Who ordered the violence during the protests of August 10th?

It would be a mistake and a trap to start hunting for scapegoats, low ranked enforcers such as the white-dressed man or other secondary characters. The real coordinators of Friday night violence were not in the square, there has only been enforced a high-level predefined plan.

According to G4Media.ro sources, the action was coordinated from the Interior Minister’s office, where the leadership of enforcement structures were present until after 3 am (police, Interior Ministry intelligence, gendarmerie, etc.). Now, the full attention has to focus on the high level accountable persons, otherwise we risk inducing the public the idea that everything has been planned and coordinated by lower echelons, which would be a diversion and a fake.

The request by President Klaus Iohannis on Saturday is an important indication that the command center was at the Interior Ministry. Iohannis announced that he „demands Interior Minister Carmen Dan to take responsibility for the way she handled the situation during the protests and to provide a detailed report on how the law enforcement have acted, and especially on whose order.”

The Interior Minister replied to the president in a long press statement, stating that she would submit a detailed report to Supreme Defense Council if she would be asked: „Do not imagine that the Minister of the Interior orders gendarmerie interventions, the operative actions of the police or the firefighters’ missions. There is a clear law that determines who decides the intervention for the restoration of public order, and last night this order was approved by the prefect, according to Law 60 of 1991 on the organization and conduct of public assemblies.

In the meantime, there are more and more videos and direct testimonies of the gendarmes’ pointless violence against peaceful demonstrators beaten fiercely for no reason. They undoubtedly point to premeditation, especially that the instigations and the aggressive attitude of the gendarmes were totally absent on the second and third day of the protest.

These testimonies must all be turned into criminal actions against the law enforcement, since only in this way can be restored in a legal, probative and legal sense, what really happened in the afternoon and evening of Friday, August 10th. Until Sunday, 33 complaints had been filed with the Military Prosecutor’s Office, who in turn also opened an ex-officio investigation.

The Attorney General and the military prosecutors have an important mission. It is one of the most extensive investigations after the mineriads of the 1990s, where force institutions must respond for unprecedented violence against civilians, specific to authoritarian regimes, not to an European democracy. All those who have suffered, the victims of the repression, have the duty to testify and to demand that the guilty be held responsible.

In Romania were repeated the turbulent scenes from the early 1990s, with people beaten in the streets for the simple reason that they opposed the regime, terrifying the civilized world.

The gendarmerie was set against the Romanian citizens who came to protest against Liviu Dragnea, PSD and Premier Dăncilă, in one of the most virulent disputed movements of the past three decades, condensed in the slogan „M … e PSD!”.

It has to be clarified who organized the instigators and the ultras hooligans, the role of sectoral mayors and other political leaders in calling underworld figures on the streets. The first official allegations have emerged that the aggressors of the lady gendarme are football ultras of Steaua Club (CSA), suspected that they are the people of the riot police, trained and used especially at such times.

It is then necessary to establish precisely who set up the tactical plan and ordered the gendarmes to provoke the crowd to subsequently justify a manifestly disproportionate and indiscriminate reaction using water cannons, tear gas or pepper spray, acoustic grenades, and generally resorting to extreme violence against peaceful protesters and beating protesters with hands up, women, children, journalists.

The aggression on journalists of HotNews.ro and Digi24, the ORF cameraman, is proven and incomprehensible, sinister attacks on freedom of speech, all the more so since they were on duty and presented themselves to the gendarmes as such.

Finally, it must be clarified how much political involvement exists in the brutal crackdown on Friday, who directed it and on whose order the gendarmes acted like they never did before. The Prefect of the Capital, Speranţa Cliseru (the Pandele-Firea family crony) must explain in detail the reasons underlying the Friday evening order authorizing the intervention.

If we do not find answers to all of these questions quickly, accurately and well documented, it means that democracy in Romania has died, just as it was suffocated 28 years ago during the mineriads. But, after these protests, the Romanian democracy deserves another chance.

PS: Where are the ALDE leaders today, the chief advocates of the „rights and freedoms” of citizens? What do they say about the over 400 protesters who needed medical care, about the 60 wounded, about the brutal aggression of the police? Tariceanu is ready to set a parliamentary commission to investigate the death of a corrupt judge, Voiculescu being convinced he was assassinated. What does the ALDE leader say after the diaspora rally? Isn’t a parliamentary commission to investigate the gendarmes’ acts of violence also needed?