Raed Arafat: A reluctant rebel

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Human interest.

The revolt currently shaking Bucharest is inspired by Raed Arafat, a doctor of Palestinian origin who protested against the privatisation of the country's health system.

Mircea-Ionuţ Sărărescu | Eveline Păuna

If Raed Arafat has always been popular among Romanians, it is undoubtedly because they have always felt close to this Palestinian from Syria who founded the Emergency Mobile Reanimation and Extraction Service or SMURD.

Born in Damascus in 1964, Raed Arafat discovered a passion for "first aid" at the age of 14. Still in high school, he worked with a city hospital and he created the first emergency team which included some of his colleagues. Medicine, at first a simple passion, would become a professional goal. His father wanted him to attend Polytechnic but Raed had sworn "to become either a doctor or a garbage collector".

He came to Romania aged 16 and a half, because, he says, "it is the country that responded the most quickly to my request for admission to university [the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu operated a system which allowed residents of Arab countries to study in Romania]. "I found out later that I was also admitted in Greece and in the United States, but my parents didn't tell me about the American response out of fear that I would go over there and never come back. They hoped to see me return from Romania," he explains.

http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1409981-raed-arafat-reluctant-rebel

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1. Anti-austerity revolt in Bucharest

Sixty injured and many shops ransacked are the result of a demonstration held in Bucharest on January 15 to demand the resignation of Romanian President Traian Băsescu, seen as responsible for the decline in the country's standard of living. The demonstration deteriorated when demonstrators were joined by extremist supporters of the capital's football clubs – mainly Steaua and Dinamo. For Romanian daily Adevărul, these events are the work of what, on the front page, it calls "Opportunists!" described as "the politicians [of the left opposition] and the delinquents" guilty of having "instrumentalised the original goal of the revolt."

Romanians' discontent has focused around the plan to privatise several social services including the SMURD, the emergency ambulance service. The proposal was withdrawn the following day, but the well-publicised resignation of SMURD head, Raed Arafat, revived the controversy. "The social trigger would have been pulled anyway," Adevărul argues. "Eight out of ten Romanians think that the country is headed in the wrong direction and that the austerity measures [demanded by the International Monetary Fund in exchange for financial aid] are the price to pay" for Băsescu's policies, the paper explains.

Romanians are taking the same path as the Indignados in the United States, Europe and Putin's Russia.

http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/news-brief-cover/1399591-anti-austerity-revolt-bucharest

[Jefferson23]

2. Wishing them all the best..austerity measures that will only make matters worse, literally. n/t