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Iohannis, first reaction after referendum: Romanians need to live without
Romania belongs to all Romanians and they need to live in peace and understanding, without "rifts between people, which divide them," President Iohannis stated on Tuesday.
"When social peace is in danger, and we have enough examples for that in what happened in Romania in the past couple of weeks during the preparations for the Referendum on the revision of the Constitution, there is need that all the relevant actors in the society have a mature approach and stay open to dialogue. The first step in restoring social peace is to abandon the hate speech and acknowledge that only through tolerance we can overcome together such rifts that risk to divide us. We should leave all these hate storms and black thoughts in the past and, in turn, we should invest our energy in our future, in building a country where all Romanians should be able to live in understanding, without fears and commotion caused by imaginary dangers. Romania belongs to all Romanians," stated Klaus Iohannis, on the occasion of the ceremony on the decoration of the survivors of the Holocaust.
The head of state reiterated his firm commitment to take all the necessary measures to avoid in the future any actions against human dignity.
He underscored that the Romanian state proved that it learnt the lessons from its own dark past and acknowledged its historical truth, after taking such concrete steps of recovering the memory of the Holocaust and eradicate Anti-Semitism, the most recent such concrete step being the establishment of the National Museum of History of the Jews and the Holocaust in Romania - a project dedicated to the history of the Jewish community that he supported since he took over as President and which benefits from his unconditional support.
Klaus Iohannis also mentioned that, "initially, in Romania, Anti-Semitism meant the cultivation in the society of hatred against those with a different cultural identity than of the majority." "The citizens were instigated to hate each other and the Romanian Jews were demonized and made into targets. In parallel, there was adopted an Anti-Semitic legislation, which generated the gradual expulsion of the Jewish from the economic and cultural life of the country, opening thus the path to their deportation and killing. This type of policies are unconceivable today in a society that is strongly attached to the democratic principles of the rule of law state. Discrimination against a minority solely based on the fact that it does not share the same beliefs, values, religion or origin with the majority represents an approach that make us think of the dark years of the dictatorships," the President pointed out.