SUMMARY
[Note to reader: this Country page primarily contains brief information about state-based violence during the period 1946–1974, and to some extent 1975–1988. For more detailed information on organized violence after 1989, please consult the specific Conflict and Dyad pages available on the left-hand side of this page. These pages contain more detailed information regarding all three categories of organized violence in this country from 1989 and onwards (when applicable), as well as detailed information about state-based violence 1975–1988. The left-hand side menu also contains links to Actor pages for all groups involved in organized violence since 1989 in this country, as well as actors involved in state-based violence 1975–1988.]
Following the Second World War, an authoritarian communist regime was established in Romania. After the death of president Gheorghiu-Dej in 1965, Nicolae Ceausescu came to power. In 1982, he ordered that most of the country's agricultural and industrial production would be exported, in an effort to pay off a large foreign debt that the government had accumulated in the 1970s. The resulting drastic shortages of basic necessities such as food, fuel and medicine drove many Romanians from a state of relative economic well-being into poverty and starvation. While the population of the Soviet Union – Romania’s powerful neighbor country – gained more freedom under Mikhail Gorbachev in the end of the 1980s, Ceausescu did not change his repressive domestic policy. Finally, in December 1989, protests against Ceausescu’s rule and the economic hardships expanded into a rebellion. Government forces used one-sided violence against demonstrators and clashed with the anti-government National Salvation Front. The conflict culminated in the execution of Ceausescu and his wife.
In the 2000s, the government of Romania sent troops to Afghanistan to support the government against the Taleban and to help the USA to fight al-Qaida. Romanian troops also backed the government of Iraq in the intrastate conflict that started in 2004.
Since 1946, Romania has experienced the intrastate and one-sided categories of UCDP organized violence.
