Even today, thirty years later, I cannot forget the first time in my life I experienced the collapse of a communist state, the People’s Republic of Romania, currently just named Romania after the ‘Revolution’. At the time, I was a student at the linguistics department at Bucharest University and working as a Romanian language trainee posted at the Japanese Embassy. I received a phone call from Counsellor Tsushima, who was the deputy chief of Mission (DCM), who told me that because of some unstable situation in the country, he requested me to come to the embassy from tomorrow and work there temporarily. In Romania at the time freedom of speech was strictly controlled, and the only things broadcast on the television or radios were communist propaganda programs or news about the activities of the president, such as ‘Our great leader Comrade Ceausescu visited a factory and encouraged the workers’. Because of the propagandist language used, Romanians called jokingly that time ‘The Golden Age (Eopoca de Aur)’. The greatest enjoyment for the people was distracting themselves by satirizing the political situation.
　In Eastern Europe at that time, it was a popular trend to use the recreation tickets handed out at the workplace to spend holiday such as in the areas around Balaton Lake (Hungary) and the Black Sea. In 1989, because of the political unstability in Central and Eastern Europe in particular, Hungary’s border security was relaxed, and people from East Germany coming on holiday started to enter Austria. I presume the Austrian border police, who were at the front line in the Cold War, were also astonished, because many East Germans continuously defected to West Germany via Austria. People in East Germany soon found out about this situation, and many East Germans said they were going for a ‘picnic’ then took this route, ultimately leading to the collapse of East Germany. In West Berlin, which had become an isolated inland island under the joint control of the four winners of the war (United States, United Kingdom, France, Soviet Union), the wall that surrounded the area except Soviet Union sector occupied by the western winners was destroyed, and people were now free to move between East and West Germany even in areas other than Checkpoint Charlie (the border control point between East and West Berlin).
　This was the kind of political situation occurring consecutively in East Germany, Czechoslovakia (which was later divided) and Hungary, and apparently it was so busy that the Foreign Service officers working in the Eastern Europe Division of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time were exhausted from working day and night and were sleeping on the floor. One key point in analysing the situation was whether or not the political turmoil taking place in Eastern Europe would also spread to Romania and Bulgaria, which were under strong political controls. Political officers in the Embassies had a meeting for exchange of views in Vienna, which was the gateway towards Eastern Europe at the time, to discuss this issue. In particular, in the case of Romania it was thought that any contact with dissident groups would result in arrests, imprisonment and torture, and it was an open secret that Romanian local staffs at the Japanese Embassy at the time were regularly reporting on the internal goings-on at the embassy to the Protocol office in charge of the diplomatic corps that also dispatched them. There was also a possibility that listening devices had been installed in the Embassy, and for this reason, the consultations of a confidential nature were often held in the Embassy compound outside of the office building.
　At this time, a valuable information source was Radio Free Europe (RFE), where defectors from Eastern Europe broadcasted information to their home countries. The BBC, Deutsche Welle and others also broadcasted in the Romanian language. RFE was based in Munich, and was an important activity base at the time for European intelligence service, just like the German Federal Intelligence Ministry today. In this way the Romanian language broadcasting unit was broadcasting the latest information about Eastern Europe, which was not broadcasted domestically in Romania. On December 16, 1989, it reported on the news that the people had finally revolted in Timisoara, and had clashed with the security forces and were suppressed, and this led to the start of rumors of riots among the people. For this reason, the Japanese Embassy also entered a state of alert. I was one of the staff assigned temporarily as an extra member of the political affairs section, and began to work immediately. 　Although people had started to talk covertly about the insurgence at Timisoara, crucially, there was no evidence, so other embassies were frantically trying to gather information. The embassies of the major nations decided to dispatch diplomatic staffs to verify the situation in Timisoara. The ambassador at the time, Ambassador Ichioka, consulted the matter with the Ministry in Japan, and as a result decided to dispatch two officers to the area. Of course, if they failed, there was a risk of retaliatory measures, such as diplomatic officers being expelled from the country as persona non grata and the Romanian driver being arrested on a charge of treason. While some thought that we should be cautious, the conclusion was that the only way to obtain evidence was to go to Timisoara. An ambassador’s car vehicle was used as it was less likely to be blocked by authorities along the way, and the three members quietly departed from the Embassy, trying not to attract attention.
　The United States, France and Germany had all tried in the same way, but because they tried to enter from the main road they were stopped at the police security checkpoint and sent back. The Japanese team tried to enter Timisoara from not the main road but a rural road, although they nearly got lost along the small traffic road where there were no streetlights. Although they were seen by a policeman at a village police station along the way, they somehow arrived in the center of the town. There, they saw stores that had been destroyed, their windows smashed and the glass shattered everywhere; and marks from gunshot and bloodstains―it was clear that an insurgence had occurred in Timisoara and that the general public had been suppressed. After this, they were found by the secret police that were patrolling the city and were kindly requested to come to a hotel where a temporary command post had been set up. There, they were interrogated briefly. They were told that because they had entered the city, which had been designated as an area that foreigners are prohibited to enter, thus they were requested to leave and led out of the city escorted by a police car.
　The two diplomats were only asked why they had come to the city, but the Romanian driver had his hair pulled during the interrogation and was continually threatened―he must have been terrified surely. In the end, Japan was the only country to successfully enter Timisoara, and the news of the tragedy there was communicated to the world from Tokyo. Later, corpses that became proof of the suppression of the people were unearthed, and images of the many coffins carrying the dead bodies at a church were broadcast on television. However, we still do not know how many people lost their lives in that clash, even today. One thing that is clear is that the insurgence was triggered by the gathering that was held to protest the persecution of the pastor Laszlo Tokes, whose name indicates that he was a Hungarian minority Romanian and that in response, the security forces opened fire in attempt to stop the protest, and as a result many people lost their lives. In the background is the fact that communist regimes in Eastern Europe were falling like dominos and there were regime changes one after the other. The security authorities in Timis County, consulting with the central government, took hard-line measures in order to maintain the administration at that time. 　What was President Ceausescu doing at the time of the Timisoara revolt? He was on a trip abroad in Iran. Naturally he must have been informed the uprising in Timisoara. Although there were information that the president returned home a few days later, Romanian state-run television broadcast no reports on what happened in Timisoara. After a while, the Japanese Embassy received information that the Romanian government was planning an organised protest meeting where Ceausescu would criticize the insurgence in Timisoara. The meeting was to be held on the afternoon of December 21, five days after the incident. The location was not very far from where the Japanese Embassy was located at the time, so we also went there, monitoring the situation in the city along the way.
　At the place where the official protest meeting was held, there was the former Royal family’s Palace, which was transformed as the national art gallery; the Romanian Athenaeum concert hall, which is an historical building; the prestigious Athenee Palace Hotel and Bucharest University library; and also the headquarter of the Communist Party. The headquarter was used before as the Ministry of Home Affairs to protect the palace located just in front of the Palace, and the access to the surrounding area was restricted. Something that came to light after the gun battle described below was that people who were loyal to the Ceausescu regime lived in the apartments surrounding the party headquarters, such as members of the secret police, and they protected the headquarters. This was the historical background of the headquarter building, and there were many surprising things that were found out about it later, including the fact that these two buildings such as former Palace and the Ministry was connected by underground tunnels. We were told to take care in the surrounding area, as cars with 1B3 number plates, which were allocated to the cars of party officials and government VIPs, drove recklessly in the area. When Ceausescu came to the official residence and the Communist Party headquarters in the Primavera area, the roads would sometimes suddenly be blocked, even though it was in the middle of the city.
　This was the place that was chosen for the meeting, and the residents who were mobilized gradually filled the location. There were heavy security measures; presumably to prevent any reoccurrence of what happened in Timisoara. We were watching the meeting from a little further away, near the Athenee Palace Hotel, but because there were a few Japanese people who spoke Romanian, it is likely that the plain clothes security police noticed that we were from the Japanese Embassy and had come to monitor the meeting. The organised meeting this time was different from usual one that had been held in the past: after transporting people who had been mobilized, a bus parked lengthways in front of the Communist Party headquarters, like a shield. In a short while Ceausescu appeared on the balcony at the front of the building.
　The statement criticizing what happened at Timisoara had already been released, and immediately after Ceausescu started talking there was the sound of an explosion in front of the building. The surprised people climbed over the barricades of security police and plain clothes secret police and started to move towards the city center, so we also hurriedly returned to the Japanese Embassy. Looking at the video that was shown later, the stunned look on Ceausescu’s face as he realized something unexpected had happened was memorable. His entourage of officials were panicking, and on the other hand members of the public started yelling “Down with Ceausescu!” and filling the streets of the city. There were cars sounding their horns, and it was just like a liberated zone. But this was not the end and it was the beginning of a sort of civil war on the streets.
　Coincidentally, on that day a member of the Embassy in a neighboring country had travelled to Bucharest, and had a room in the Intercontinental Hotel in front of University Square. That room was on an upper floor and had a good view of Bucharest University, but looking down on the road after the meeting, blinded vehicles equipped with machine guns had appeared out of nowhere, and had started to force their way into the crowd of people. That Embassy official quickly called the Japanese Embassy from his hotel room and told them what was happening, and just like a messenger game the diplomat at the Embassy communicated the same thing to Tokyo. For this reason, we had the strange situation where once again for some reason the news on the strained situation in Bucharest was being reported immediately from Tokyo.
　Actually, after the meeting in the city of Bucharest, from that evening the security forces were deployed and there was a tense atmosphere. The airport was closed, and because of the strict controls on the press from the end of the Ceausescu regime, the only member of the Japanese media was the special correspondent for the Japanese Communist Party bulletin. Today it is basically the same―when anything happens, the special correspondents acceded to the Eastern Europe press club in Vienna just call up the Japanese Embassy in Romania and ask the situation. It was the same situation in other countries as well, so no-one was able to report on the news. Eventually in the evening there was a sound of gunshot in the dark, and the shooting started. First it was warning shots into the air, so actual bullets were passing right by the window of the hotel we were in. I remember that we hurried to the far end of the room, feeling the fear that if any of us were hit we would definitely die.
　The sound of gunshot continued, and after a while tanks appeared. The tanks were shooting blanks, but it was enough to scare the people. The square that we were in during the day had turned into a battlefield. We were monitoring the situation, at the same time fearing for our lives on site. The university library was set on fire, there was shooting from the national art gallery that was the former Palace, and from neighboring apartment blocks, and to be honest it was very scary. Stray bullets even flew into the Japanese Embassy, which was away from the city center, and smashed the windows. Vasile Milea, the minister of defense, was found dead, who was forced to resign to take responsibility for the incident. It is not clear whether he killed himself or whether he was murdered, but in any case he was replaced by General Stanculescu, who had been in charge of the cleanup operation in Timisoara. However, Stanculescu realized the nature of the situation and rejected his orders, and as a result the military switched to the side of the people. At around midday on the 21^st, Ceausescu and his wife tried to flee by helicopter from the Communist Party headquarter, but they were forced to land at Titu air base. After attempting to flee on land they were arrested on the 23^rd. 　Political Power was seized by Iliescu and his supporters, who on December 22 announced the establishment of provisional government by the National Salvation Front (FSN). On December 26, Ceausescu and his wife were sentenced to death in a court-martial trial held as a formality, and soon after their execution was reported on television. While the glorious Ceausescu regime had come to a shocking end, Ceausescu loyalists in the secret police and other organizations opposed the revolution to the end, opening fire from buildings around the Communist Party headquarters and so on. Actually the only places where there were gun battles apart from the area near the headquarters were the Ministry of Defense and the area surrounding the television station. It was truly a battle on the streets to seize power. Fortunately, the Japanese Embassy at the time was safely away from those areas. Around eighty Japanese nationals escaped in the embassy to be protected. There was also a reporter from a public broadcasting agency who pretended to be taking refuge but actually came into the Embassy and interviewed people, secretly making contact with outside parties by phone―to be honest, this was extremely vexing as the lives of Japanese nationals were at stake.
　At the same time as this situation was occurring locally, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs cabled instructions to the Japanese Embassy in the United States, saying that agreement had been reached that when the United States were evacuating US citizens over land, Japanese nationals would be evacuated with them. Preparations for departure began the next morning. When we left the Embassy and were waiting in a line of cars on the road next to the US Embassy, gunfire broke out from a nearby building of the secret police, and the marines who were guarding the US Embassy returned fire. There were children crying, and we were also terrified. Eventually the gun battle stopped, and our group left, heading for neighboring Bulgaria. A few weeks later, when the situation became safe, they returned to Romania. In Romania, after a while the rebel loyalists surrendered and gun battles in the city finally ended, but in the areas where there had been fierce battles the charred remains of buildings remained for a long time.
　Afterwards there were daily demonstrations in front of the Romanian office of the Prime Minister (previously the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), and at University Square as well there were continuous demonstrations to commemorate the deaths of the young people who had lost their lives in clashes between the demonstrators and the security forces. In June 1990, President Iliescu, who was now in power, was said to have called miners to Bucharest, who then violently attacked the members of the general public participating in a demonstration; the demonstration collapsed. It seemed that even though the regime of a state had changed, it would take some time to establish a true democracy. In fact, it was in 2004, when I had assumed my second post as the chief of political section, Romania joined NATO, and it was 2007, after I had left, that Romania joined the EU. After this there was an increase in the number of Romanians who went looking for work outside of the country, and in 2018 there were demonstrations by Romanians living abroad. Currently Romania is slowing walking along the path to democratization. The chains of events described above are extremely instructive to me when I consider the fundamental concepts of peace, civilian and the state.
　The Salomon Dictionary of International Law defines peace as ‘a situation without war’, and there are similar passages in books published by colleagues at the Hiroshima Peace Institute. So, should the Romanian Revolution be called war? According to this definition, cases where war breaks out because two states declare war on each other is classified as war, but a non-international armed conflict does not come under this definition, as may be seen from the fact that people see this as a power struggle within the Communist Party and call it ‘the Palace Revolution’. On the other hand, however, a battle, which could also be called armed conflict, did break out and people lost their lives. The definition of ‘the civilian’ is difficult as well, because the secret police who suppressed the demonstration were not wearing uniforms, and looked no different from civilians. Regarding the state, similarly although the regime changed through political upheaval, it is hard to come up with a persuasive argument for how the state was transformed under those circumstances. The events of that time show to us the need for an elucidation of the historical facts, and the difficulty of explaining the nature of war and peace, which cannot be seen simplistically, and the relationship between civilians and the state.

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