Thirty years on, will the guilty pay for horror of Ceaușescu orphanages?
By 1989, when the dictator was killed, up to 20,000 had died in Romania’s children’s homes. Now criminal cases may finally be brought
They were the pictures that, for many across the world, were the defining image of the aftermath of Romania’s 1989 revolution: emaciated children clothed in rags, looking into the camera with desperate eyes amid the squalid decay of the country’s orphanages.
Christmas Day will mark 30 years since Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s megalomaniac, isolationist dictator, was convicted in an impromptu trial and shot dead together with his wife. His execution ended more than two decades of rule that brought poverty and misery to the majority of the country’s population.