Moldova's neighborhood as seen from Moscow

Selections from the June 25 and June 28 editions of RIA Novosti's "What the Russian Papers Say" section:

Nezavisimaya Gazeta - Bucharest blacklists Moscow

Romanian President Traian Basescu has submitted to the parliament a draft national defense strategy listing Russia as an external threat. The document says the deployment of Russian forces in the Republic of Moldova threatens Romania's national security.

The defense strategy mentions the deployment of foreign troops, rather than Russia's peacekeeping force, near Romanian borders. Moldovan media has promptly reported Bucharest's intention to take an active part in the region's demilitarization and the withdrawal of illegally deployed weapons systems.

The response in Transnistria, a breakaway territory located between the Dniester River, the eastern Moldovan border, and Ukraine, where the Russian task force is deployed, has been more emphatic: Bucharest must not intervene, or it will do more harm than good.

Transnistria's Foreign Minister Vladimir Yastrebchak stressed that the self-proclaimed republic's stance regarding the presence of the Russian peacekeeping force and limited troop contingent on its territory had remained unchanged since the end of the 1992 armed conflict between Chisinau and Tiraspol.

Commenting on Romania's proposal to mediate a bilateral peace settlement, Yastrebchak said Bucharest had already acted as mediator in the run-up to the 1992 war. At the time Romania supplied weapons to the Moldovan army, which had unleashed the conflict.

It may be a paradox, but Serafim Urekyan, leader of the Alliance Our Moldova, part of the Alliance for European Integration ruling coalition, supported Yastrebchak. Although Moldova and Romania are more than just neighbors, Bucharest had better mind its own business and not intervene in our affairs, Urekyan said.

The Moldovan politician said the conflict between Chisinau and Tiraspol should be settled in line with the Five Plus Two negotiating format involving Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as guarantors and mediators, the European Union and the United States as observers, as well as Moldova and Transnistria as the parties to the conflict.

Urekyan also said the peace settlement should duly heed the relevant agreements on this issue between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Bucharest's new draft national security strategy notes that the last barriers dividing a single nation could be eliminated by involving Romania in a common European space, Urekyan said. This implies Moldova being openly called a second Romanian state by Bucharest, which does not recognize the existence of the Moldovan nation.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow and Brussels would do everything possible to resume negotiations, and that the main task was to search for a mutually acceptable resolution of this conflict through the preservation and strengthening of Moldovan sovereignty. Lavrov added that the EU may become involved in the Transnistria peacekeeping mission.



Vzglyad [often-tendentious online pro-Kremlin rag] - Top Moldovan official signs controversial document

(Acting Moldovan president tries to add Soviet Occupation Day to national calendar)

Moldovan Parliament Speaker Mihai Gimpu, who is now acting president of Moldova, has signed a decree on marking Soviet Occupation Day every June 28. Gimpu admitted that he had issued the decree without consulting his colleagues in the Alliance for European Integration ruling coalition.

On June 28, 1940, Soviet forces entered Bessarabia, and this became a black day in the history of Moldova, Gimpu said.

Political analyst Pavel Svyatenkov at the Moscow-based Institute of National Strategy said Moldova was following in the wake of other East European states, former Warsaw Pact members.

"But Moldova was part of the Soviet Union. It has an absolutely special status because Moldovan nationalists believe that there is only one Romanian, rather than Moldovan, nation. Moldova's conversion to anti-Communism is another step in severing ties with Russia," Svyatenko told the paper.

Gennady Konenko, head of the Moldova and Transdnestr section at the Institute of CIS Studies, said the decision to institute Soviet Occupation Day was not historically or legally motivated. He said Romania had taken advantage of Soviet Russia's weaknesses in 1918 and seized the Bessarabia Gubernia (Region) which had been part of the Russian Empire since 1812.

The opposition Communist Party of Moldova thinks that Gimpu has soured relations with Russia and was whipping up an anti-Communist hysteria in order to boost his popularity ratings before presidential elections. The latest opinion polls show Gimpu is supported by only 2% of respondents. Consequently, he is in no position to assume top state positions in the future.

In his decree, Gimpu demanded that Russia, the Soviet Union's legal successor, unconditionally and promptly withdraw its forces and weapons from Moldova. A Russian troop contingent has been fulfilling a peacekeeping mission in the self-proclaimed Transdnestr Republic since 1992.

Yuri Muntyan, Executive Secretary of the Moldovan Communist Party's Central Committee, said Gimpu and other ruling coalition leaders were ready to deprive Russian of its interethnic language status, and were preparing to amend the current polyethnic national policy concept.

Muntyan said his party was preparing to oppose official repressions strictly by legal means. The Communist Party is confident that Gimpu's decisions will be abolished after it stages a political comeback. Consequently, there will probably not be enough time for June 28 to become part of Moldova's political calendar.



Nezavisimaya Gazeta - Moldova to mark Soviet Occupation Day

New tensions in Russian-Moldovan relations were provoked by Moldovan authorities, who declared June 28 Soviet Occupation Day. Russia is the legal successor of the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991, and must now withdraw its "occupation troops" from Transdnestr, a breakaway republic of Moldova, the Moldovan leader said in a decree.

Acting President Mihai Ghimpu has recreated the situation of 1991, when his predecessor, Mircea Snegur declared war on Russia during his speech in parliament, but took his words back almost immediately. However, Ghimpu will not rethink or reword his demand.

He is preparing for the parliamentary and possibly presidential elections and needs to increase his extremely low rating of 2%. The popularity of his Liberal Party has fallen in the past six months, and its members are fleeing to another pro-Romanian rightwing party, the Liberal Democratic Party, whose rating has been growing.

Ghimpu has nowhere else to win votes because Moldova's rightwing electorate comprising intellectuals and students who identify themselves as Romanians is very stable, 20%, and has not been growing. That electorate is divided between the two parties, which reflect certain moods of society but not of its majority. This explains why Moldovans are divided over Ghimpu's decree.

The Moldovan parliament will today hear a report on the consequences of the Communist regime in the country. The agenda includes a proposal to prohibit the use of all Soviet and Communist Party symbols in the republic.

Ghimpu is expected to submit to parliament a draft law canceling the concept of the republic's nationalities policy adopted in 2003, in which Moldova was described as a polyethnic state and Russian as the dominant spoken language. That concept provoked major protests in the republic.

Valery Klimenko, leader of the socio-political movement Equality, described the developments as a rollback to the 1990s, when the Moldovan People's (Popular) Front held the power in the republic. Ghimpu was one of its leaders.

The extreme rightwing government pursued a policy that provoked an armed conflict on the Dniester, which has not been settled to this day, Klimenko said.

Bulgars and Gagauz, small ethnic groups living in compact communities in the south of Moldova, have expressed protest against the authorities' actions that are complicating relations with Russia.

The Civil Society movement said it would call people to the streets today, but the Liberals have the support of young people, who are society's most energetic part. This means that Ghimpu's decree may provoke clashes in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.

Battling Historical Narratives

Moldova in Myths and Legends, Chisinau, April 14.

I already pointed out how the government-run newspaper Moldova Suverana equated the protesters / rioters on April 7th with fascist Romanians retaking Chisinau in 1941. Now I have seen the flip side of this exaggeration of historical parallels, in a message sent around a few days ago by an opposition activist:

The Moldovan state authorities' violence against protesters is without precedent. Unlawful arrests, preventing access to a lawyer, torture, sexual abuse towards arrested young women are comparable only with the Soviet times in 1940s, when the country was militarily incorporated in the USSR along with the Baltic States.

Propaganda

When I boarded the Air Moldova turboprop in Vienna for my connecting flight to Chisinau last Friday (talk about a small world - seven people on the plane, I knew one of them and he knew two of the others), the reading material available for passengers left no doubt as to how the Moldovan government was spinning the events of April 7.

Below are the two pages of coverage from state-run Moldova Suverana (a newspaper we had occasion to discuss last summer when it ran a hatchet-job piece on American NGOs in Moldova) - the paper had only four pages in total and the other two were business announcements, classifieds, etc. The front-page headline is "The Opposition's Latest Vandalism Will Cost Us 300 Mln Lei," and the stories along the right-hand side discuss Voronin's conversations with the Presidents of Russia and Lithuania and the Russian Duma's support for the Moldovan authorities.

MS's second page of coverage highlights, among other things, photos of opposition leaders Chirtoaca and Filat supposedly organizing the riots and - rather unbelievably - photos of destruction in Chisinau in 1941 when it was retaken by Romanian forces, inviting readers to draw a comparison between the devastation wreaked by a fascist army and the riots in downtown Chisinau on April 7th.

Further down and continuing below the cut is coverage from Vremea, a Russian-language newspaper which doesn't seem to have a functioning website at the moment (the URL on the front page leads to a blank page). The bulk of the paper is devoted to what it calls a "Chronicle of a Failed Putsch."

IMG_1371, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

IMG_1372, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

IMG_1373, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

IMG_1374, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

IMG_1375, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

IMG_1376, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

IMG_1378, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

IMG_1379, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

The last page, of course, is not about Moldova, but its slams on Georgian and Ukrainian leaders assist one in pinpointing the paper's editorial stance.

More fun with maps

Regular readers will recall my summertime practice of scanning in and posting maps, mostly of the Caucasus and various regions thereof - see the photoset here and previous map-themed posts here.

Recently I've been taking advantage of London's status as the center of the world's antique maps trade and have been checking out some of the offerings. The two maps below are not exactly antique - they are from Harmsworth's Atlas, n.d. but variously dated as 1919-1923 - but they are pretty interesting. The first appears to show the brief period after WWI during which the states of the South Caucasus were independent. The second shows that Romania within its current borders (much less its interwar borders) is a relatively recent phenomenon and that when it comes to the notion of redrawing borders in that part of the world, just about any group can select a long-ago date to use as a reference point that would give it more than what it has today.

Caucasia, view full-sized version here.

Romania Historical, view full-sized version here.

Breaking News: The Cold War Is Over!

I knew there had to be some reason I was channel-surfing at 1:30am on a school night. Now I know the reason - it was my destiny to be one of the few East-Coast viewers to see President Bush's speech from Bucharest live (on MSNBC, which seemed to be the only channel to carry it) and to receive this "breaking news":


To be fair to Bush, he delivered the line about the Cold War being over and Russia no longer being our enemy in the manner of one stating the obvious, and its appearance under the "BREAKING NEWS" tagline is the result of MSNBC's laziness with on-screen graphics. What's sad is that in some circles, thanks to the industriousness of the "New Cold War" school of thought, the reminder that the Cold War ended nearly 20 years ago might actually seem like news.

Bush also reiterated his support for NATO Membership Action Plans for Georgia and Ukraine (predictably, the immediate mainstream Russian media reaction seems to be headlining this aspect of the speech). This not exactly breaking news, either - some of the opposition to Bush's stance from our European allies is discussed in this NPR piece, and Matt Rojansky of PSA posted an interesting and thoughtful piece yesterday about NATO expansion, concluding with an April 1st take on Bush's remarks in Kiev:

If I had the President’s ear today, I would advise him to place a call to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s incoming successor. He should tell the Russian leaders that this morning’s tough talk about cutting Russia out of the NATO expansion dialogue was just a very poor April Fool’s Day joke. The US-Russia relationship is of great importance to us, and we respect Russia’s legitimate security concerns. It is because we recognize that the Cold War is long over that we want to give Russia a real seat at NATO’s collective security table.

[The rest of the post is worth reading as well, for its look back at NATO expansion rounds past.]


Actually, Bush's Bucharest speech tried to have it both ways, suggesting that NATO should expand but at the same time trying to reassure Moscow that this would not be directed against Russia, and that his pet project white elephant European missile defense system is also not designed to counter Russia's arsenal. Interestingly, RIA Novosti is headlining its initial story on the Bush speech "Bush Calls on Russia to Combat Missile Threat Together," playing up Bush's call for US-Russian cooperation (of course, RIAN also posted, 20 minutes later, an atypically short one-sentence "article" headlined "Kremlin Seriously Considers Recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia")


It seems like a difficult needle to thread - promoting NATO's expansion as a way of cementing Ukraine and Georgia's "independence" (that's Bush's word choice, and he is not alone in believing that their independence is imperiled), meanwhile arguing that Russia is not seen as a threat.

The Russian government, though, has its own needle to thread. Although its opposition to NATO expansion into Russia's underbelly is understandable and genuine (NATO expansionists who argue that Russia will eventually fold or that it has little real leverage are in effect advocating a game of chicken with Russia on the issue), it seems unlikely that Russia really wants to make good in the short term on its explicit threats to recognize Abkhazia's independence if Georgia is accepted into the MAP program. It will be very interesting to see what Putin says in his public statements while at the NATO summit. One issue appears to be that he may not get the chance to publicly address the summit - the Russian press is displaying its world-class talent for taking umbrage at imagined national slights.

In any event, it's difficult to imagine that Bush plans to have a positive and productive meeting with Putin later this week if Ukraine and Georgia get MAPs in Bucharest. So perhaps they will get nicely worded statements about cooperation and partnership with NATO but no actual MAPs, and the story of Bush's transatlantic trip will turn out to be the return to a realistic approach - if not an actual rapprochement - with Russia which a number of pundits have advocated of late. I wouldn't want to make any predictions, though, other than the obvious one - that this is going to be an interesting week.

Here's a bonus bit on the idea of a changing US approach to Russia (not immediately relevant, but I've been meaning to post this for a while) from Stephen Sestanovich of CFR, from an event in late February:

I think the phase of, sort of, Western commentary on Russian democratic progress and human rights performance is, sort of, over. The phase that we began at the end -- toward the end of the Cold War has, kind of, played out. And the idea that there's a lot of influence, just in moral opprobrium, is -- that one is not going to work for us as it has. And it -- you know, we might as well think of something, of something new.

If we're going to think of something new, the one thought I would suggest, as this, sort of, starting point for anything, is that it can't be an American attack on, you know, Russia's -- you know, the degree of Russian democratic virtue. It has to be something more broadly agreed among democratic states, and particularly the United States and Europe.

I would say that the administration, in general, has been weak in trying to develop a consensus with Europe about how to deal with Russia -- across the board, whether it's security issues, economic issues, political issues, democracy. And that is now, I think, recognized by the Europeans as something that really does need to be on the agenda of the -- for the U.S. and the Europeans if they want to have any influence in the future.

Dossiers on Transdniester

While mining the research riches of the internet, I happened upon the English-language website of the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (CRJI). They have a couple of sets of stories which touch on Transdniester. The first, called "The Final Frontier," is from December 2003 and is actually about the EU's expansion. It includes only one article on Transdniester, titled "Transdnister [sic] - the kolkhoz of smugglers." While the English translation leaves something to be desired (from the first sentence: "A modern sports complex erects downtown."), and observers have toned down some of the smuggling allegations in recent years, it may be an interesting read anyway.

The second folder I wanted to mention is titled "Pridnestrovskaya Moldavskaya Respublika – Terra Incognita" and contains a number of articles dating from 2006. The following description is offered of the project:

The project "Transdniester - Revealing Europe's black hole" is an investigation of CRJI, financed by SCOOP in Danemark and SAS in Switzerland. The participants in this project are the following journalists: Vitalie Calugareanu (Chisinau), Vlad Lavrov (Kiev), Igor Boldyrev (Odessa), Alexander Bratersky (Moscova) and foto Robert Ghement.

The journalistic investigation was financed by the Scoop project (through the Danish Investigative Journalists Association – FUJ) and by the organization Small Arms Survey from Geneva.

I've become much more skeptical of internet news sources since seeing how slick propaganda sites can be made to look. As with any previously unknown source that one has only seen on the internet, I feel the need to offer some sort of disclaimer. On the other hand, far from looking like something set up just to criticize the de facto Transnistrian authorities, this organization appears to target all of the classic targets you would expect good investigative journalists in the region to go after - corrupt Romanian officials, organized crime, problems in Moldova (including a feature with video - in Romanian only - on the recent scandal about alleged visa-selling at the Romanian embassy in Chisinau) and even Romania's alleged discrimination against Muslims "in its zeal to please the US." So I'm pretty comfortable recommending its fairly recent, firsthand reporting from the PMR. Or how about this - as comfortable as I would be recommending the work of any other equal-opportunity-muckraking outlet. Anyway, I hadn't seen this before, so I wanted to share it.

Russian TV online

For those of you no longer in Russia who miss Russian TV, it looks like there's a new service called WebTelek which might satisfy your longings. They offer a subscription, but at the same time it's possible to view many Russian channels live for free on their website (at least for some amount of time - maybe they cut you off eventually). The channels are sorted by country of origin using the pull-down menu in the top right corner. So whether it's AZTV, Romania's Antena 3, or even Belarus TV, if it's post-Soviet or in the neighborhood (or not - they also have Chinese and
channels), they've got your fix. Enjoy!

A tiny bit more on Transnistria

As an addendum to my previous post about the possibility of a Transnistria settlement, here's an article from last Thursday's edition of the Romanian newspaper Ziua. It contains a rather unflattering photo of one of the officials responsible for negotiating on the Russian side, Yuri Zubakov. He was formerly Russia's ambassador to Moldova, and according to the article was one of the authors of the 2003 Kozak Memorandum, which outlined a settlement proposal favorable to Transnistria and Russia and was ultimately rejected by Moldovan President Voronin.

Tiraspol, Moldova, Aug. 7, 2006.