Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration is indignant about Ion Antonescu’s rehabilitation

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration of Moldova (MFAEI) is concerned about Romanian judicial bodies’ decision to rehabilitate Marshal Antonescu’s actions from the period of the Second Wold War and to recognise the occupation by Romania of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic’s and Northern Bucovina’s territory as legitimate, and considers this decision “as a dramatic precedent in the bilateral relations between Moldova and Romania, which certainly questions Romania justice’s capacity to act under the United Europe’ standards and values”, a press release from MFAEI says. According to MFAEI, the decision “was received with indignation by the whole Moldovan society, by everybody who remembers well the horrors of the Holocaust of 1941-1944”. The authors assert that “everybody knows that over 300,000 Jewish people and representatives of other nationalities were exterminated exactly in this period of Antonescu’s “liberation” mission in the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic”. On the other hand, the statement reads, “the Romanian justice provokes astonishment as concerns its capacity to revise not only the actions of certain odious persons, but also to create legal grounds for rehabilitation in cases that are univocally considered by the entire EU as invasion, aggression and occupation”. Exactly in such a way can the joint actions of the Romanian Government and fascist Germany from June 22, 1941 to August 24, 1944 on the present territory of Moldova be appreciated, the press release also says. Recently, the judges of the Bucharest Court of Appeals (BCA) have declared the secret Protocol no. 3 of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact as null and acquitted the members of the Antonescu group for “crimes against peace, for which they were sentenced in 1946, as a result of the aggression against the peoples of the Soviet Russia”. The Court of Appeals found that the war for the liberation of Basarabia and Bucovina, was lawful, until removing the imminence of the soviet military danger. Also, Marshal Ion Antonescu, head of the Iron Guard (Garda de Fier), Horia Sima, and another 19 members of the Romanian Government of 1940 were acquitted for “war crimes imputed as a result of the military cooperation between Romania and Germany in the aggression against the peoples of the Soviet Russia".