The conflict that took place in the Transylvanian village of Hădăreni in 1993 stands to memory as the pinnacle of anti-Roma violence in Romania, and as a paradigmatic event of the Roma rights movement. In the aftermath of the conflict, Hădăreni has been the locus of several humanitarian and developmental interventions aimed to compensate the victims, install the rule of law, and restore peace in the community. After two decades, most of the beneficiaries of these interventions and the actors that carried them out jointly declare them to have failed. In May 2013 I interviewed Nicolae Gheorghe, a leading figure of the Romani movement, on the topic of the Hădăreni case. Gheorghe had tackled the case in the beginnings of his activism, and he later described it as the ‘failure test’ of the strategies that had been employed to address Roma exclusion. In light of this statement, in the present chapter I propose to read the case as an exemplary or cautionary tale of early postsocialist Romani activism. To contextualize Gheorghe’s assessment, I build on interviews with state representatives and with other civic entrepreneurs involved in the case, and on my own ethnographic insights from the village, so as to provide an overview of the co-existing and often conflicting notions of ‘rights’, ‘justice’, and ‘reparation’ that were circulated in connection to the events in Hădăreni. By employing a historicizing approach to the process of truth-production around this case, I inquire into the dialectics of ‘improvement’ and ‘failure’ that Roma activism thrives on, and into the tension between ‘emotions’ and ‘procedures’, as envisaged by the various approaches to this case.