"Chisinau burning"? *

Downtown Chisinau, April 6 - I have to say I'd prefer to see fewer Romanian flags and more Moldovan flags, but maybe that's just me.
[image source]

It looks like the democracy is hitting the fan in the capital of Moldova today. Sunday's elections resulted in a victory for the ruling Communist Party, and a protest planned for Tuesday morning has now turned violent. Apparently military units are now arriving in downtown Chisinau and protests are being planned or taking place in other cities as well (I have read about Balti and Ungheni so far).

A number of bloggers are covering events, mostly in Romanian (the language spoken by most of the population in Moldova, where Russian is also spoken by many), and according to the Telegraph, Twitter was a key organizing tool for the protesters today.

Here is a link to what seems to be the most active Twitter feed for following events in Chisinau,** although according to this post (which also has some videos and is being regularly updated), there are rumors that Twitter has been blocked in Moldova - not sure if they would actually be able to do that. Another report is that internet access from the country has been blocked, although I'm not sure that's accurate. According to one Twitter-er following the feed, the service has become the "new CNN."

Natalia Morari, a Moldovan journalist and activist who was famously barred from entering Russia last year, has been involved in organizing some of the protests and has posted photos from a peaceful protest by some 15,000 people on Monday and an account of how it was initially organized - by six people, organizing everything using only tools available on the internet, under the slogan "I'm not a Communist!"

According to her post, even on Monday, the organizers asked everyone to disperse and planned to reassemble on Wednesday, but "everything began unfolding rather chaotically." Tuesday's protests, for which the Liberal Democratic Party (PLDM) had official permission, apparently became even more chaotic. It's possible, though, that the chaos could have been provoked by the authorities in a bid to get the peaceful majority of the population on their side by portraying the opposition as thuggish rabble-rousers.

Now, apparently, the organizers of Monday's demonstration may be facing criminal charges and are consulting with attorneys. Further developments to follow, no doubt, at Morari's blog.

Another Moldovan blogger, Nicu Popescu, has lamented the end of Moldova's history of non-violent protests in a long and interesting post which I unfortunately haven't time to translate, and has posted a call for EU High Representative for Foreign Policy to come to Chisinau and mediate:

My suggestion is that the EU should promote a “new deal” between the government and the opposition that could include some of the following elements.

• recount of the votes with strong international monitoring, and the recognition of the re-counted votes by the opposition.
• the dismissal of the the minister of interior who has been central to many pre-electoral abuses and harrassment of the opposition and the media. the new minister of interior should be appointed by after consensus between the government and the opposition.
• initiating a process of police reform under the supervision of EU advisors, possibly extending the mandate of the EU Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine.
• Vladimir Voronin, the incumbent president (at the end of his second term) should respect the Moldovan constitution and retire from politics after his second term with guarantees for future immunity from prosecution. The Communist party elects a new leader, who might enjoy a majority in the parliament. There might be a Communist government (if the recount confirms their victory), but without Voronin.
  
• The broadcasting licenses of existing independent media, particulaly PRO TV (the only TV channel independent from the government) should be extended. A decision on that is pending.

One can only hope that cooler heads will prevail.

Some fairly alarming photos from today have been posted here and here - below is one from the latter photoset, titled "Moldova has Awakened."

Downtown Chisinau, April 7
[image source]

I'm sure this is not the kind of awakening many Moldovans would have preferred, although it is easy to understand why so many people have lost patience with the government.

Here is one comprehensive post which is being updated as events develop and has links to photos and even to the official Ministry of Internal Affairs statement (in Romanian), just released, which states that the authorities will take "all necessary actions...to restore public order."

Romanian ProTV is running a live feed (for the moment) from downtown Chisinau here. BBC News coverage is here. RIA Novosti coverage is here.

Russia Today has video and also has a story up quoting Voronin's top adviser, Mark Tcaciuk / Tkachuk as referring to the protests as "an attempt to launch a street riot coup d’etat [sic]." It also quotes Vlad Filat, leader of the PLDM, which made it into the parliament with 12+% of the vote, as stating that his party and the Our Moldova Alliance (AMN), which also made it into the parliament with just under 10% of the vote, have signed a statement calling for the election results to be annulled. According to Morari, this proves that the protesters are not just "a bunch of losers who didn't make it into parliament."

Actually, Morari has just posted a statement on her blog calling for all opposition leaders to stop trying to take advantage of the youth protests for "political games" and to show up tonight at 7pm (that would be noon in NY and 5pm in London) to have a "dialogue between the young people who took to the streets [on Monday] and those who are trying to get into power by using that protest." She's thrown down a gauntlet of sorts: "Those parties which do not come to the National Assembly Square at 19:00 tonight will show that they may as well spit on us - on those for whom they claimed to speak [when addressing the protesters] today."

She's also posted another statement detailing today's events and disavowing the violence which began on Monday night with the overturning of some commuter minibuses and escalated today into the burning of the parliament building - the latter was "a planned provocation directed against those who took to the streets peacefully."

If the protesters manage to hold out and dig in downtown, we'll be searching for a name - perhaps it could be the Grape Revolution, or the Wine Revolution, in a nod to Moldova's most famous non-human export.

I think that's all for now. Let's all spare a thought for everyone in Chisinau and hope that things there are resolved peacefully. Here is BNE's summary of today's events and background, sent out this afternoon in a "flash" email:

Moldova: Protestors storm parliament, demand new elections
bne
April 7, 2009

A crowd of around 20,000 people has stormed the Moldovan parliament, demanding an end to the Communist Party’s rule.

Moldovan opposition leaders say the Sunday April 5 parliamentary elections which returned the Communists to power were rigged.

Angry protestors have entered the Moldovan parliament building in central Chisinau and set fire to furniture, documents and equipment from the parliament. Computers and other equipment were hurled from the building.

Other demonstrators have thrown eggs, stones and bottles at the presidency, Interfax reports.

At least 20 people are reported to be injured in clashes between police and demonstrators, and one protestor is feared to be dead. Police are now using tear gas to try and disperse the crowd.

The demonstration started peacefully with around 10,000 mainly young people calling for the end of the Communist government, and for closer ties with the EU and Romania.

As the crowd swelled, protestors carrying Moldovan, EU and Romanian flags breached the police cordon around the parliament and attacked the building

Opposition activists are demanding a repeat of Sunday’s election, which they say was rigged.

Liberal Democratic Party leader Vlad Filat told Interfax, "We have information about abuses and falsifications. Thee are many cases that citizens who are dead and Moldovan national's who are abroad "took part" in the election.”

With almost 99% of votes counted, the Communist Party had 49.96% of the vote, and is expected to pass the 50% threshold which will allow it to form a government and select the president. The Liberal Party had gained 12.78% of the vote, the Liberal Democratic Party 12.26%, and Our Moldova Alliance 9.81%.

The protest come after the OSCE declared the elections at the weekend largely “free and fair,” but admitted there were some abuses.

“Yesterday's parliamentary elections in Moldova met many international standards and commitments, but further improvements are required to ensure an electoral process free from undue administrative interference and to increase public confidence,” the OSCE said in a press release on Monday.

*The title of this post is hardly original. It's been used (already) by a couple of Romanian media outlets and at least one blogger.
** Note that the tag to search on Twitter, #pman, is the abbreviation of "National Great Assembly Square" - where the protests are taking place - Piata Marii Adunari Nationale in Romanian. Thanks to Mihai Moscovici for pointing this out (and a hat tip to GVO).


[Update 16:25GMT]

As the US is waking up and the English-language world is taking a bit of notice of what's happening in Chisinau, which is generally ignored by the Western media, there are a couple of on-point English-language posts.

Evgeny Morozov has a very well-written and thorough post about the role of social networking websites in the protests and suggesting that the unrest be dubbed the "Twitter Revolution." He links to a website that's aggregating all of the Twitter posts flagged #pman, which makes it easier to interpret the flow of news.

Nosemonkey's EUtopia also has a post with several videos and links to other online coverage. He notes that

with both internet and phone networks down in Moldova itself, reliable information is hard to come by. The major Western television news networks are - so far - silent on events in this small, largely ignored country, and so (as so often) Google News is your best source for press reports. It’s all strangely reminiscent of the early stages of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution four and a half years ago, where the attention of the Western press was similarly slow to turn to the East, and information was similarly confused and confusing. All that is certain is that this is already turning nasty - and could yet turn nastier.

[Update 19:30 GMT]

Voronin has met with the leaders of the three main opposition parties and has agreed to a recount. It's unclear, though, if this will appease the protesters. There looks to be at least one effort to organize some sort of people's security force to maintain order downtown, which can't be a good sign. A couple of Twitter-ers are reporting that some of the Russian tanks based in Transnistria (as "peacekeeping forces," natch) are moving towards Chisinau, and while I would be surprised if those reports turned out to be true, the scale of today's protests took a lot of people by surprise as well.

Some reports suggest the violence has been and will be confined to the two-block area where the major government buildings are located; others are forecasting that opportunists will use the protests as a cover for looting shops in the downtown area.

Youth gone wild next to the old Ministry of Agriculture building, where the NGO that organized my
summer study program in Moldova had its offices when I first spent time there way back in 1999.
Source - unimedia.info

[source - unimedia.info]

Local online media portal Unimedia now has a page in English covering the situation in Chisinau - titled "Big protestes in Chisinau, the capital of Republic of Moldova" - lots of videos, several photo galleries, and frequent updates. According to Unimedia, as of 9pm local time everything was quiet on the main square, with protests expected to resume tomorrow. Another page providing a running commentary, albeit in Romanian, is here. Another report from the scene (in English) was posted earlier today at Kosmopolito.

The Washington Post is running a lengthy AP story about the protests on its website, which has a slideshow. Pictures from the day's events have also been posted by LJ bloggers drugoi (here and here - the second one is a shot of an injured policeman, captioned with a line from an old Russian anekdot to which I only remember the punch line - "a crowd will f*ck you up, even if you're a lion") and snail-md (who has uploaded them to a slightly ungainly interface where you have to click to view the individual photos), as well as Moldovan blogger Denis Graur.

Russian news website Novyi Region 2 also has an article with a number of photos which I haven't seen elsewhere, showing the extreme destruction visited on the center of Moldovan power (such as it is).

Russian online newspaper Gazeta.ru has a long and generally well-written story, which however lost a bit of credibility by misspelling the names of a couple of opposition leaders in the next-to-last paragraph.

Other Russian reaction has been interesting - Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of Russia's Communist Party, has alleged that the protests are all a Western-organized plot. I wouldn't be surprised to hear similar sentiments from Putin if and when he speaks up on the developments in Moldova.

And Russian President Medvedev seems to have been the only foreign leader who managed to congratulate Voronin on his party's victory before all hell broke loose in Chisinau. This bears an unnerving similarity to what happened in the early stages of Ukraine's Orange Revolution - then-President Putin congratulating Yanukovych multiple times on his "victory" in the elections.

In case this collection of links is not sufficient, here is another collection (with not too much duplication) put together by a Moldovan blogging from Bratislava.

[Update 22:30 GMT]

This post has reached a length where it's become unwieldy to edit and probably unwieldy to read. Therefore, further updates (tonight or tomorrow, as time permits and the circumstances merit) will be in new posts - check the "Grape Revolution" tag.

For now, I leave you with some thoughts from two Moldovan bloggers (both of whom are also professional analysts and often blog in English) to whose writings I turn regularly for help in understanding events there. First, Nicu Popescu has some running commentary on the goings-on in downtown Chisinau earlier today. Nicu's second post of the day provides some background on the situation and suggests an action plan for the EU.

Second, Dumitru Minzarari has broken the two-month hiatus of his Political Moldova blog with three insightful posts today. The most recent one of them struck a chord with me, because I share the sentiments expressed whole-heartedly:

As I was afraid, the massive youth anti-communist protests are turning into something… not really good. What I mean, is that anti-communists protests should not turn into nationalist ones. We are a multinational country, and any citizen has the right to be heared, regardless of the language she speaks. Those ugly dwarves that slept for years, are trying to exploit the momentum.

Earlier in the day, Minzarari had expounded on the censorship which prevented accurate accounts of the protests from being broadcast and on the youth - tired of being "treated like scum, being humiliated, and their votes being stolen" - who participated in the protest, which according to him was caused at least in part by the authorities' "Soviet-style behavior." He also pointed out

[o]ne more hilarious thing – Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has just published on its official site, that “the results of the Parliament elections in Moldova are in line with the interests of Moldovan and Russian people”…. . Now how is that????

And here is Minzarari's third post of the day, an update which by now - given the rapidity of developments in Chisinau - is probably already out-of-date, but is still worth a read.

Just now, Dumitru has posted another update - apparently Voronin addressed the country (in Russian, strangely) - calling for the people to not support a violent putsch; however, the violence of the day's protests may have been initiated not by students but by thugs planted in the crowd to provoke violence and turn public opinion against the opposition.

On the other hand, a couple of Moldovans I've spoken with were surprised at the protests and don't understand why there should be such ardent opposition to election results which do not seem outrageously falsified (although if it's true that, as some reports have stated, 200,000 dead people voted...) and which set up a continuation of the rule of a Communist Party which, while it has continued and entrenched the national tradition of corrupt governance, has at least provided a modicum of stability to the country. Granted, these are Moldovans who don't live in Moldova at the moment. I think it's possible that some people had planned for this protest to take place regardless of the result, but it's hard to tell from afar so I am trying to refrain from wild-eyed speculation.

At the very least, the government's response to the protests - stonewalling and media censorship - shows that the protesters had legitimate reasons for taking to the streets in the first place. Moreover, Moldova has maintained a surprising level of stability up to now during the "global economic crisis," or whatever we're calling it nowadays. My suspicion even before these violent events occurred had been that the post-election period would see a devaluation of the local currency (this is not a particularly unique opinion - see, e.g. here and here - although a devaluation hasn't yet occurred, despite substantial devaluations in neighboring Ukraine and in Russia, which has a strong influence on the Moldovan economy) and a deflation of the property bubble which has blown up in Chisinau in recent years.

The fact is that in recent years the dramatic growth in remittances sent home by migrant laborers has contributed greatly to a stability which may prove to have been illusory, much as soaring oil prices contributed to a sense of stability in Russia which the financial crisis has called into question. While I certainly hope, for the sake of my Moldovan friends and relatives, that the country can maintain at least a sense of stability, it looks as though it may be headed for more uncertain times.