An immigrant wins delayed justice for communist persecution

LAKE STEVENS — Viorel Ciubuc has been pursuing justice for eight years.

He might have finally found it.

In December an appeals court in his native Romania ruled in his favor in a suit he filed under a law that entitles victims of the former Communist regime to seek reparations.

It’s a moral victory so far, because he has only succeeded in winning acknowledgement of the persecution he suffered.

“I won the political war,” he said.

Ciubuc is a diminutive man who exudes energy that belies his 77 years — “I’m 53,” he claimed in mock-seriousness. He still referees soccer games at the Snohomish Soccer Dome, where he’s known as “Ref V,” and he brings the same level of focus to his legal case.

As a young man, he played soccer for local leagues and later became a referee. He got the equivalent of a master’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Iasi, and worked as the director of the water department in the eastern city of Focsani. He also played soccer in local leagues.

But his father and grandfather had been jailed by the Communist regime when they resisted collectivization of their family farm in the years after World War II.

Ciubuc remained critical of the government, and he knew the Securitate, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s secret police, was spying on him and his family, recording his phone calls and searching his apartment.

“They have my key from my apartment,” he said.

In 1975, he went to the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest to apply for an immigration visa. He was arrested in the street outside the Embassy.

He spent a short time in jail. Fired from his job, he was forced to work in construction and other physical labor jobs. Friends who helped him, or employers who hired him, often faced retaliation, he said.

Ciubuc was finally allowed to leave the country in 1985, at age 47, and settled in Snohomish County with his wife and four children. But in many ways, he was only exchanging one struggle for another.

In the U.S., his limited English meant he couldn’t work in his field of engineering, and ultimately found that refereeing local soccer games was the only job he could get.

In 2000, he went back to Romania to file suit against the government. His case didn’t get anywhere.

He went back in 2003 and this time got hold of his Securitate file — more than 1,000 pages of reports collected over the years proving he was targeted. He now keeps the records in two roller bags in his Lake Stevens home.

The Securitate had files on 1.1 million people during the Communist era and recruited more than half a million informers, said Lavinia Stan, an expert on post-Communist Romania and the chair of the Department of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

The regime held 600,000 political prisoners between 1948-1968, Stan said. It jailed 80,000 peasants for resisting collectivization from 1945-1952, deported 200,000 “enemies of the state” from 1949-1962, and extrajudicially executed an unknown number of people before 1964.

Ciubuc used his newfound evidence to start a campaign of letter-writing, legal motions and even a solo protest outside the Romanian Embassy in Washington, D.C.

He lost his second suit in a local Focsani court. But in December 2015, the Court of Appeal in eastern Galati County overturned the lower court ruling and acknowledged that he’d been blacklisted from his job and spied upon.

Ciubuc’s work isn’t over, however. It’s unclear if he’ll succeed in getting his retirement owed him for his lost years of work, or any back pay.

A 2009 law allows former victims of persecution to obtain recompense, but the law isn’t applied consistently.

That’s partly because the Romanian judicial system is set up in a way that laws sometimes contradict each other, Stan said.

Decisions rendered in one court might be contradicted by decisions in similar cases in other courts, she said.

“It’s a complete confusion,” Stan said.

In addition, Stan said, the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime in 1989 did not lead to the wholesale removal of Communist loyalists from the judiciary, and many judges remain unsympathetic to the plight of victims of repression.

“The Romanian judiciary has a systematic problem when it comes to cases related to Communist human rights abuses,” she said.

Ciubuc still hopes that his moral victory might lead to a little physical remuneration as well, and that his thousand-page Securitate file will be the key evidence needed to force the state into action.

“I don’t ask for something that is not allowed under the law,” Ciubuc said.

“I wanted to fight, but I didn’t want the war,” he said.

Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.