The Romanian miners of Jiu Valley were called by the newly elected power to Bucharest to end the riots that broke up on 13 June 1990. As President Ion Iliescu put it, the miners were called to save the \"besieged democratic regime\" and restore order and democracy in Bucharest. The government trucked in thousands of miners from the Jiu Valley to Bucharest to confront the demonstrators. The rest of Romania and the world watched the government television broadcasts of miners brutally grappling with students and other protesters.

Over the course of a month-long demonstration in University Square, many protesters had gathered with the goal of attaining official recognition for the 8th demand of the popular Proclamation of Timișoara, which stated that communists and former communists (including President Iliescu himself) should be prevented from holding official functions. Many people, most of them intellectuals, were dissatisfied with Iliescu\'s first government, made up mostly of former communists, because it implemented reforms very slowly or not at all. There had been a protest and hunger strike since 20 May, the general elections day, when the protesters were angry that Iliescu\'s FSN won the elections mostly because the opposition had no chance to mount an effective campaign, and that former communists were in power — the only other country of the ex-Soviet bloc in which this happened was Bulgaria, where the Bulgarian Socialist Party won a 52.7% majority. Some among the protesters in University Square grew violent and attacked the police headquarters and the national television station. When the police were unable to contain the violence, Iliescu appealed to the miners to defend the country. Special trains transported some 10,000 miners to the capital, where the miners violently confronted anyone they saw as opposing the government.^[2]

The official figures say that during the third Mineriad, seven people were killed and more than a thousand were wounded.^{[citation needed]} The opposition newspaper România Liberă claimed that on 29 June 1990 over 40 bodies were buried in a common grave in Străulești, near Bucharest. Conspiracy theories and rumors circulated as to the origins and development of the mineriad, with some believing that both the Romanian Presidency and Secret Service had a hand in it. Later parliamentary inquiries into the potential role of the Secret Service contributed to the widespread public mistrust of the post-Ceaușescu intelligence service.^[2]

Government inquiries would show that the miners had indeed been \"joined by vigilantes who were later credibly identified as former officers of the Securitate\", and that for two days, the miners had been aided and abetted by the former Securitate members in their violent confrontation with the protesters and other targets.^[2]

The history of Romania (Wiki)