Angelica versus Romania, a terrible case of domestic violence. “I’m glad that justice was finally made, but I’ve suffered too much for too long”

PMR, the initials of the Romanian Worker’s Party (Partidul Muncitoresc Roman) are carved in the mountain rock on the way to Petrosani, a miner’s town in Romania. It’s a place frozen in time, that looks just like it did before the 1989 revolution that brought the downfall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and the Communist Party.  If it weren’t for the modern cars, you would think you’ve traveled back in time. The town is bleak, the old communist blocks are dark and almost a ruin. We are on our way to meet Angelica Balsan, the woman who won at the European Court of Human Rights against her own country, in a case of domestic violence.

It is the second time Romania loses at the European Court in a case like this. Last time was in 2012. The sentence for Balsan versus Romania was pronounced on May 23rd, and the state is now obligated to pay her 9,800 euros for failing to protect her from her husband and even stating that she is to blame for the decades of beatings and humiliation she and two of her four children endured.

“I’m glad that justice was finally made, but I’ve suffered too much for too long. I would come home from work and find the door locked. I would wait there and knock asking him to let me in. ‘No, go to hell, you have no place here, this is my house’, he would tell me”, she said in an exclusive interview for Evo News.

The worst beatings were during the divorce proceedings in 2007, when Balsan ended up in hospital several times, once needing medical care for 10 days, after her husband had smashed her face, breaking her nose. She still bears the scars of that beating today. The man also used to hit his children, beating them systematically and because of the paralyzing terror in the house, Balsan was too frightened to intervene.

“He beat all the children, but the worst beatings he would administer to our youngest son, who is a little headstrong, like him. He didn’t like the fact that the boy would answer him back, so he would kick him down, press his boot of the boy’s neck and would kick him until he would bleed from his nose and mouth. And I? What did I do? I laughed. The boy said to me often ‘Why didn’t you intervene, I always intervened when he was beating you’. I made many mistakes in my life, I should never have permitted him to beat any of the children”, Balsan said in tears.

The suffering was caused by her husband of 28 years, Nicolae Camarasescu, a famous officer in the former ‘Securitate’, Romania’s infamous secret police, the Department of State Security (DSS), that terrorized people all throughout the Communist regime (1947-1989). Camarasescu was famous for being caught and beaten the Patriotic Guards at the Revolution while trying to smuggle documents from inside the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Six months later, he was one of the key leaders of the ‘Mineriada’ (13-15 June 1990), when an organized mod of miners stormed the Capital and committed terrible crimes in an attempt of certain former communist leaders to secure power. 27 years after the atrocities that took place then, Romanian authorities are finally investigating the events of June 1990, that could mean the indictment of former Romanian president Ion Iliescu, the man believed to have organized the ‘Mineriada’.

At the time, Camarasecu led a mob of miners to the headquarters of Romania Libera, a national newspaper that didn’t publish favourable articles about miners, and stopped the publication of the newspaper under threats of vandalism. Although a high official in the Securitate before 1989, after being caught during the Revolution and for his implication in the ‘Mineriada’, Camarasescu suffered a dramatic fall down the hierarchy and wasn’t integrated in the new secret services that were forming at the time from what remained of the old system. In the last years of his life, Camarasescu lived in poverty, repairing computers in a forgotten small town in southern Romania. He died in January 2016.

“I shouldn’t have stayed with him once the beatings started”

Angelica Balsan feels guilty today for having stayed with him for 28 years. “I shouldn’t have stayed with him once the beatings started, but I was afraid of him. He would never provide financially for us, he wouldn’t do anything and when I asked him where he’s going, he would yell at me ‘Shut up, your place is in the kitchen’. That was his opinion of me. I am sorry for having stayed with him so long and having four children with him, who now suffer because of what they’ve seen and endured from their father. I even started drinking for one year because of the problems, I thought I was going mad”, Balsan said with regret.

Things weren’t always so. There was love in the beginning and nothing could foretell Camarasescu’s behaviour in the future. Balsan was 17 when she first met him. She was a famous beauty in town, especially for her bright blue eyes, her colleagues say. The years and the suffering endured have left scars on her, but underneath it, you can still glimpse the girl she was, her eyes are a bright, light shade of blue and can still captivate, only that the look in them is different now. Angelica Balsan has a melancholic gaze, often staring in the distance and occasionally, as if trying to shake herself out of her memories, she gestures dismissively with her hands.

“He was a handsome man, he was kind to me, polite, he would compliment my eyes. We used to walk in the park here, sit on a bench and talk. I loved him dearly. I don’t know if he ever really loved me back, my youngest son tells me he never did. No matter now”, she says.

They were married in 1979 and had four children over the span of 20 years. Life was good for them in the beginning, Camarasescu was a miner at Aninoasa mine and she worked at the human resource department in the mine. The money was good and they didn’t lack anything, Balsan says.

“Before he went into the Securitate, we had a good life, we would get by, we had friends who would provide things that you couldn’t find on the market, like meat, good coffee and cigarettes. Miners had good salaries back then. I earned well too, there was money in this town back then, no one would starve. We never felt the crisis that the rest of the country was going through. We were all Communist Party members, but we didn’t hold any office. I was told by a colleague in college, who was party secretary for the university, to join and I did. Back then, if they asked to join the party, you just did. We used to go on mountain trips with the communist youth organization or whatever it was called. It was a beautiful life”, Balsan remembers.

There is a kind of nostalgia in her voice, a feeling that the entire town of Petrosani seems to have. Like with many communist establishments, its glory days are past and now it’s practically a ruin. The Party had a forced urbanization policy that created many industrial centers, populating them over night with people moved from the country by force. Petrosani is such a town. After the fall of Communism, the forced industrialization backfired and many of these towns struggle today to survive.

The trouble started when Camarasescu joined the Securitate, around 1986. He started beating her and was initially encouraged by his own parents to do so.

“I didn’t have a word to say in that house regarding the children or him. Whatever he said was law and he considered me no more than a serving woman. My parents-in-law had a lot to say in our relationship. They never liked me. They would tell my husband ‘Beat her, kick her in the mouth’. I couldn’t believe it. I have two sons and if I catch them trying to hit a woman, I would immediately intervene, men have no right to hit women. My parents-in-law were simple people, but bad. This was my marriage, but I thought it was normal, I mean I loved him”, Balsan says in defense.

The Revolution of 1989

Regarding Camarasescu’s activity in the Securitate, she says she never knew much because he never told her what he did. She found out he had accepted the job at the Ministry of Internal Affairs on her birthday.

“I don’t know how he got it. He used to work as an engineer at Aninoasa mine where there was someone working for the Securitate, as was the case everywhere back then, and he must have determined my husband to join. He never asked my opinion about it and we had a fight, he told me I had to come with him to Bucharest. That’s how he ended up there, working for a department that dealt in economic counterespionage, if I remember well. I don’t know what he did there. I moved to the Capital with him and worked at the Mine Ministry”, Balsan recounts.

They remained in the Capital until the Revolution in 1989, when Nicolae Camarasescu was caught at the Ministry of Internal Affairs by the Revolutionary Guards and identified as an officer in the Securitate. He was beaten along with his brother. The incident was filmed and was one of the many images of the Romanian revolution that circulated on television all over the world at the time.

Nicolae Camarasescu is the first man in this video, walking out of the Ministry of Internal Affairs with his hands behind his head. The second man is his brother. 

‘He had some documents and code names and wanted to secure them, probably to blackmail the people behind those code names. I don’t know exactly, he never explained his actions to me. They caught him then and beat him, they nearly shot him. Anyway, he got away and it was over. I told him I don’t want to remain in Bucharest, I wanted to return to Petrosani and he made the necessary arrangements to go back to working at Aninoasa”, Balsan says.

The events of the Mineriada in 1990. “He shouldn’t have done all those violent acts that the miners did”

Just six months later, the June ‘Mineriada’ happened. For three days (13-15 June), bands of miners raided the Capital, kidnapped and beat people, terrorizing the residents. Camarasescu had a key role to play then. He was one of the leaders who ordered the miners from Valea Jiului to storm Bucharest and he personally lead a band of them to the headquarters of ‘Romania Libera’, a national newspaper that made a stand against what was going on. There, they stopped the printing presses, under threats of vandalism. Years later, Camarasescu said in an interview for Adevarul newspaper that the incident at Romania Liber had not been planned and that no one was hurt.

Angelica Balsan says she had no idea her husband was one of the leaders. Her colleagues told her they had seen him at the University Square with a megaphone, giving orders.

“A colleague came to me and said ‘Your man is in the square, clean clothes, white helmet, go and get him out of there’. What the hell was he doing there, all the way from Petrosani to Universitate Square in Bucharest? I went out on the streets to find him and tell him to leave the miners. I waved at him, but he started bellowing insults at me. If you ask me, what the miners did was wrong. The truth is Romania Libera didn’t write nice things about the miners. They probably meant to devastate the place, like they did with the house of Ion Ratiu (Romanian politician and the presidential candidate of the Christian Democratic National Peasants’ Party (PNT) in the 1990 elections). He shouldn’t have gone there, he shouldn’t have done all those violent acts that the miners did”, Balsan says.

After the Mineriada was over, they both returned home, to Petrosani. Camarasescu wasn’t called back to join the new intelligence unit and from a counterespionage officer, he ended up a simple engineer at Aninoasa again.

“He probably would have been asked to join the new unit, but there were films of him from the Revolution, he had been caught and identified. I think that’s why they didn’t want him anymore, they didn’t need someone with that kind of a public profile. It was an abrupt fall, from high up where he was in the ranks, to a simple engineer at Aninoasa”, Balsan commented.

The divorce proceedings. “He would beat me in court, he would harass me on the street”

The fall made him even more violent that he was before, and the beating continued until Balsan couldn’t take it anymore and in 2007 she filed for divorce. The case was judged for almost two years, during which Camarasescu would constantly harass her. He would follow her on the street, he would threaten and beat her. The woman would call the police, but the officers would fine her, instead of him. Too scared to talk, the neighbours who had witnessed everything refused to testify. All Angelica Balsan had as proof of her torment were the medical documents from hospital.

“He would beat me in court, he would harass me on the street. One time, I was at a terrace, having a drink and he came over and poured the drink on my head. None of the neighbours would intervene. When the police came over, he would say ‘You believe her?! Believe me, ask the neighbours’. The neighbours, of course, were all afraid of him, they would say they never heard or saw anything. No one came to my aide. I got really angry then. How was is possible that I was beaten in plain sight and no one would care, no one would say anything and the police would blame me and give me a fine instead of him! I once asked a neighbour why he didn’t admit to the Police what he saw and he said ‘What do you want me to do? The police leave and he can very well kill me for telling’. I wanted to call another neighbour as a whiteness in trial, but she refused, said she doesn’t want to intervene, she wants to be safe in her own home. They probably all thought ‘poor thing’, but no one did anything about it”, Balsan said with bitterness.

Of all the children, Camarasescu would beat his youngest son and oldest daughter the worst.  “He didn’t like the relationship he had with this boy she was with. She’s still with him today, 20 years on. He would tell her to be home early and if she didn’t make it back by 9, he would block the door, didn’t let her come in and when he did, he would beat her. She went to the Police too, and just like me, she ended up with a fine. I think the worst beating he administered first to me, that to our youngest son and then her”, Balsan recounts.

One time, Camarasescu followed her to a store and attacked her there. “Of course he had people on the inside in the police force, but looking back, I don’t know what the police could have done for me. They would knock on everyone’s door asking if they had heard or seen anything and they would all deny. At the store, I called the police, but when they arrived, the employees there didn’t want to say anything, they never admitted to what they saw, that I had to hide behind the counter. After the police left, I asked them why they lied. They said they didn’t want anything to do with him. No matter how much I wanted the police to intervene, they couldn’t do anything for me”.

Balsan says she would try to help if she ever saw women in a situation like that, but who doesn’t know these things can’t understand and therefore would just pass by. The only people that tried to help her were her work colleagues.

During the divorce proceedings, her eldest daughter initially testified against her, but later retracted what she had said, stating that she bared false whiteness at the request of her father.

“My father used to hit my mother [the applicant] and us, the children, many times. He used to do it when he had not come home at night and my mother asked him where he had been. Then he would get angry and hit her. The main reason he got angry was lack of money … Even after July 2007, when I moved out of my parents’ apartment, my mother continued to be hit by my father; I saw some of these incidents personally. Before 2007, my mother used to drink alcohol, but it was within normal limits, and in 2007 she stopped drinking. I retract the statement I gave during the criminal proceedings because I gave it after threats from my father,” the eldest daughter testified.

However, the Court never took this statement into account and didn’t say why. Instead, the Court decided that the victim is to blame for having been beaten by her husband, for having consumed alcohol and for not taking ‘adequate’ care of their children.

“The injured party [the applicant] has not proved her allegations that on 24.06.2007, 3.09.2007 and 8.09.2007 … she was physically assaulted by the defendant. The court considers, also in view of the evidence collected during the criminal investigation, that such assaults by the defendant took place principally because of the injured party’s alcohol consumption and because she was not taking adequate care of her four children. The defendant’s acts are not so dangerous to society as to be considered crimes and he shall therefore be acquitted of the three counts of bodily harm and shall pay an administrative fine of RON 500,” the Court decided.

Balsan later found out her husband didn’t pay the fine. After two years of trial, the divorce finalized, but Camarasescu didn’t stop then. He got custody of the children, but his youngest son, the one he used to beat bloody, left him and fled to his mother. “He called me and asked me if I could take him in. I said ‘of course, you’re my child, you are always welcome’. I baked him a cake and cooked a meal for him that day. He was just starting high school and I made the necessary arrangements to transfer him to a school in Petrosani. I didn’t think he would stay with me, I really had nothing to offer him, except the debts Camarasescu left behind, debts I still struggle with today. The boy seemed to be happy with anything I could give him and he still thanks me today”, Balsan says.

Camarasescu wanted his son expelled from school

Camarasescu wasn’t happy about the boy going back to his mother and set to deliberately harm him. He went to the high school he attended and asked for the boy to be expelled. “My ex husband would go to the principle and ask her to expel his son, he said the boy didn’t attend the school, that he beats his mother, that he takes drugs and drinks. However, the principle had none of it. She told Camarasescu to leave and stop saying bad things about his son, as they weren’t true. He tried to have his own son expelled from school… what kind of parent is that? You can’t treat your own child like that, no matter how they turn up, good or bad. I tried to help him finish high school and now I pay for extra lessons so he can finally take his Baccalaureate”, Balsan says.

The European Court trial

When the divorce proceedings were over and she found herself yet again blamed for her husband’s actions, this time in court, Balsan decided she has to seek justice elsewhere. In 2009, she appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. She got the idea from a lawyer, who has since left Romania. She met her through her mother, who was a seamstress and she used to visit her at work telling her about her troubles with Camarasescu. The lawyer, whose name Balsan doesn’t recall anymore, overheard and offered to help. At first she helped with the divorce proceedings, as Balsan didn’t have a legal representative, no local lawyer would dare openly go to court against Nicolae Camarasescu. Indeed, when he found out about the lawyer’s implication, he started harassing her too.

“He found out she had helped me with some of the paperwork and went to her house to threaten her. He made threat calls too”, Balsan says. Eventually, the lawyer left the country and Balsan appealed to an old acquaintance, Elena Medves, another lawyer who had previously advised her regarding her husband, but never dared to openly represent her in court. It was Medves that guided her through her complaint to the European Court of Human Rights and legally represented her for the last two years of the trial.

“I went to Medves to tell her I want to make a formal complaint to the European Court of Human Rights. She gave me the papers and said to write down everything as I’ve told her, post it and wait to see what happens. I wrote down everything in detail and added the medical documents that testified to the beatings. Two months later, I got a letter telling me the complaint had been officially registered. Who the hell knew anything would come of it. A year later they started asking me for papers from the divorce trial. Up until about two years ago, it went on like this, I would take leave from work for days to search for and send over copies of all the documents they asked for. Everyone at the archives know me. Two years ago I got a letter saying that the trial couldn’t go on unless I had a legal representative”, Balsan says. That is when lawyer Elena Medves formally stepped in.

On the 23rd of May 2017, eight years after the complaint was made to the European Court of Human Rights, Balsan won the trial and now, the Romanian state has to pay her 9,800 euros compensation for all she suffered. However, she won’t be seeing the money anytime soon, as the procedure is long and the sum doesn’t cover the debts left behind by Camarasescu. It seems, Angelica Balsan will still be paying for all she endured.

She found out about winning the trial from her son, who had called her that day telling her a local television had come to their apartment asking to talk to her. Balsan refused all interviews then.

“I understand the women who take the beatings”

Balsan says there are many reasons why women accept this kind of treatment and don’t fight back. Mostly it has to do with fear, especially if children are evolved.

“I don’t condemn them. It’s a bad thing to be a single woman, to have children and to have all the problems fall on you. I understand the women who take the beatings, they probably don’t get beaten every day and think the way I used to think, that this is the way things are supposed to be, that we belong in the kitchen, although this is a lie we tell ourselves. They accept it because some don’t have an income of their own, they don’t have a job, they depend on the men”, Balsan says.

She has one piece of advice for young women. “Choose carefully who you marry, what family he comes from for this is very important, and never accept a single hit in your life. Make no mistake, if he hits you once, he will hit you again and again, things will spin out of control. If you don’t get along, split, each go their own way. If you remain in an abusive relationship, then you make a compromise, you accept to be beaten and humiliated”, Balsan warned.