured in the bloody uprising have started, stalled, resumed but never been completed, Cases have been passed from one prosecutor’s office to another and have periodically bounced from court to court.
Forty-nine children were killed during Romania’s revolution, the youngest a month old which ended Ceausescu’s nearly 25-year rule
The Monument to the 1989 Heroes was supposed to be placed in the cemetery in September three months before the 35th anniversary of the revolution.
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