Romania Council Completes New Election Law : Reform: The draft outlines an American-style system. Concern rises that the ruling front is acting in secret.

BUCHAREST, Romania —  The draft of a new election law, ensuring free elections and a multi-party system, has been completed by the ruling council of Romania’s National Salvation Front and will be presented this week to the provisional government.

The draft law, largely the work of Dumitru Mazilu, the vice president of the 11-membership leadership council of the front, also spells out a government structure that will have some features of the American system, with independent legislative, executive and judicial branches.

The draft law calls for a new senate, a 235-seat assembly and an office of president, limited to a single, five-year term.

In an interview Sunday, Mazilu said the law will allow all citizens 18 years and older to register to vote in primary and runoff elections, with discrimination against religious or ethnic minorities expressly prohibited. He said the law will provide for a system of vote counting and observation by opposing political parties to prevent vote fraud.

The front has said the elections will be held in April. However, over the weekend, the leadership said it is willing to discuss postponing the vote because some opposition groups have said they need more time to organize.

Mazilu’s comments came as three small demonstrations were held in Bucharest to protest what some Romanians say is high-handed behavior by the National Salvation Front, which was created Dec. 22, the day that Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu fled the capital. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by a military firing squad Dec. 25.

About 3,000 students, gathering at the university Sunday, charged that the National Salvation Front, composed mostly of dissident Communists who came to oppose the Ceausescu regime, have “hijacked” the Romanian revolution.

The National Peasants Party, in a street rally outside its Bucharest headquarters, charged that the front is “acting as a political party without having been elected.”

The demonstrations occurred against a backdrop of concern that the front is failing to employ democratic processes and is acting in secret.

Even Mazilu, in some matters, agreed with the protesters’ criticisms. He pointed out that on Saturday night, two Communists were given time on television, in effect explaining and defending the Communist Party.

“But they did not allow the Peasants Party or the Democratic Party to go on television,” Mazilu said. “Why? The television people said that these two parties were not registered. I said to them, ‘Are the Communists registered? No, they are not.’ Well, they said, they have been the ruling party.

“This is not good enough,” Mazilu said. “Everyone must be allowed access to television.

“These are very strange times we are in now,” Mazilu went on. “The old mechanisms are still functioning. People continue to think in a very old fashion. So, the people who run the television, they call me and ask if it is all right if they let other people speak.”

Mazilu, 55, along with former diplomat Silviu Brucan, is perhaps the most widely known Romanian dissident. A former member of the Romanian foreign service, Mazilu produced a scathing attack on the Romanian human-rights situation in May, 1986. His passport was immediately revoked, he lost his job and he and his family were subject to harassment that lasted to the day that Ceausescu was toppled.

From 1987 until Dec. 22, he was under house arrest in his modest apartment in Bucharest, unable even to walk to the corner market. His wife was followed by squads of police when she went shopping. Teams of police watched his house around the clock.

“We had no money, no food,” he said. “Even my sister, when she tried to visit me, was arrested and beaten.” Under mysterious circumstances, his 54-year-old brother dropped dead on the street. His mother, also in apparent good health, died suddenly in the same year, 1987.

On Dec. 19th, as the end was nearing for Ceausescu, Securitate secret-police officers broke through the Mazilu front door in the middle of night. He was beaten in the face in the presence of his wife and 13-year-old son. He was taken away and later hammered in the chest with the stock of a rifle. His wife and children were taken away in their pajamas.

“I thought this was the end for us,” Mazilu said Sunday. “My greatest fear was that they would kill my wife and my son before my eyes.”

They were freed Dec. 22, when Ceausescu fled. Since then, except for Saturday night, Mazilu has slept on a cot in his office in the Foreign Ministry.

Mazilu is now pressing all members in the front, and in the provisional government, to renounce their membership in the Communist Party--or any other party--or, failing that, to leave their new positions.

“It is not enough to be against Ceausescu,” Mazilu said. “We are changing a totalitarian system. It was the system that produced Ceausescu, and if we do not change the system, sooner or later it will produce another dictator.”

In the immediate aftermath of Ceausescu, Mazilu said, Communists are coming to the National Salvation Front council to ask for ranking ministerial jobs.

“Where were these people before?” Mazilu said. “We who opposed the system before were so few, maybe 20 or 25 people. Now we have people coming forward saying they were opposed. But these were people who supported Ceausescu day and night.

“Now, they have changed their clothes and say they have changed their minds. I cannot believe the cynicism. People have died for this revolution. Not just a few people. Thousands died for it. We have a duty, before the nation and before the world, to protect the revolution they died for.”

The problem that Mazilu addressed seems spread throughout the country.

In Brasov, a city of 350,000 and one of the most important industrial cities in the country, the local committee of the National Salvation Front has only two members of the dreaded Securitate in custody. The top-ranking Securitate members, according to Gen. Ion Flora, who heads the local committee, are “at their homes” but not under guard.

The editor of a local newspaper, Gazeta de Transylvania, charged that the front’s local committee is “like a black box: things go in and things come out, but no one knows what goes on inside.”

An overwhelming concern with security has added to the impression that decisions are being made in isolation.

Another factor is that the totalitarian system under Ceausescu has deprived Romanians of any knowledge of how an open government ought to be run. They simply have no experience with the process.

Unlike other nations undergoing far-reaching changes, Romania had allowed no dissident organizations, such as Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia or Solidarity in Poland.