'I killed Ceausescu'

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‘Ceausescu looked in my eyes, and he knew that he was going to die’
A former soldier is haunted by the memory of the Christmas Day firing squad that killed Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena
Roger Boyes
timesonline.co.uk

Christmas Day memories are made of this: a turkey dinner, exchanging gifts, watching television, family togetherness, peace on Earth and goodwill to all men. Dorin-Marian Cirlan’s abiding memory is of the Christmas Day he shot a dictator. “I know what I would rather have been doing,” said Mr Cirlan, who was a member of the three-man squad that killed Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, on December 25, 1989. “As a Christian it is a horrible thing to have to take someone’s life — and that on Christmas Day, that holy holiday.”

Mr Cirlan was in the elite 64th Boteni parachute regiment when Romania crumpled in the 1989 revolution. Unlike the upheavals in Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, blood was spilt — some of it on Mr Cirlan’s paratrooper boots. “You have to picture how it was then,” Mr Cirlan said. “Rumours were swirling — there was panic everywhere on the radio, on television, even on the army radio frequencies. It was like the coming of the Apocalypse.”

The paratroopers had gone over to the side of the revolutionaries; some of their units were fighting agents of the Securitate secret police around the Bucharest television tower. But Mr Cirlan — 27 at the time and a non-commissioned officer — was at regimental headquarters in Boteni, about 30 miles (50km) outside the capital. “Many army leaders were beginning to break down under the intense pressure.” Someone, it was never clear who, had placed Soviet-made electronic devices around their barracks, creating a loud drone, the sound of explosions. It was psychological warfare at its crudest. Was it a revolution, a Russian-backed coup d’état? Even now there is not much clarity about who was pulling the strings. Into this maelstrom, early on Christmas Day, came two helicopters. “Our commander needed eight volunteers. We didn’t know where we were going, which is against the military code — every soldier should be told his mission.”

Mr Cirlan has put on weight — his stomach pushes against the waistband of his grey suit — but he still has a military bearing; a sergeant’s ashen moustache. He is a lawyer now, vetting contracts for foreign property dealers. As we sat chatting for three hours in a draughty Bucharest café near Ceausescu’s former Palace of the People, my eye was drawn constantly to his right hand, to the trigger finger. “We flew at high speed, very low, zig-zagging in our Puma helicopters to avoid radar.” They touched down in Bucharest near the military cemetery and were joined by officers from the military justice department. Mr Cirlan recognised only one man, General Victor Stanculescu.

“He was just like an English gentleman — very elegant.” General Stanculescu had been the favourite of Elena Ceausescu, had briefly taken over command of the army and had now changed sides. “We had a lot of time for him. He knew how to talk to soldiers, had looked after us, arranged coffee and cigarettes for the troops.”

This week the general, undergoing treatment in a prison hospital, has argued in interviews with the Romanian press that the Soviet KGB had helped to plan the toppling of Ceausescu for almost a year, that the United States was aware of a plot and that Russian GRU (military intelligence) were among those firing in Bucharest and Timisoara to increase the sense of menace and accelerate a popular uprising. Twenty years ago though, to Mr Cirlan and his comrades, General Stanculescu seemed to be the only officer who knew what he was doing.

To reassure the garrison in Tirgoviste, where the Ceausescus were being held, one of the officers had unfurled a long yellow scarf that had briefly got caught in the rotors — a code that they were on the side of the revolutionaries. General Stanculescu barked out: “Paratroopers to me!” The Ceausescus, he said, were about to be “judged by the people”. If the verdicts were to be death, he needed soldiers ready to carry out the sentence.

“Who is ready?” All eight men stepped forward. “Those ready to shoot, raise your hands!” All eight raised their hand. Impatient, the general barked: “You, you and you!” The three men were Captain Iomel Boeru, Sergant-Major Georghin Octavian and Mr Cirlan. The captain was ordered to sit in the makeshift courtroom and shoot the Ceausescus if anyone tried to break in and rescue them. Mr Cirlan and Mr Octavian were supposed to stand guard outside the room.

“I could hear everything through the door,” Mr Cirlan said, “and I knew then that there was something wrong with the trial. Elena was complaining, refusing to recognise the court. The so-called defence lawyers were acting like prosecutors. But I was a soldier obeying orders. It was only later that I realised what a mockery it all was.” The verdict was read out after a few hours. The Ceausescus were sentenced to death. They had ten days to appeal, but the sentence was to be carried out immediately. A nod to Kafka.

There was a confused silence. Death — now? The dictator and his wife were tied up but not blindfolded. As Mr Cirlan helped to frogmarch the dictator along the corridor, he heard a shout: “Get on with it! The US Sixth Fleet has just sent a helicopter force to rescue them! Move! Move! Do it!” “Take them to the wall,” General Stanculescu said. “First him, then her.” But the Ceausescus did not know what was happening until they were led past the helicopters to an outbuilding. “He looked in my eyes and realised that he was going to die now, not at some time in the future, and he started to cry,” Mr Cirlan said. “It was very important to me, that moment. I still have nightmares about it. That look.”

The dictator was lined up with his wife — she had insisted on their dying together — and yelled: “Death to the traitors!” He puffed out his chest and started to sing the Socialist Internationale: “Arise, wretched of the Earth! Arise prisoners of hunger!” He never reached the fourth line: “This is the eruption of the end / of the past, let us wipe the slate clean.”

“We were told to fire 30 rounds each into them. From the hip. As paratroopers. Not as a firing squad, where some of the shooters have real bullets, some blanks, so that no one has to live with the feeling of being an executioner. We fired live,” Mr Cirlan said, his thick trigger finger unconsciously mimicking his actions of 20 years ago. “After shooting seven rounds into Ceausescu, the gun jammed. I changed magazines and shot a full 30 rounds into Elena. She flew backwards with the force of it all. We started at about a metre range and then walked steadily backwards, still firing, so that we wouldn’t be caught by a ricochet.” Elena’s blood splattered on his uniform. The back of her skull had fallen away. “She didn’t die easily. She was in spasms,” Mr Cirlan shook his head at the memory. “I had never even killed a chicken before.”

Behind the three-man squad, two other soldiers had joined in the shooting. One had lost his brother in the Timisoara rising a few days earler and wanted revenge. “I was angry too when I shot Ceausescu. Until the Timisoara revolt in mid-December, I had been a true- believing communist. What else? Even in kindergarten we hadn’t sung songs about nature and sunsets but about the genius of Ceausescu and how he was our national father. But then the army was used to shoot civilians and it made me, many of us, question everything. I was furious with Ceausescu for betraying socialism.”

After the executions — “it wasn’t a trial, it was a political assassination in the middle of a revolution” — Mr Cirlan was edged out of his army career. He studied law. Captain Boeru later rose to the rank of colonel and retired. Mr Octavian became a taxi driver. “We don’t meet up any more,” Mr Cirlan said, “because we always end up talking about the same thing. Now I try to live according to the teachings of the Bible. But I can’t be happy on Christmas Day, not ever. Across the world, Christians are celebrating. But not me. Not me.”

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That's quite a story.

[Mixxa]

Ceausescu deserved to die. That's the bottom line. Anybody who played any part in his death should sleep with a clear conscience.