Doubtful revolutions and counter-revolutions deconstructed

Abstract

On 15 December 1989, in the Romanian city of Timisoara, a huge crowd waiting for the chronically late tramway caught word of a nearby altercation between dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s secret service, Securitate, and a few Hungarian parishioners protesting the arrest of their priest. Although they were mostly Romanians, they allied with the parishioners against the Securitate. The altercation turned into an uprising after shots were fired by the Army. After a couple of days of escalation, by which time the whole city had joined the insurgents and had occupied the official buildings, Ceauşescu denounced it as the work of ‘foreign terrorists’. To counteract, he convoked the usual formal meeting of support in the capital Bucharest. However, a part of the crowd turned against him. He fled the city the next day, only to be found and shot in the midst of national panic created by sniper fire and collective hysteria. The regime which followed after him, resulting from the first free though unfair elections (1990), took a care to seal the archives concerning these events by means of a National Security Law passed in 1991. People have been left since puzzling over who were the alleged ‘Arab terrorists’. As the Western media originally reported a huge death toll the mere 1000 actually certified dead, although the highest of Eastern European revolutions, has been viewed since with some disappointment and suspicion. In Andijan, a small city in post-Soviet authoritarian Uzbekistan, where the monopoly of power of President Islam Karimov had still been unshaken, violence broke out on 13 May 2005. A small armed mob, Islamic ‘terrorists’ by government accounts, attacked the jail and set free the prisoners, then occupied the main official buildings. The local people gathered in the main square, according to some sources answering a call from the President who had flown in to address them as Ceauşescu had done, according to others by curiosity only. By late afternoon the square was surrounded by security forces. The government