Updates on the Action in Chisinau From the Moldova Maven

BOULDER, Colorado -- My Romanian-speaking associate who has inexplicably chosen to study the country that I like to call "The Mississippi of the Former Soviet Union" offers up a number of additional juicy details on last week's unrest over elections.

1) Many opposition activists had claimed that the government received a special delivery of tear gas canisters from Moscow to deal with the protests, though both the Russians and Moldovans deny it.

2) It turns out many of the provocateurs on the government payroll to start the looting were wearing t-shirts that read "Basarabia: Romanian soil."

3) Either this dude is the world's most awesome protester, or he had a little help riling up the crowds with his EU and Romanian flag waving, as this video shows.

4) Here's what Fiodor Ghelici, a member of Moldova's Civil Congress of NGOs, had to say about the violence, as quoted by Infotag: "Everything that happened was a trap and the opposition got caught. It is obvious that had the authorities not wanted those buildings looted they would have taken clear-cut measures. I do not mean arms and batons used against the youth. But several thousand policemen with belts would have established order." There's a bit of money in the whole thing, too, for contractors that are cozy with the government. "In question are tens of millions of lei and some construction companies are already looking forward to repairing the parliament and the president's office," Ghelici said.

5) Meanwhile, the gangsters across the border in Tiraspol claim to have been unnerved by the incident.

6) As we mentioned earlier, international media were barred from entering the country during the protests. Dumitru Minzarari from the blog Political Moldova had this to say: "According to the Romanian ActiveWatch media monitoring organiztion [sic] and the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalistm [sic], on 7 april, at least 18 journalists who tried to come to Chisinau from Romania were stopped at the border, and turned back at the border crossing points Galati-Giurgiulesti, Oancea-Cahul. Moldovan border-guards invoked reasons as malfunctioning of their computerized system, and requested multiple papers such as written invitations, special medical insurance, press accreditation from Moldovan Foreign Ministry, while in order to cross the border only passport was needed for these journalists [under the usual visa regime]. They represent press agencies such as Associated Press, EPA, France Press, Intact Images, NewsIn, Mediafax, Reuters, and newspapres Evenimentul Zilei, Jurnal National, Ziua, and TV channel Realitatea TV."

Moldovans Protest Parliamentary Vote, Violence Sparked by Government Provocateurs?

BOULDER, Colorado -- Moldovan authorities regained control of the country's parliament and presidential administration buildings Wednesday after the capital Chisinau had been gripped by demonstrations sparked by Sunday's parliamentary elections. Protesters claimed that there was widespread vote-rigging by the government. Moldova's communists, led by the country's president Vladimir Voronin, did far better than expected, winning nearly 50% of the vote, ensuring their ability to form a government and choose the next president.

The protests, which began Monday, were led mostly by Moldovan youth movements. More than 10,000 people gathered in the city streets, many waving signs telling people to "trash" the communists. By Tuesday, the protests had devolved into rioting, and the authorities sent in riot police. Protesters stormed the parliamentary building, setting fire to furniture and hurling objects out of the windows, and it was not until Wednesday that the police managed to regain control of the building. Police made 193 arrests over the past three days, and more than 200 police and civilians were injured during the violence.

While sparked by political grievances, the protests also centered around economic concerns. Nearly a third of the country's adult population travels abroad for work, and remittances made up 36% of Moldova's GDP in 2007, making it the most remittance-dependent economy in the world. However, the economic downturn in Europe has caused jobs to dry up, and many workers, especially young people, have been forced to return home, unemployed and dissatisfied with the economic and political stagnation they are witnessing there.

Several of the protesters were waving Romanian and EU flags, demanding closer ties with their western neighbor. The government took this as a sign of foreign provocation, accusing Romania of inciting the riots. While there is a strong Romanian nationalist movement within Moldova, most citizen want closer ties with Romania and the European Union because EU membership would allow easier access to job markets for Moldovan workers and provide the country some degree of collective security from Russia, which supports and occupies its breakaway region of Transdnistria. During the unrest in Chisinau, Transdnistria sent troops (many of them Russian "peacekeepers") to its western border to seal off access, apparently fearing the unlikely scenario that someone from Moldova would flee to the gangster republic.

Some are now speculating that the worst of the violence was actually instigated thugs organized and paid by the Moldovan government. Unimedia has posted photos of several young men they claim were mainly responsible for ransacking the parliament, and may have been told to do so by the police. There are photos of people raising EU and Romanian flags atop the parliament with policemen clearly visible in the background, making no effort to stop them. The site also includes a video of police allegedly placing stones and other projectiles around the parliament for their paid provocateurs to throw.

Russian nationalist and all-around crackpot conspiracy theorist Alexander Dugin somehow managed to place the blame for the riots on Barack Obama. [Note: the preceding link comes from the Moscow News, a Russian government-owned propaganda rag now edited by apologist fool Tim Wall.] He claims that the American government has organized a "color revolution" for Moldova, much like the public uprisings that toppled governments in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, events he also blames on the US.

Meanwhile, protesters are also putting pressure on Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. Tens of thousands gathered in front of parliament to demand his resignation, citing his dictatorial rule and brazen mishandling of relations with Russia, which culminated in last summer's disastrous war in South Ossetia. The protests come on the twentieth anniversary of a brutal crackdown of independence protesters in Tbilisi by Soviet authorities. Soldiers and police killed twenty civilians that day, which is now considered a formative moment in the Georgian independence movement.

Many of the protests in the Moldovan capital were organized by the help of social networking sites Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, the country's Internet service provider is the state-owned (and awfully-named) Moldtelecom, which promptly cut off access to the services. Most foreign journalists were not allowed access to the country during the violence, meaning much of the information was disseminated by participants via the Internet. The pictures in this post come from unimedia.info, which contains several galleries of photos and videos of the protests.

While the parliamentary voting was nominally approved by foreign observers as fair, many in Moldova believe that the vote was rigged to keep the communists in power. Voronin will have to step down from the presidency in a few months, as he has reached the constitutional limit of two four-year terms, but it may be very important for him to have a say in choosing his successor. In a move similar to Boris Yelstin passing power to Vladimir Putin in 1999, in part to ensure that the Yeltsin family's corruption would not be investigated by his successor in the Kremlin, the 67-year-old Voronin could keep his own ill-gotten riches safe by passing power to a close political ally. There has been some speculation that he may even choose his son Oleg, though the corruption allegations that have swirled around him make that unlikely.

Transdnistria: Border Politics and the Geopolitical Gaze

BOULDER, Colorado -- As reported in the Moscow Times Thursday, the AP's Masha Danilova wrote a story about the efforts of the Russian government to distribute Russian passports to ethnic Russians living in former Soviet republics. Recently, Russia has been aggressively distributing passports in Moldova's breakaway region of Transdnistria - 135,000 of the region's 550,000 inhabitants now hold Russian passports.

Since splitting from Moldova after a brief civil war in 1992, this narrow sliver of land has been a close ally of Moscow - like Georgia's breakaway regions, it is also patrolled by Russian "peacekeepers" who are really just occupation troops. Transdnistria is one of the many pseudo-states that dot the former Soviet space. Without international recognition, these places represent geopolitical "black holes" - they are breeding grounds for criminal enterprises, like trafficking in drugs, weapons and people, enterprises that are usually run by the elites in control of the government. With a reliable patron like Russia, citizens can receive the benefits of an internationally-recognized passport, while the state can remain outside the purview of international institutions and regulations. Transdnistria especially has deserved this reputation as a gangster state, as it is a hotbed of smuggling in people and weapons, rackets allegedly under the control of the authoritarian president, Igor Smirnov.

Russia is not the only country in the region engaged in passport politics. Romania has periodically allowed Moldovan citizens to apply for Romanian passports (which now also makes them EU citizens). The Moldovan government has criticized this move as undermining their statehood, but many in Romania (and Moldova) hope to eventually unify the two countries, as their languages and cultures are nearly indistinguishable. Moldova had traditionally been part of Romania until World War II, when it was annexed by the USSR. The language of the region was switched from Latin to Cyrillic script, and the Romanian speakers now under Soviet control were declared to be a separate ethnic and linguistic group, called "Moldovans."

What particularly intrigues me about Transdnistria is the geopolitics of the region's name. This is a contested region that straddles the line between East and West. In English, its name means "across the Dniester River" - looking eastward, it hugs the far bank of the river. For the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, this region was the farthest extent of their eastward push along the Black Sea's northern coast. The "civilizational" divide between these empires and the Russians to the east can be seen in the frontier fortresses that dot the area. The gaze from the other direction has the opposite meaning - its name in Russian is Pridnistrove, where the prefix "pri" means "in front of," so it is thought to lie on the near bank of the Dniester.


In the context of the contemporary border politics of Europe, this distinction holds a great deal of meaning. The European Union has drawn a bright line across the continent. Countries within its borders are promised prosperity, security, and freedom of movement for citizens; outside, they are subject to the machinations of a newly-assertive Russia and beyond the reach of EU cash. Of course, the line is never as bright as it appears at first. Knowing that it can never truly be a "fortress Europe," the EU extends all manner of assistance to its neighbors, especially for immigration controls and border security though its Border Assistance Mission. The fancy PDAs now carried by Ukrainian border guards were bought with EU cash.

Like in Transdnistria, Russian diaspora communities have provided a number of challenges to Moscow and the host countries since 1991. Since Putin's ascent to power in 2000, Russia has seen them as an asset rather than a liability. Through passports, as well as overt and covert support of nationalist political groups, the Russian government has found supporters of its foreign policy goals inside neighboring countries. Ethnic Russians in Ukraine want to keep the country out of NATO and keep the Black Sea Fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol; in Estonia, they agitate against the country's nationalist language and citizenship policies. They are especially useful in breakaway regions, like Transdnistria, and Georgia's restive republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where nearly everyone holds Russian citizenship, is eligible for a Russian pension, and government workers have their salaries paid by Moscow. In the case of Georgia, these benefits are not only extended to ethnic Russians, but to the entire population; should Russia gain a stronger footing in Transdnistria, they would probably also offer passports to the Ukrainians and Gagauz who occupy the territory, though likely not to ethnic Moldovans.

Transdnistria is comically awful place, and I can hardly fit all of the entertaining bits of information I know about this geopolitical querio into a single blog post, but I can point you to other resources. The author of news*diet will be spending the next year of his life studying "Moldovanness" for his dissertation, and he has made many forays into the hermit kingdom of Mr. Smirnov. Also, check out the research by geographers John O'Loughlin and Vladimir Kolossov on pseudo-states. Transdnistria's English-language propaganda newspaper, the Tiraspol Times, is always good for a laugh. The few minutes it took for my train to cross this sliver of land on my way from Moscow to Chisinau was all the time I needed to spend in Transdnistria, and I do not have any plans to return.