Financiarul

Former anti-communist dissident Doina Cornea on Friday got the decoration of Commander of the Order of the Legion of Honour, a decoration that was handed to her by French Ambassador in Bucharest Henri Paul. The ceremony was held at the French Cultural Centre in Cluj-Napoca (central Romania). Ambassador Henri Paul said on this occasion that there were two reasons, which rendered the ceremony necessary.

“The first, the most important one, consists in the very spirit of the Legion of Honour, which intends to grant decorations to the exemplary personalities for the other people to be able to take them as models,” said Henri Paul. “Indeed your life is exemplary, your road is admirable, full of simplicity, of courage and resolve, it is the excellent road of a woman whose convictions are also accompanied by an inflexible determination,” also said the French Ambassador, who added that few women got the highest insignia of the Legion of Honour.

Henri Paul said that the second reason referred to the fact that there were 20 years since the Romanians won their liberty and 20 years since the regime Doina Cornea denounced collapsed. “It is essential for France that, through your agency, they should mark the anniversary of the events you took part in in the front line. Your consciousness was aroused, as you have said, during a visit to France,” Henri Paul also told Doina Cornea.

“Doina Cornea, in this year 2009, for your lifelong struggle against tyranny and for human dignity, on behalf of the President of the French Republic and by virtue of the powers invested in me, I have the honour of granting you the Legion of Honour in rank of Commander,” concluded France’s Ambassador to Romania Henri Paul.

Doina Cornea was also decorated on Thursday, October 8, by Romania’s former sovereign, King Mihai, with the Cross of Romania’s Royal House. Doina Cornea is 80 and was an anti-communist dissident. She was arrested for spreading anti-Ceausescu leaflets. She also voiced several protests at Radio Free Europe and after 1989 she became a member of the Christian Democratic National Peasant Party, a historical party.