Citizens are directed to assist the militia when called upon or to act as police—to apprehend and hold violators—if no police are at the scene when a crime is committed. Provisions authorizing the formation of auxiliary police groups are established in law. Such auxiliaries would ordinarily be organized by the militia but, whatever their sponsorship, they would be expected to cooperate with local police authorities.

According to the law defining the militia's organization, its personnel consist of military and civilian employees on the staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Officers, military experts, and noncommissioned officers are recruited from the graduates of schools operated within the regular military establishment. Policemen may be drawn from those selected annually for compulsory military service. The armed forces' personnel regulations apply to militiamen acquired from the draft process or from military schools. Graduates of civilian schools are employed in the police force to meet its requirements for specialists who are not trained in the armed forces. These individuals and others who have had no association with the armed forces retain civilian status and are subject to the provisions of the labor code and other regulations applicable to civilian employees.

The militia's personnel strength of 500,000 in 1972 means that about one person in every forty of the country's population is in, or employed by, the force. The reason for this high ratio is that the militia organization has branches at all government levels, from the national ministry down to the village. Also, its working groups include nearly all of the country's guard, regulatory, investigative, and paramilitary organizations, as well as those performing police and firefighting functions.

Security Troops

Security forces organized at the national level to protect the regime from subversive activities, whether locally or externally generated, were created in the late 1940s and are still maintained. The force in 1972 numbered roughly 20,000 men. It is organized along military lines, and most, if not all, of its men have military rank. It receives its administrative and logistic support from the Ministry of Internal Affairs but is supervised by the State Security Council.

According to pronouncements made during anniversary ceremonies held in August of 1968, during their twenty years of service the security troops had been a consistently reliable force. Their mission was described as identifying and apprehending foreign espionage agents and combating local spies, saboteurs, agitators, and terrorists. It was declared that the forces operated under the leadership and direct guidance of the party and governmental leadership and that local security forces were controlled by the party authorities in districts and cities.

Pronouncements by the leadership about their local subordination notwithstanding, the security troops, which are the direct descendants of the old secret police, are still controlled at the national level. Because of their declining mission in counter-espionage and counter-subversion, they undoubtedly cooperate wherever possible in usual militia functions, but they appear to have only nominal responsibilities to local government agencies.

The diminishing role of the security troops is evident in several areas. Their personnel strength in 1971 was a fraction of that of the militia. The country's efforts against external threat have been increasingly relegated to the regular armed forces. Also, although the chairman of the State Security Council—which was newly established in 1968—is a member of the Council of Ministers, in 1970 he was the only man on the security council who was a ranking party member, and he was no more than an alternate member of the Executive Committee of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party. His vice chairmen were military officers, and only one of them was prominent enough in the party to have been a member of the Central Committee. It is evident that the State Security Council in Romania does not have the status of the high-level groups that in some countries have the responsibility for coordinating party and governmental activities relating to national security and for providing basic guidance to all of the various military, paramilitary, and police agencies.

PUBLIC ORDER

As is the case in the other communist countries that pattern their systems after that of the Soviet Union, Romania's leadership relies on the party and several mass organizations to foster a climate in which the people will actively support and cooperate with the regime. These organizations involve as large a segment of the population as possible in a broad spectrum of programs and functions. The efforts they elicit from their members may consist of activities within the organizations themselves or in local governments, judicial systems, and security groups. Mass popular involvement provides an influence that is generally subtle but that may become direct pressure.