Revolutions can change political regimes, economic structures, social hierarchies. What they can’t change is people.
Revolutions can change political regimes, economic structures, social hierarchies. What they can’t change is people. People obviously readjust themselves, adopt new strategies, more or less double-faced, yet they basically remain the same. This is why revolutions are never followed by paradise on Earth, but some sort of restoration or another. With the same people, who only change skin-deep, you cannot forge new times. Mainly that, once in a while, ‘the protagonists’ “past” comes to the surface, comes out as a stubborn germ, as a chronic illness which cannot be hidden or cured.
I have recently seen Mr. Sergiu Andon on Radu Moraru’s television show. Mr. Andon came to publicly defend his boss and client, Dan Voiculescu against the charge of being an informer, not made by the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), public opinion or newspapers, but by Mrs. Silaghi, the blood cousin of the accused. Looking into her Securitate file, Mrs. Silaghi was unfortunate enough to learn that she used to be an ‘investigative’ goal to her cousin. Sergiu Andon was tasked to dismantle the accusation and did it employing the classical, yet still ‘green’ methods of a Securitate officer. He acted not like a lawyer, but a prosecutor. And not even like a prosecutor, but an investigator.
I don’t know Sergiu Andon’s biography, but had I run a Securitate service before 1989, I would have hired him on the spot: finest equipping, inborn abjection. I think I have met the lawyer about two times before. I’ve also seen him on television, in various political and legal debates. It appeared to me as an able, clever, efficient guy. And in most of the cases, of a bituminous (and sulphurous) bad faith. On Mr. Moraru’s programme, Sergiu Andon’s performance did not however capitalise on that latter “attribute”. The rest was predictable to the point of being stupid and primitively boorish. Sweaty, vaguely apologetic, a seasoned professional of bar trickery, the lawyer-prosecutor-investigator made use of the whole arsenal of police questioning. It was an opening lesson in a course of browbeating and de-legitimising the victim.
First, the old tactic of turning the accused into the accuser and the other way around: the informer, is suggested, is the person informed on, and the latter, the informer, actually. Therefore, Mrs. Silaghi is likely to be a Securitate informer (how did she manage to flee the country?) and Mr. Voiculescu has a criminal proceedings file for him. Sergiu Andon knows all too well that all the Securitate collaborators, from the petty ones to the generals, and from the rookies to ministers, were shadowed during those wonderful times of his subservient maturity. It doesn’t matter. The overall stupidity should be taken into account. Then, the feet moves when it comes to evidence. Sergiu Andon demands that the accusations should be rigorously backed by evidence. With documents. When a document emerges, the rigour gets soft, takes on a sentimental note: ‘don’t you feel (mind you!) this is a document that has been dictated?”
The evidence has thus become irrelevant, as it is manoeuvred without ‘decency’… Sergiu Andon would not seek subtle solutions. The investigative ABC is enough for him: insinuations, veiled threats (the “definite” file half out of his briefcase and put back “for later”, the alternation between honey and blood, the wild grin and the rotten attack. What I had before my eyes was a being from another world, a wild beast that could not get rid of itself. If I were Dan Voiculescu, I would fire him at once, he will only make his situation worse, adding a huge nausea to the presumption of guilt.
(Sergiu Andon began his activity as a prosecutor, after which he worked in the media, for “Flacara” magazine and “Scanteia” newspaper.)
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