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EDITORIAL

Fate is sure to be ironical, since foreign minister Adrian Cioroianu is being insistently asked to resign, not because of his unbelievable incompetence, but simply because he uttered some uninspired words, interpreted as racist. It is the same minister who made a complete fool oh himself in a TV show last year, just to express his "political correctness" very clearly. He took the risk to be unfair with the character he had chosen to "defend" and with the rules of the game in particular. Cioroianu behaved like a prosecutor when he was asked to argue for Marshall Ion Antonescu's odds in the final of the "Great Romanians" competition. He acted like a prosecutor, not like a lawyer. Those who dared criticize his strange attitude he reproached for Anti-Semite tendencies or totalitarian nostalgia. Insulting labels were used instead of arguments.

Now it is Adrian Cioroianu's turn to see how it feels like to get unfairly labeled. He said he would send the criminals committing severe crimes, like rapists and pedophiles, to Sahara so that they would toil instead of being secluded in prison cells with TV sets. His statement is not racist. It is just stupid. It was not born out of some nostalgia for "a final solution", but out of his wish to seize an opportunity.

As he was really out of popularity, minister Cioroianu tried to make use of the anger wave emerging because of the recent events in Italy. He thought he could score some points by playing the unrelenting justice maker. The electorate's response is usually positive anytime some one asks for harsher sanctions against criminals. And in the context strain was prevailing. Not for a minute did Adrian Cioroianu think that his statement might be interpreted in a different way, twisted, displaced from its context and misinterpreted. He should have thought about it, had he had some vague diplomacy skill. But he obviously doesn't have any.

The Romanian foreign minister is now on the black list of the "Simon Wiesenthal" Center. The latter influent Jewish organization asked PM Tariceanu "to criticize Cioroianu's statement publicly, dismiss him from the government and apologize to the Roma community in Europe." I am curious to see the sanctions this Center has proposed against the Italian politicians remarked in the latest weeks for much more severe speeches, with immediate, negative consequences on the minority in Italy.

Even if I am tempted to claim that Adrian Cioroianu deserves his fate, I can't ignore how absurd the accusation of racism is. In fact, the only thing he is guilty of is that he can't manage to be a foreign minister.

It is interesting that people who seemed to have a lot in common with him are those most enraged by his stupid statement. It is people he would take for friends or at least for his spiritual kin until a short while ago, people who are sure to know him well enough not to suspect him of Nazi tendencies. But it is just because they have so much in common that such people stepped back all of a sudden when the never tired collaborator of "Dilema veche" weekly became a Liberal minister. Such kin people of the old times can no longer protect him against the dirt he himself poured on other people once. Opportunity seizing is much more powerful than friendship and more important than truth for our "elite" intellectuals. Still it is God who makes justice every now and then...