rT ansitional Justice and Democratic Consolidation in post-communist aE stern uE rope: Romania and Albania. Transitional Justice in post-communist Romania This chapter will examine the effects of transitional justice mechanisms in democratic consolidation in post-communist Romania. The main conclusions are that Romania implemented early on some vigorous retributive justice mechanisms such as state and opinion (popular) trials,8 restorative such as active truth commissions (Stan 2009)9 and rehabilitation and financial compensation as reparative means to address past prisoners and formerly persecuted needs. This is a comparison to Albania which lacked the same mechanisms, which either were too little or came too late. In a nutshell, it contributes to my overall argument by focusing on the crucial difference between a functioning democracy of a full EU member such as Romania and a laggard one as Albania’s case at present can best be explained. One of the best documented cases of Transitional Justice in Communist Eastern Europe is Romania. There is some noticeable gap between political elite and civil society urges to have a clean break with the past and their lack of willingness to adopt or implement the appropriate transitional justice mechanisms that would address that need on the first place. This goes beyond a black and white split and involved the role of institutions and how they have often succumbed to political interferences. Lavinia Stan wraps this up neatly, when accounting for the Tismăneanu Commission, created by at the time President Basescu, which included several civil rights groups and completed a scientific report that detailed the crime of “1945–1989 period in a systematic and dispassionate manner” (Stan 2009: 25). Tribunals that dealt with communist crimes, their perpetrators and their collaborators have been a feature to different degrees of implementation by all former Communist countries. They are often compared by the level of success of how much a role they had played for a swift and successful transition and how well a country democratized. In Romania we note a particular type of tribunal, the so-called “Opinion Tribunals”. They were another characteristic of Romania’s citizens trial, which resembled such trials created elsewhere in the past (Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer 2002),10 responsible for holding the former regime responsible for crimes against humanity although unfortunately these trials in Romania received little notice from Romanian society or its citizens living abroad. They were mostly symbolic and lacked “legal standing”, so they achieved very limited success as Stan (2012) explains. Regarding the overall lustration attempts and success, Romania started relatively late, only in the second half of the 90s (Stan 2013) and did not do enough to classify as one of the successful cases of former Eastern Europe. As the same author argues: “civil society has promoted lustration without convincing political elites to fully implement it.” (Stan 2013). Regarding civil society engagement, the case of Romania, both in the 1990s and in the second decade of the aftermath of communism has shown to be much more active that the Albanian counterpart, which in no publicly recorded instance pushed consecutive Albanian governments to establish transitional justice mechanisms, although both countries show a degree of similarity when it comes to government undertakings. The difference is that in Romania it is mostly a bottom-up push for such reforms, emerging chiefly from civil society groups and networks, while in Albania is a highly top-down undertaking, given the structural weakness of civil society actors and the politicization of the debate regarding the adoption and enforcement of such measures.11 8. Opinion trials were different from state trials, complimentary to them and particular only to Romania’s case among the other CEE. 9. “Since the start of the democratization process in the early 1990s, only Germany, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Romania have employed truth commissions as methods to reckon with communist crimes” (Stan 2009) 10. This study compares and contrasts “the history of such ‘citizens tribunals’ from this first astonishing success to the mixed record of subsequent efforts-including tribunals on the Moscow show trials, the American war in Vietnam, Japanese sexual slavery, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster etc.” (Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer 2002). 11. When it comes to lustration measures in particular, both countries fell short in comparison with other CEE countries (i.e. Czech Republic or East Germany), but even among the Vishegrad countries there were huge disparities. For example, “[w]hile in the Czech Republic 10,000 people lost their positions because of lustration in Hungary and Poland less than 500 were affected” (Stan 2009). 63