Lurching toward democracy.

THINGS are stirring in Rumania, that apparently immovable bastion of neo-Communism. Ion Ratiu, the man the Rumanian regime loves to hate, was in London the other day presiding over a ceremony to mark the launching of the Rumanian Cultural Center he has created. Ratiu let it be known that he seriously intends to run for president early next year. Should he win, he would hold a referendum proposing the restoration of the monarchy, for which he believes there would be a popular majority.

The exiled King Michael, born in 1921, has spent most of his life in Britain; when he attempted to visit his country a couple of years ago, he was not allowed to leave the airport and was sent back by the next plane.

Ion Ratiu is well aware of the problems he faces, including his own age: he is 78, though still lucid and vigorous. His courage has never been in doubt. Having been granted political asylum in Britain when Rumania joined the Axis powers in 1940, he was stricken by tuberculosis. During long, recuperative spells in a Swiss sanatorium between November 1946 and January 1950, he wrote a book on the global ambitions of the Soviet Union which remained unpublished until he lent me the typescript in 1986. So struck was I by its prophetic quality that I arranged publication of Moscow Challenges the World in December of that year.

Ion Ratiu is still president of the World Union of Free Rumanians, which he created and ran during his decades of exile. He is also deputy speaker of the Rumanian Parliament, deputy of Cluj, and vice president of the Rumanian National Peasant Party.

As it happens, the incumbent president of Rumania, Ion Iliescu, has had some unsavory publicity lately. A recent issue of ZIUA, a Bucharest daily, gave details of his recruitment as a KGB agent (Code Number D-KGB-90519) during his student days in Moscow. This apparently authentic revelation throws a new (for me a confirmatory) light on the events of December 1989, when the odious tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown and summarily executed on the orders of Iliescu's faction of the former Communist Party, renamed the 'Front of National Salvation.' Once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent (unless you defect, and sometimes even then).

The way Iliescu himself put it in an interview was that 'the former unique party . . . was self-dissolved' and that the National Salvation Front had emerged 'as a spontaneous form of organization of a revolutionary nature.' Euphemisms abound in Iliescu's Rumania.

In April, I attended a discreet international conference in Bucharest. Some of the participants, myself among them, had made it clear that we would come to Bucharest only if Ratiu was permitted to attend. He was. In an earlier article ('The New World Disorder,' NR, Dec. 19, 1994) I described how the post-Ceausescu government had cut off the electricity feeding Ratiu's imported printing press and how persons unknown had burned his apartment to ashes.

On the first evening of the April conference he told me of some of the other problems he had faced, including two thefts. In the first one, in June 1990, a member of his staff removed $160,000 in greenback banknotes, only $70,000 of which was restored after the thief was arrested. In the second, a year later, the amount stolen was $100,000. After another arrest and long litigation the Supreme Court ordered that Ratiu be awarded $60,000 compensation. The official prosecutor immediately appealed against the verdict and the award; but the Special Appeals Court's 35 members unanimously rejected the appeal. (When I last spoke to Ion, the money had not reached him.)

When Ion spoke at the conference, however, he was calm and objective. The facts he gave were not all negative. Despite the earlier cutoff of his electricity, he had been allowed to launch his daily newspaper, named Cotidianul (Daily). There was no censorship of the press, and he was allowed to attack the government, as were other newspapers. And television? That was another story: apart from a few small, privately owned stations, Rumanian TV is a state monopoly. This means that Ratiu and other opposition members of Parliament are denied regular access to the little box.

Ion Ratiu alleges massive fraud in the first 'free' election, in 1990, but believes that the second election, in 1992, was conducted fairly. Moreover, speech is free in Parliament. It certainly came freely from his lips at our conference, even though the neo-Communist government had sent a high-level spokesman to condemn what he was saying as 'subjective.'

Another plus, or more accurately a reduced minus, that Ratiu cited at our conference: inflation had dropped from 300 to 70 per cent. Against that, more than a million Rumanians had left the country, unemployment was rising, and the old-age pension was barely enough to buy a newspaper. Hence, a family-dependency society.

Most of the land remained in the hands of the state, as did industry, which, as Ratiu put it, is 'programed to lose money.' And the rate of privatization was the lowest in Eastern Europe.

To counter these observations, the official voice asked what else could have been expected in a country without a banking system; which prompted Ratiu to ask what ever had happened to the $2.5 billion in cash that had been found in the state coffers after the revolution of December 1989. No answer was forthcoming.

That first evening, in Ceausescu's former personal palace, we heard a wide-ranging speech from Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu, who made it clear, as did other official speakers, that Rumania aspires to join NATO and (sometime or another) the European Union. Meanwhile, along with other would-be NATO members, it has to content itself with the feel-good device known as the Partnership for Peace.

Sadly, Rumania is still a long way from becoming a well-functioning democracy or witnessing a full flowering of its potential wealth, bearing in mind that in natural resources (oil, coal, minerals) it is by far the best endowed of the European ex-satellites.

The democratic party scene is a maze of short-lived groups and coalitions. Even the ex-Communists' umbrella, the National Salvation Front, no longer has the field to itself. In late 1990 the Rumanian Communist Party (or at any rate some of its hard-liners) reappeared outside Parliament, as the Social Party of Labor. As for Iliescu's NSF, it acquired another initial two years ago and became the Democratic National Salvation Front or DNSF. The adjective 'democratic' is much favored in the ex-satellites.

There is also a new constitution, passed by the Constituent Assembly and ratified by referendum. By old-regime standards, it is a democratic document. For example, whereas under the Com-munist regime the judiciary was brazenly controlled by the ruling party (as in all other Communist systems), it is now said to be independent and subject only to the law. I note, however, that judges are appointed by the president and are supposedly irremovable (though not in reality, says Ratiu).

The harassment of Ion Ratiu continues. After his speech at the conference, all telephone lines at the offices of his newspaper were cut. On complaining to the authorities, he was told that this was 'accidental' because of road work. The cut-off went on for nearly a week.

Against this background, it is hard to see how Ion Ratiu's proposed bid for the presidency could be allowed to succeed in this neo-Communist sham democracy. But such is his courage and determination that one cannot rule out success.