Since I got back from Chisinau, I've tried to catch up on all of the online and other coverage of events there which I missed while running around the city. As it turns out, some of the stories which have appeared contain substantial errors of fact or interpretation. Below are two such articles.
First is an article in OpenDemocracy, the headline of which informs readers that it's "
Time to Take Sides" in Moldova, an exhortation which should give one pause immediately. Sure enough, the article contains at least one profound factual error:
...Moldova's long-serving leader has survived the challenges faced by his post-cold-war counterparts in east-central Europe in the early 1990s to be repeatedly re-elected in essentially non-contested elections and become the incarnation of the status quo. The official results of the 5 April election continued the pattern...
Voronin was not "repeatedly re-elected" (actually, the way the system works, his post is selected by the Parliament, but I guess one shouldn't be too literal): he was elected once in 2001, in contested elections regarded as free and fair, and he was re-elected once in 2005, in elections which were also a legitimate victory. The problem is not that there has been some sort of "pattern"; quite the opposite. The problem is that the pattern of Moldovan democracy - multiple peaceful transfers of power via the ballot box, a record of which no other CIS country can boast - has been dealt a serious blow.
Perhaps it would be better if journalists and commentators simply referred to Voronin's party as the PCRM. It might allow people who still go all wild-eyed at any mention of the C-word to develop a reasonable opinion about the Moldovan political scene. In its actual policies and attitudes, the PCRM has been about as Communist as Putin's United Russia.
Next up is
a piece by the Guardian's Jonathan Steele, which essentially makes the very reasonable point that, were Moldova better off economically, people likely wouldn't have taken to the streets to protest what Steele seems to regard as minor irregularities in the voting.
Opposition parties deplore last week's violence - they claim it was started by pro-communist provocateurs. But why would the government, having just won elections, want to stoke unrest?
There is one obvious answer to this question: the level of violence involved in the protests allows the PCRM to discredit the Moldovan opposition in the eyes of Moldovan voters, and therefore secures the PCRM's position as the unchallenged master of the political scene. Given the level of accusations leveled at the Communist leadership involving personal enrichment (accusations not dispelled by the awarding of the roughly $27 million contract to repair the destroyed government buildings to Glorinal, a construction company owned by the President's son, Oleg Voronin), and the attendant diminished sense of legitimacy surrounding the PCRM's rule, it is clear that the ruling party may have some reason to fear ending up in the minority.
Moreover, the violence in Chisinau could have been orchestrated to allow the PCRM to assume a tighter grip on power in anticipation of the global economic crisis arriving in Moldova in full force, which many observers expect to happen in coming months. I mention these possible rationales merely to show that one should not incredulously ask, "Why would the government...want to stoke unrest?" In any event, perhaps I was talking to the wrong people, but no one I spoke with in Chisinau over the weekend believed the violence of April 7th took place without some government role.
It is true that [the government] reacted to last week's violence with heavy-handedness, arresting around 200 people, beating some in prison and police stations, and not releasing adequate information on who was still held and where. Foreign journalists have been blocked at the borders and access to several opposition websites as well as Facebook and Twitter has been barred, so as to obstruct protesters from mobilising.
But these abuses do not warrant calls for the government to resign, nor for the EU to back demands for a re-run of the elections. They look like sour grapes since there is no evidence of fraud large enough to have awarded the wrong party victory.
Steele filed this piece before news of a second death associated with the protests came out (both deaths reported so far were allegedly the result of police brutality), but he seems to have underestimated the degree to which the opposition would be successful in playing the human rights card and getting European attention. Interestingly, the West wasn't really sitting up and taking notice when the opposition's grievances were related to the electoral process; but the new grievances resulting from the apparent brutality of the government's response may be enough to get some attention.
More importantly, the observation in the last sentence quoted above suggests a lack of understanding of the Moldovan political process. In order to elect the President, 61 votes in Parliament are required. The results initially released, in which the vote for the PCRM on a percentage basis exceeded both exit-polls and earlier surveys by 5-15%, provided exactly 61 mandates (the results were later revised downward by about 0.5% to provide the PCRM with 60 mandates). Thus it becomes a question of what sort of fraud is "large enough" to create a scandal. If the fraud prevented the PCRM from having to reach a compromise with roughly five opposition deputies, it quite possibly could have changed the outcome of the Presidential selection process. After all, at certain borderline levels, fraud need only be minuscule in order to tip the balance.
I normally wouldn't waste time on errors which might not be errors at all - some of my nitpicks of Steele's piece could be just misinterpretations or a choice of emphasis - but it's important to know the details in a situation like this before deciding how one feels about how one would like things to turn out.
