Note: On the 16th of August, a fire broke out in the Intensive Care Unit of one of the largest maternity hospitals in Romania. There was no nurse to look for the premature babies in the ward – since the government decided to drastically cut personnel in state institutions, so there was only 1 nurse caring for 53 babies on the entire floor. Before anyone could break down the electronically locked door, 3 babies died in the fire and 8 were horribly burnt. Up to now, 2 more babies died due to the severe injuries sustained. The fire is presumed to have started from a crude (and illegal) improvisation made to the air conditioning system. Also, due to chronic lack of funds, the hospital (like all the state hospitals in Romania) did not have smoke detectors. This is the most terrible tragedy, in a long row of tragedies, involving Romanian hospitals, where people died instead of being cured, due to lack of equipment, medicines, or the most basic humane interest from underpaid doctors and nurses. We have seen a lot of cases of people dying in hospitals – senior citizens, children, even new-born babies – but never before has death struck so horribly in a maternity ward. This time I will not remain silent. I want to point my finger and expose the people who made this tragedy possible by their actions. * * * * I Accuse Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I know I am not original. Someone far more intelligent and gifted than me, the great French writer Emile Zola, sent a powerful letter with such a title to the French president, trying to expose a criminal coalition bent to send an innocent man to death. In this case, esteemed readers, the evil has been already perpetrated. Murder was done, and the dead cannot speak in their defense. I take up this responsibility and I will try to be the voice of the very young, burnt to death in their first days on this world. I am not learned in law and cannot quote long and complicated phrases in Latin, trying to codify the tragedy in an obscure language of the courts of justice. I know what I and all the other people of my country have lived through these last years. Until I could take it no more and keep silent about it. Now, therefore: I accuse the Romanian president Traian Basescu of being a madman and a dangerous and deranged maniac, who believes that the country he represents is his to do as he pleases. I further accuse him of willfully acting against the best interests of the people who elected him. All his actions are bent to insure the prosperity of a favored few, from the political party he sprung from, and who helped him in all unlawful ways to confuse the nation into voting for him. And who also orchestrated a massive fraud in order to insure his election. I further accuse president Basescu that his only encouragement for a nation struggling with the worst economic crisis since World War II was to “leave the country and go abroad if you don’t like it here”. I accuse the Romanian Prime-Minister, Emil Boc, of being a puppet in the hands of president Basescu, of accepting to leave behind a respected career as a university professor of law and becoming the enactor of the worst and most damaging laws ever passed in this country in the last 20 years. I accuse him of destroying the education and healthcare system of Romania, by dramatically reducing personnel, and by still more dramatically reducing the salaries of the remaining few. I further accuse him of being deaf to the cries of despair from people who gathered so many times under his office windows in strikes and protests, trying to show their despair, their impossibility to maintain a decent life and of performing their profession at an acceptable level at least. I accuse the Minister of Healthcare, Cseke Attila, of being an infatuated know-it-all, who actually doesn’t know a thing about organizing healthcare and keeping a health medical system. He is simply the representative of the Magyar minority, an item on the agenda of his political party, and has already outlived his usefulness in a country where Romanians and Magyars alike are faced with unemployment, high taxes and no hopes. I further accuse minister Attila of being a heartless, cynical and cruel creature, whom I can’t bring myself about to call man, who found nothing better to say, in the wake of the tragedy which so far took the lives of 5 (five) new-born babies, than that we should search Google and see that such things happen in other countries as well! Proof to the above mentioned accusation stand the grim, dirty, understaffed, and badly equipped hospitals all over the country; the countless cases when people die in hospital for lack of medicines, or of interest from the doctors and nurses; the now usual requests to bring medicines and medical supplies (such as syringes, cotton and IV tubes) from home when being admitted to a hospital; and finally the inhumanly low salaries of the medical personnel, coupled with long hours on duty and performing the work of 4-5 people. Add the old, rusted and unreliable equipment, which have long outlived their useful lives, but were never replaced. Add the government budget for healthcare which keeps diminishing every year. And now you have the specific conditions for such a tragedy to happen. As years went by, we’ve got used to everything, even to the horrific cases of people being sent from one hospital to another and dying en route. To the careless and arrogant attitude of under-bribed nurses and doctors. To the dirty waiting rooms where the chair sticks to your clothes. To the lack of the most common living conditions in hospital rooms – clean sheets and toilets. To the family doctors who cannot prescribe the exact number of medicines the patient needs, but up to a limit set by the government. Yes, Mr. President, Mr. Prime-Minister, and Mr. Minister of Healthcare, we’ve got used to all these. But we cannot accept, and cannot get over the images of the maternity ward on fire, the scorched tiny bodies of new-born babies. We cannot get over the idea that there is not one ounce of respect for life, even since its frail beginning. We cannot accept to be treated as expendable units, whose only useful purpose is to pay taxes and stay silent. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I rest my case. Let you be the judges who can answer this question to the grieving parents who took their babies to the grave instead of the nursery: Why did our babies have to die?