Dictators and Amateur Radio
continued..
There are cases when the oppressive régime feels itself impregnable and magnanimously allows the licensing of a few "reliable" residents, intimates of the power wielders, for propaganda's sake to defend itself from the international amateur radio community's disapproval. Some dictatorships, after lengthy negotiations, authorize time-limited activities for foreign operators present as United Nations officials, NGOs or peace-keeping forces.
In Romania the dictatorial régime branded amateur radio as well. For 45 years the state of one's "dossier" was decisive in obtaining a license. In the 1950s those applicants who hadn't a "healthy origine" (i.e., originated from a family of workers or peasants) could experience huge difficulties, and not only in the realm of amateur radio. Family members living in the West, unfavourable information from the schools' secretary of the Communist Party, from the college or employer's "cadres office" (today's personnel office) regarding the applicant's lack of enthusiasm and attachment to the "Party Line," denunciations, containing mostly mendacious and misinterpreted information - all were grounds for denial without explanation of the application or suspension of a previously issued license.
Truly impartial historians of Romanian amateur radio should record its decades-long constraints as subordinate to the army. This practice followed piously on the heels of the Russian pattern. The Securitate (the former Romanian secret police) exercised relentless control of the licensing procedure through the so-called Higher Radio Commission, overseeing the entire activity of the radio amateurs, beginning with the assignments in leading positions in the county clubs and in the Romanian Amateur Radio Federation and ending with the accurate inventory of the equipment owned.
In the 1980s the Radio Control Centres launched a series of residential inspections and license suspensions for varying periods of time. Was it merely coincidence that many holders of those suspended licenses were also members of reputable foreign clubs? This group included the most active and notable amateurs, authentic ambassadors of Romania on the air.
Yearly "informative materials" drawn up by the Securitate and presented with the force of "truth" cited "negative aspects," like "relations with foreigners" (regulated by notorious Law 23 requiring compulsory detailed reports about the nature of these relationships and their progress), the correspondence of amateurs, alike the correspondence of all other presumptive "unfaithful" citizens, was inspected and systematically censored. Receiving a transceiver from friends or relatives in Western countries was a terrible humiliation and a matter of suspicion - an opportunity for blackmail.
But not only amateur radio was subject to thorough supervision. The presidential couple Ceausescu deemed profoundly undesirable: computers, video recorders, TV antennas pointed towards Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, TV satellite dishes, books, magazines and newspapers from abroad, everything enabling the free circulation of ideas and information, not to mention the free movement of Romanian citizens.
We don't have yet sufficient and complete information about the Stalinist trial of George Craiu, YO3RF, and the ordeal of his imprisonment. We don't know the truth about the conviction of YO7DZ. I don't think amateurs are aware of the fact that in the 1987 anticommunist uprising in Brasov, two years before the revolution and the régime's collapse, a ham was among the participants. He was charged during the inquiry with "subversive communication with the West," although he was a short wave listener and possessed only a receiver! After 1989 he also faced a defamation lawsuit, because he thought he recognised a member of Parliament on the TV screen as his torturer. We don't know how many persons abandoned hope after their failed attempts to obtain a license.
To understand the past a people must become acquainted with it and finally to admit it. With no hard feelings, no resentments, but fully aware of the truth. This truth must not be silenced and buried under the dust of archives. I think it's important to be uttered, recorded and known, in order to avoid all the tragic mistakes of the history.
Francisc Grünberg, YO4PX
• This text was published in the Romanian magazine Radiocommunications and Amateur Radio and on the independent website www.radioamator.ro
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