Romania: “brutal” intervention of the police more than 450 casualties at the time of a demonstration anti-government

More than 450 people were wounded and about thirty challenged at the time of a demonstration against the left government which degenerated Friday evening in Bucharest, announced the gendarmerie Saturday.

Between 50,000 and 80,000 demonstrators are descended in the street, Friday, August 11, in Bucharest and in several towns of Romania to protest against the social democrat government (PSD).

The demonstrations were staged by groups of Rumanian expatriates who intended to denounce the corruption which causes to become gangrenous their country, the low wages and the attempts of the PSD to weaken the judicial power. In the car, the train or the plane, thousands of them had come from several countries of Europe, even of the United States or Canada to express their short–nap cloth–of–bowl towards “the absence of progress” in their native land. Romania is classified among the most corrupted States of the European Union and Brussels supervises its legal system particularly.

In Bucharest, certain demonstrators tried to cross the police lines installed around the building of the government. Others launched bottles and paving stones on the anti–riot police, which answered by using tear gases and a water cannon. A thousand of gendarmes and anti–riot police officers intervened to evacuate the place of the Victoire, theatre of caused scuffles, according to the gendarmerie, by “agitators”.

Many casualties had to be neat after having inhaled gases pepper and lachrymatory abundantly used by the police, while others suffer from contusions, according to hospital sources. About thirty gendarmes appear in the number of the casualties, eleven of them having been hospitalized.

Criticized by the opposition of centre right for its intervention in force, the gendarmerie ensured to have acted “in a way gradual and proportional” in answer to the violent actions of several tens of hooligans.

Some 80,000 Roumanians, of which thousands of expatriates returned especially in their country and accompanied for some by their children, had gathered place of the Victoire to denounce the “corruption” of the government.

Centre president Klaus Iohannis condemned the excessive violence whose police has according to him shows. “I firmly condemn the brutal intervention of the anti–riot police, completely disproportionate compared to the actions of the majority [of the demonstrators]”, he wrote on his Facebook page. “The ministry for the Interior must be explained quickly on the way in which the events of the evening were managed”, he added.

A new demonstration was envisaged in the evening of Saturday in Bucharest. Since its return to the power at the end of 2016, the democratic social Party launched a vast reform of the justice which threatens independence of the magistrates and aims at making it possible to political officials to escape the continuations, according to its detractors.

This reform caused demonstrations of a width without precedent since the fall of the Communist regime at the end of 1989, with a half of million people in the street in February 2017.

According to the estimates of the World Bank, three to five million Roumanians work and live out of their country, that is to say a quarter of the population. The expatriates are as well daily workers as doctors. Last year, they sent to their families the equivalent of 4, billion euros, that is to say nearly 2,5% of the gross domestic product of this country, one of poorest of the European Union.

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