The Nation's Gratitude by Maria Bucur

Author:Maria Bucur [Bucur, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Eastern, Modern, 20th Century, Military, World War I
ISBN: 9781000535419
Google: Ok1SEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-30T16:17:59+00:00

Veterans’ organizations

While many veterans, especially disabled ones, wrote individually to the IOVR offices to report injustices, abuses, corruption or to simply demand their rights, most such activities were undertaken collectively by veterans’ organizations. Over 250 organizations for veterans, orphans and widows (with more than 175 of them dedicated exclusively to veterans) are known to have existed in interwar Romania. A handful of these groups began during the war, like SMIR and the Mărăşeşti Society, both established in 1917, and then flourished throughout the interwar period. There were over 50 such organizations founded in Bucharest. Some sought to open branches throughout the country, which led to a great deal of activity among the veteran population and eventually to tension, conflicts among these groups and limited success in lobbying the government for better benefits and fulfillment of the existing legislation. Other organizations, like the General Association described in Chapter 2, were initially established in other locations, among them Chişinău and Cluj. The list I compiled is the result of several years of research in a variety of archives. It is entirely possible that there were other organizations, as it is possible that those I only found mentioned in correspondence, without direct evidence of their existence, were not particularly active. In the 1930s, even the Romanian government had a difficult time finding the leadership, offices and archives of the best known, legally registered organizations.

The predominance of organizations with a central office in Bucharest was a result of both demography and government policy. As the largest city in Romania, in 1930 Bucharest and the surrounding affiliated communes had a population of 640,000, or 3.5% of the total population. In a country that was still 80% rural, this was a large proportion of the urban population overall. Still, it is clear that Bucharest was overrepresented among the veterans’ organizations.

The efforts made in the 1920s to organize veterans were to a great extent motivated by the IOVR laws. By and large, lobbying activities with the government officials took place in Bucharest. Representatives of veterans’ groups arranged meetings with members of parliament or with officials of the central government. There is far less evidence of provincial activities that lobbied for curbing misapplication of the law at the local level. Veterans’ groups engaged in frequent meetings, but those were for the purpose of allowing the membership to speak out and discuss their frustrations. It was a rare occasion to have a representative of IOVR in those meetings, and if those individuals were present, they were more likely there as spokesmen for the veterans’ group they represented (ANIC, DGP, Dos. 36/1934). At these meetings the membership voted on further action to address their problems, which generally meant drafting a petition or proposal for amending the law, that representatives of the veterans’ group promised to take to Bucharest and present to government officials and/or members of parliament.

The choices made by veterans’ groups to focus lobbying activities in Bucharest were a function of the centralization that the Romanian government pursued relentlessly.

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