Editing Nicolae Ceaușescu (section)

===Timișoara===
Demonstrations in the city of Timișoara were triggered by the government-sponsored attempt to evict [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_T%C5%91k%C3%A9s László Tőkés], an ethnic Hungarian pastor, accused by the government of inciting [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_hatred ethnic hatred]. Members of his ethnic Hungarian [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/congregation congregation] surrounded his apartment in a show of support.

Romanian students spontaneously joined the demonstration, which soon lost nearly all connection to its initial cause and became a more general anti-government demonstration. Regular military forces, police and Securitate fired on demonstrators on 17 December 1989, killing and injuring men, women and children.

On 18 December 1989, Ceaușescu departed for a state visit to Iran, leaving the duty of crushing the Timișoara revolt to his subordinates and his wife. Upon his return to Romania on the evening of 20 December, the situation became even more tense, and he gave a televised speech from the TV studio inside Central Committee Building (CC Building), in which he spoke about the events at Timişoara in terms of an "interference of foreign forces in Romania's internal affairs" and an "external aggression on Romania's sovereignty".

The country, which had little or no information of the Timișoara events from the national media, learned about the Timișoara revolt from western radio stations such as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America Voice of America] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe Radio Free Europe], and by word of mouth. On the next day, 21 December, a mass meeting was staged. Official media presented it as a "spontaneous movement of support for Ceaușescu", emulating the 1968 meeting in which Ceaușescu had spoken against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces.