Romania—The Bright Future and Present Problems

Head Table Guests

William Whittaker, Q.C., Partner, Lette, Whittaker and Honorary Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Paul Barnicke, Partner, Ernst and Young; Gillian Platt, Assistant Deputy Minister, Recreation, Government of Ontario; Captain The Rev. Philip Ralph, 2nd Field Engineer Regiment, CFB Toronto and Pastor, Yorkview Heights Baptist Church; Albina Guarnieri, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Canadian Heritage and MP Mississauga East; Corneliu Chisu, Vice-Chairman, Canada-Romania Business Council and President, Light Allied Technologies Corp.; Ilie Puscas, Consul General of Romania; Willis Blair, Secretary, The Empire Club of Canada; Marta Chisu, Seneca College student and a member of the Romanian national figure skating team; Tony Ruprecht, MPP, former Minister of Multicultural Affairs; and H. J. (Joe) Janthur, Chairman, Canada-Romania Business Council and President, Depag Deposit Agency of Canada Inc.

Introduction by David Edmison

On December 22, 1989, Romanian poet and former dissident, Mircea Demescu appeared on the recently liberated national television and declared: "God has turned his face towards Romania again." These words dramatically conveyed the depth of feeling about the events which were engulfing his country.

The revolution which began in Timisoara on December 15, 1989, ignited by a courageous minister, Reverend Loszlo Tokes, ended in the streets of Bucharest with the overthrow of Nicholas Ceausescu. It was an irresistible popular uprising which ended four decades of one of the most oppressive totalitarian regimes in modern history.

The Romanian people are no stranger to oppression or foreign occupation. Since early in its history, this beautiful Balkan country has endured a succession of rival conquests. First came the Romans, then the Goths, the Huns, the Tartars, the Hungarians, the Germans, the Turks, the Poles, the Austrians and, finally, the Russians. The Romanian borders have been almost elastic, expanding and contracting, depending on the outcome of treaties and alliances.

In 1945 Romania, along with its Balkan neighbours, was subject to the "spheres of influence" formulated by the allied victors. The hopes and aspirations of freedom after Yalta were rapidly extinguished by Stalinist repression.

Today, all is changed. The Berlin wall has collapsed, the centralist ideologies have been discredited and Romanians can chart their own destiny. The aspirations of the Eastern European nations were perhaps best expressed by playwright and former Czech dissident, Vaclav Havel, when after taking office as President, said: "I dream of a republic that is independent, free and democratic, a republic with economic prosperity yet social justice, a humane republic that serves the individual and, therefore, hopes that the individual will serve it in turn, a republic of well rounded people because without such people it is impossible to solve any of our problems, whether they be human, economic, ecological, social or political."

Alexandru Mironov, like Vaclav Havel, took an active role in the revolution in his country and is a man who devoted much of his life to the arts. After the revolution he acted as an advisor to the President of Romania and was appointed Minister of Youth and Sports.

Our guest graduated in mathematics and spent several years as a mathematics teacher. In his youth he was a fencer and he is now President of the Romanian Fencing Federation. He has had a lengthy career as a scientific writer and a newspaperman. He also hosted a weekly television programme "science and imagination." He is an international award-winning telejournalist and best-selling author. He is President of the Romanian Science Fiction Association and sits on several international science fiction bodies.

Our guest speaks fluent English and French and can also manage a conversation in Russian, German and Italian.

Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome our distinguished guest, a truly Renaissance man, Alexandru Mironov.

Alexandru Mironov

Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, members of the Club, their guests:

I thank you for the warm words you have already said, Mr. President, and I want to say that as a writer and as a journalist dealing with the future, there was never in my crystal ball or in my cards that I shall ever speak to such a club in the town where Marshall McLuhan invented the global village.

Along with the global village let me tell you that there is an idea called planetary projects, and it was the first thing that came to my mind that I should speak about to you. I think that we have to make planetary projects because they bring peace. I shall give you an example. When the Suez Canal was built 100 years ago, there were at least one million people working there--Palestinians and Jews and Egyptians and so on. And there was no war during that time in that zone. After that, peace never came back. Let's hope it will come one day. So I think that working on planetary projects will really help bring peace in the places where such projects are built.

Let me give you an example of a planetary project that may come soon. It will be an international co-operation and I'm quite sure it will bring peace and tranquillity to the area. There is now in the Union of Europe and the Council of Europe talk about a highway going from Helsinki to Tallinn to Moscow to Kiev to Bucharest and then to Belgrade. I think that it will be one of the most important highways in the world and people from Finland, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Greece and Yugoslavia will work on it. Such a planetary project when finished will be something that we shall take care of and defend. Planetary projects, big projects--I think they bring peace.

Now I shall change the subject and speak a little bit about a place that I love. It is somewhere up in the mountains. It is a lake made by man because of the power plant there. There is a research station for aquaculture which has some patents on the raising of trout. On the lake there's a floating island where the trout are being raised. Last year I was there as a reporter for television and a Canadian champion diver was there. He dived and made some photographs and films for Canadian television.

Above the station there is a mountain and up on the mountain there's a monastery--an absolutely wonderful monastery painted by a wonderful painter. The landscape is magnificent and near the research station you have the skeleton of a construction that has never been finished. We have started building there, bits and parts of that building, and we shall put students there and there will be students from all over the world. They will study the Carpathian Mountains and aquaculture. They can learn about how to raise salmon up there in the mountains.

It is something that can spread throughout our country. Small lakes, mountain lakes are all over Romania. We can raise some trout and it is, I think, a very nice example of how we can change to something efficient. As I said, the landscape is absolutely magnificent. Our legend says that He worked hard for six days. On the seventh He stopped for a while and on a sunny Sunday morning, really sunny, He created my land. That is a way of explaining to you that we have there everything we need. We are a very rich country. Everybody came there from every part of the world. The land was sweet, the crop was good, the wine has always been there, nice beautiful women so everything was there and the conquerors came and came and never stopped.

But something happened there. It happened maybe as a reaction to those who came to my country. Maybe it was a way of melting the hearts of the enemy so that you may find all the romance from those people in their descendants. And the Huns and the Russians and Turks and so on and so on. They were all there. They all are us. That is how life is in such parts of the world.

Imagine the map. You will see that Romania is in the middle of everything. Going every way from East to West, from North to South you must pass through Romania. Our ancestors had to decide that we didn't have time to build big palaces. There was no time to rush into the forests and into the mountains when conquerors came because they came all the time. And in such a way we developed a special culture which I would call the wooden culture. Please come one day and see how beautiful the peasant villages are up in the mountains. For instance, many of the monasteries are well known all over the world. Famous painters painted the monasteries but they were finished during their time. After that nobody knows their names. There is in a monastery, a painting with several hundreds of saints with halos about their heads. It is a painting having depth, really very deep, and the monk who presents the monastery will always say, "Please look through the saints--you may see there the painter too but he was so shy that he has been hidden for eternity in the middle of the colour that is there."

Now of course we have to think about the future. The President of the Republic says that, "We have always known that we have a bright future. It is the present that gives us a problem." It has always been that way.

First I will say a few words about what I think we have best, that is the schools. We have wonderful schools in Romania. You wouldn't believe it. But I can give you an example. We have a contest. In October the schoolboys and schoolgirls start competing in geography and mathematics and Romanian language and biology, in arts and crafts, in football and in basketball, in absolutely everything. Then they have a second stage on the level of the town, and then the district and then on the Easter holiday the finalists will be together for one week. This year there were 10,000 finalists from the age of 13 to the age of 19. Finally we had the national champions in geography and mathematics and physics and chemistry and so on and so on at all age categories.

From this we make our national teams in mathematics, physics, chemistry and informatics, because I think you know that there is an all-world championship for students in these four sciences. It has been happening for 26 or 27 years and Romania has never been below the fifth place. Last year we were second after China which has 1.2 billion inhabitants. We have only 23 million. So be sure that we are extremely good in mathematics, very skilled in physics and chemistry, we know biology and we speak foreign languages. These competitions are called Olympics and besides the fact that the national teams go to the world championships in mathematics, physics, chemistry and informatics, we tried three years ago to do something for these bright students. We sent the first 256 of them on a trip through Europe and then last year we sent them to California to the World Cup in soccer. This year we will send 8,000 of them, the best 8,000 kids of our country will be sent abroad all over Europe, even to South Eastern Asia, the United States of America and if we can fix up something I should very much like to send 20 or 30 boys and girls here so they would know your wonderful country.

I want to stress this point--in human resources it is a fact that any child going from Romania abroad with his parents or her parents would be among the best in the school. It is a fact that we have 276 full professors in mathematics at the universities in the United States of America. It is a fact, it has been proved, that really up to a certain level we are very good and in the future we may count on those bright students we have now.

Of course we are trying to change the economics now and our Council could tell you that we have a lot of things to change enormously. That is because during the 40 years before the Revolution, building the heavy industry was an ideological item. It wasn't that free initiative built the industry. We were compelled to do that. Generations had to be taken from the countryside, sent to the factories, but in the meantime good engineers have been produced by our technical schools and the good engineers are still there. That is why I hope that in the process of reform among the heavy industry we should be able to pick up the right lines and we should know where to go, in which direction. We cannot be out all that money or throw out everything that's worked. Building this industry meant paying an extra $11 billion and paying it in nine years from 1980 to 1989. It meant hunger; it meant cold. I even wrote a book called planetary projects, a book about the future, using candles at night because there was no electric light. In the evenings the power was turned off.

So what shall we do? We shall of course build with tourists and I hope that maybe you will care to see my country, the country's mountains, wonderful mountains, full of forests, lakes and rivers. We have a lot of spas. The soldiers from the Roman Empire used to come from their wars and take their rest at a spa which is called the Bluff of Hercules. The same spas are there yet for those feeling the pains of rheumatism and I strongly advise you to pay a visit. It will be very cheap; it will be convenient for everybody and it will really help your health.

We have the Black Sea coast. The Black Sea is a very special sea, less polluted than other parts of the Mediterranean. The seaside is a kind of a Romanian California, mainly because the best vineyards are near the seashore. We have had problems with the good wines in the last 25 centuries. There is a story about an old king who was compelled to cut the vines because the country was drunk and they had to diminish the production of wine--but that happened 22 centuries ago. We have very good land, maybe the best land in Europe. We have potential markets in Russia and the Near East. I think we shall consider ourselves a big producer in agriculture and food in the centuries to come. We have problems because land reform meant spreading the land among 4.5 million owners. They have small parcels and until they bring the land together in co-operative associations or larger land holdings arise from purchases, the efficiency of agriculture will suffer.

But there is one point I want to stress: we are strong in the fields of creation, innovation, and inventions. It is my profession. I am a scientific newspaperman and in my programmes on radio and television I have always had pieces on inventions. There was much secrecy about the Office of Patents and nobody knew exactly what happened in Ceausescu's Romania. It happens that I know. I followed some of the best patents at the Office of Patents and I can tell you that not only Romania but in all ex-socialist countries there are treasures hidden in the safes of these Offices of Patents. Sometimes they're absolutely marvellous inventions and while I don't have samples to show to you I can tell you about a material. It is something made of scraps--sawdust, leaves, sunflowers, corn, everything mixed up together, mixed up to together in a powder. There are different phases of pressure and temperature the material goes through and finally we get a wood, an artificial wood, but, after 20 days of drying, the wood is so hard that we can use this material for building homes. The inventor has 41 patents on this material. It is the most ecological material that has ever been invented. There are a lot of people around him now trying to buy the licence. You can shape this material; you can mould it into the shape you choose. It is a kind of miracle and I'm very proud to say that maybe the construction industry or the furniture industry of the future will have to be changed because of this material.

Well I think we shall have a small confrontation--Romania and Canada. And that is going to happen next week at the World Cup in rugby in South Africa, where Canada and Romania are together in the same series. Our teams are both with South Africa and Australia, which I have to say neither Canada nor Romania will be able to beat in rugby. So the confrontation will be for the third place and fourth place and we shall see if the Canadians will beat the Romanians or if it will be otherwise but it will be, I can assure you, a peaceful war. I came to London with the Romanian team, big guys like that; I am confident they'll manage.

Since the 20 minutes you gave me are over, I can give you a lot of figures about our agriculture and what we can offer for any joint venture that would care to come to Romania. Our consul knows this very well. Industries have started making their calculations and as for tourists there will always be open doors. Maybe the most important thing for us is to build roads and railroads. We are behind the countries around us and we have to compete to get the $10 billion we need to make a new infrastructure. How we shall do that I yet do not know. Nobody in the government would really know that. I can tell you only one thing. Up to now we have no lines of credit from anywhere, whereas Poland has $40 billion and Hungary has an external debt of more than $20 billion. Romania hasn't got one dollar. What we have done in the last five and a half years we have done by ourselves. We are a bit better than we were before the Revolution. Signs are that things will change but we still have to support ourselves by ourselves and to try to make our way to the next century, maybe finding new things, new products, new inventions. Everything has to be new to be able to compete.

Maybe the fall of the Berlin Wall was not the most important event of the past years, not the fall of the Communists, but the extraordinary ascension of the simple man that I feel anywhere I go in my country. It is fulfillment; it is the possibility that we shall have finally a better place in the world.

Finally ladies and gentlemen, I think that what we have achieved in Romania was an extraordinary achievement--something you wouldn't even think about. We survived! I think it is very important because we survived with our culture, with our traditions, with our know-how. We have our place where we shall invite you any time you care to come and you will see a beautiful country. Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Bill Whittaker, Q.C., Partner, Lette, Whittaker and Honorary Director, The Empire Club of Canada.