I don't know what other people feel, but I got the shivers when reading in three successive editions of "Romanian libera" daily the confessions of a former prosecutor, unveiling that before 1989 no prosecutor would be promoted unless he got training in the school belonging to the Securitate (Communist Secret Service). In this institution situated in Bran they would be taught to make up proves, to blackmail judges and lawyers, to pretend not to notice torture and not once the killing of the people investigated. This interview is standing all odds to evoke a dreadful reality. We have kept on unmasking ex Securitate collaborators, trying to learn who used to recruit and exploit them. But we can now see that a strategic point of this underground world of party and state violence has actually been unknown to us. It is not about one prosecutor or the other, it is about the whole system, perverted in its very essence by a maze of official complicity that turned this system into a pandemonium of under cover officers, assassins wearing uniforms or wearing no uniforms. Civil society together with the institutions of the rule of law must take efforts to declassify at once the documents on this severe violation of justice. There are are least three reasons for it. The most important one is that, if the confessions I am talking about prove true - I have no doubt about it, but maybe other have or they pretend to - , they prove the annihilation of the very principles of justice under the Communist regime. It is like saying any successful jurist didn't graduate Law School, but a school to teach one to do evil. He wasn't taught to judge depending on evidence, but to disdain evidence. He did not learn how to sanction falsehood, he actually learned to commit fake. It is like medicine schools training serial killers and theology seminars training professional desecrators. The Orwellian nature of this universe where injustice defined justice, just like the Ministry of Truth defines lie, is one more highly convincing proof of the Communist regime's murderous nature. No one could ask for another scientific report to be persuaded into condemning it. Secondly, such research would put an end to the legend claiming that this regime's repressive nature was restricted to the "obsessing decade". All the dread evoked by recollections about the training in Bran belongs to the time following after the 1964 amnesty, to the glorious era when Nicolae Ceausescu hadn't defiled you know what yet, to the years when Mr. Ion Iliescu himself was climbing step after step in the hierarchy. Prosecutors used to fake evidence not when Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej was in power, for he didn't care too much about evidence, but in the time of Nicolae Ceausescu's "patriotic" outburst. And nowadays some contemporaries of ours feel such an imbecile nostalgia for it! At that time they were the regime's opponents, secluded in asylums or, the interviewed claims, poisoned with drugs giving hallucinations. Before this time they would have just been sentenced to labor for the Black Sea-Danube canal. Last, but not least, such research would allow us to make out how many of the students trained in Dracula's Bran school are still working in the system and who are they working for. These last three days I have realized why the trial against the assassins of Gheorghe Ursu was systematically deadlocked. Since one of the assassins, Tudor Stanica, was a sort of textbook teaching all top jurists how to torture without leaving too many traces, why wonder that he got protection? Why wonder at the Constitutional Court's decision on the law to unmask the political police, since Mr. N Cochinescu, an overwhelmingly experienced prosecutor, was a rapporteur for it? It is true, the CVs of his colleagues are much less offering in terms of their activity before 1989. Therefore we can't say, but just suspect where they improved their studies. I am looking foward to the documents reaching the National Council for Research on the Communist Secret Service Archive and doing or not doing away with my suspicion.

Zoe PETRE