d for political or economic reasons. Punishment included deportation, internal exile, and internment in forced labour camps and prisons; dissent was vigorously suppressed. Nevertheless, Romanian armed opposition to communist rule was one of the longest-lasting in the Eastern Bloc.
In 1965, Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power and started to pursue independent policies, such as being the only Warsaw Pact country to condemn the Soviet-led 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six-Day War of 1967 and establishing diplomatic relations with West Germany the same year, economic links having been set up in 1963. Also, close ties with the Arab countries (and the PLO) allowed Romania to play a key role in the Israel–Egypt and Israel–PLO peace processes. But as Romania's foreign debt sharply increased between 1977 and 1981 (from US$ 3 to 10 billion), the influence of international financial organisations such as the IMF or the World Bank grew, conflicting with Nicolae Ceaușescu's autocratic policies. He eventually initiated a project of total reimbursement of the foreign debt by imposing policies that impoverished Romanians and exhausted the Romanian economy, while also greatly extending the authority of the police state, and imposing a cult of personality. Although these led to a dramatic decrease in Ceaușescu's popularity and culminated in his overthrow and execution in the bloody Romanian Revolution of 1989, by that time Romania's foreign debt was almost completely paid-off. A 2006 Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania estimated that the number of direct victims of communist repression at two million people. This number does not include people who died in liberty as a result of their treatment in communist prisons, nor does it include people who died because of the dire economic circumstances in which the country found itself.
Present-day
