Former Romanian President Iliescu, who led free market transition, dies at 95

(Reuters) -Romania's former President Ion Iliescu, who led its transition from communism and set it on the path to European Union and NATO membership, but faced charges of crimes against humanity for violently suppressing protests in the 1990s, died on Tuesday aged 95.

Iliescu had been admitted to hospital with lung cancer roughly two months ago. The government said he would receive a state funeral.

"History will judge Ion Iliescu, the main figure of the 1990s transition," said current President Nicusor Dan.

Iliescu went from a rising member of Romania's Communist Party to a leader of the bloody December 1989 revolution - which toppled dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and led to his summary execution on Christmas Day - to become the first freely elected president.

At the height of his popularity, Romanians were known to chant "The sun shines, Iliescu appears". But when student protests against him broke out in the capital Bucharest in June 1990, he called on coal miners, then politically influential, to put them down by force.

After repeated failed attempts to investigate him, he was sent for trial at the start of this year on charges of crimes against humanity for his part in violence in which 20,000 miners entered the capital to crush peaceful anti-government protests. Four people were killed and hundreds injured.

He always denied wrongdoing and was never convicted.

Miners' riots throughout the 1990s hampered Romania's transition to a market economy and deterred badly needed foreign investment for years. Iliescu's critics have accused him of delaying the transitions, trying to block reform and protect the political heritage and ruling elite of the Communist system.

But Iliescu was also the one who got all political parties to agree to support Romania's path to EU and NATO membership. It joined the NATO alliance in 2004 and the EU in 2007.

The founder of the leftist Social Democrat Party (PSD), to this day the country's largest, Iliescu is its only leader to have won three presidential elections. No other PSD leader has managed to win since his last term ended in 2004.

"Ion Iliescu must be understood in the context of his time," said Sergiu Miscoiu, a political science professor at Babes-Bolyai University. "He stirred anti-totalitarian sentiments in the 1990s, rightly so, but he was also the object of adulation by a large part of the population.

"While he called miners to Bucharest and sealed the slow and uncertain transition, he also ... pushed Romania on a Euroatlantic path, such as it was understood at the time."

He is survived by his wife Nina.

The government has declared August 7 a day of national mourning.

(Reporting by Alan Charlish and Luiza Ilie; Editing by Alex Richardson)