Moldova: The Ties That Don’t Bind

In their relations with ex-colonies, former empires prefer to talk of the rich historical traditions and ties that bind the now-independent states together, in a kind of euphemistic language meant to camouflage and blur bad memories of occupation and exploitation. Since countries are run by people, this is a normal human attempt to avoid the recognition of past embarrassing actions. Such logic could explain why the decree issued by the acting president of Moldova, Mihai Ghimpu, commemorating 28 June as the Day of Soviet Occupation, provoked a stormy response from Moscow. 

Ghimpu based his decree on the recommendations of a nongovernmental commission tasked with assessing the totalitarian communist regime in Moldova. A few days later, the Moldovan Academy of Science, citing archival research and historical analysis, confirmed the historical validity of the decree, with the caveat that it nevertheless carried the potential to arouse conflict in Moldovan society. The presidential document stated that on 28 June 1940 "the USSR occupied by military force the territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina against the will of [their] people" ­– a reference to the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that divided Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. These territories of interwar Romania were later incorporated into the Ukrainian and Moldovan Soviet republics.

This language struck a painful chord with the current Russian administration, by linking the Soviet occupation of 1940 with the continuing presence of Russian troops in Moldova. Not merely declaring a day in memory of the invasion in 1940, the decree also demanded, for the first time since the early 1990s, that the "Russian Federation as legal successor of the Soviet Union shall withdraw unconditionally, urgently, and in a transparent way its troops and armaments from the territory of the Republic of Moldova.” Russian troops have been stationed in Transdniester since this Moldovan region fought a brief civil war against Chisinau in 1992.

After reading out the decree, Ghimpu commented that the Russian troops are in fact a force of occupation as they don't have the consent of Moldovan authorities to be stationed on Moldovan soil. The troops are the remnants of a force stationed in Soviet Moldova, which fought alongside Transdniester separatists in the 1992 war. After the suspension of armed hostilities, Moscow used the force as peacekeepers and guardians of the large ammunition depot at Cobasna.

He assessed the historical past of Moldova's citizens to have been a tragic one, and drew a link between the Soviet invasion "which imposed communism with the bayonet and the tank" and the poverty that overwhelms Moldova today.

Mihai Ghimpu’s Liberal Party won the third-highest vote total in the July 2009 elections. As speaker of parliament, he became acting president on the resignation of Vladimir Voronin in September.

PRAGMATIC RELATIONS

The Kremlin response came swiftly. Even though Vladimir Putin himself had denounced the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact when he was the Russian president, the reaction was still strong and deliberately insulting. It was also delivered in a very organized fashion through multiple channels: the state-controlled media and state-affiliated experts, officials, and institutions. 

Moscow took immediate steps to hinder trade with Moldova. Employing a method used several years ago to penalize Georgia, Moscow blocked the import of Moldovan wines immediately after the decree. According to the Moldovan Embassy in Moscow and the Moldovan Agriculture Ministry, Russian authorities did not offer any written explanation of the step. Moscow began allowing some Moldovan wine into the country only after Ghimpu’s decree was invalidated.

There were also suggestions that Moscow could seize on the decree as a pretext for making things more difficult in the long-drawn-out negotiations over the Transdniester situation. Aleksei Ostrovski, head of the Russian Duma Committee for CIS Affairs, told the influential Russian newspaper Kommersant that the decree was “a direct obstacle towards a compromise on the Transdniester issue, and a barrier for reestablishing the territorial integrity of Moldova.” The Russian Foreign Ministry was more subtle in its appreciation, labeling the decree as "an element of a deliberately planned political campaign aimed at the Russian-Moldovan partnership" and as an "another attempt to subvert the common history we share with the Moldovan people … and destroy the existing stability mechanisms in the Transdniester negotiations." In its conclusion, the ministry’s press release called on the Moldovan government to choose a pragmatic relationship with Russia.

GHOSTS OF THE PAST

Ghimpu also had to defend himself against a chorus of displeasure from his domestic political foes and allies alike. The Communist Party of Moldova, which lost its firm grip on power in repeat elections held after the violent suppression of protests against the results of the parliamentary voting in April 2009, contested the decree at the Constitutional Court – successfully, as it turned out. In a move seen as unintentionally ironic by some observers, considering Ghimpu's attempt to reverse one of Nazi Germany's biggest diplomatic coups, some party activists staged small protests where they held up pictures of Ghimpu with a Hitlerian mustache drawn on and the slogan "Stop Ghimpler."

But that was not all. The three partners of Ghimpu's Liberal Party in the governing Alliance for European Integration (AEI) coalition also criticized the decree. The incumbent prime minister and the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Moldova, Vlad Filat, saw it as motivated by upcoming parliamentary elections. He, too, called for “pragmatic” politics – Moldovan political jargon for staying on good terms with the much bigger and more powerful Russian partner. 

Another coalition partner, Marian Lupu, the speaker of parliament under the most recent government headed by the Communist Party and now leader of the Democratic Party, was less restrained. Lupu labeled the decree as illegal and refused to participate in the wreath-laying and other official commemorative actions on 28 June.

His claim that the document did not promote Moldova's national interests was echoed by Dumitru Diacov, who earlier stepped down as head of the party in favor of Lupu. Diacov accused the president of "chasing the ghosts of the past."

Much of Moldovan society, however, seems not to have embraced the "pragmatism" which Ghimpu’s reluctant coalition partners are calling for.

Readers posted many statements strongly supporting the decree on local news forums, ridiculing the stance of the Liberal Party’s allies, and praising Ghimpu for resisting his partners’ pressure and for holding up to TV cameras a piece of paper reading "I will not cancel the decree." The anonymous author of the Morninginmoldova blog responded to Diacov's statement of "ghost chasing" that Diacov himself was a ghost of the past, "having been in politics for many years while doing little that is constructive.”

THE ULTIMATE TESTING GROUND

The elections to be held in the fall (a mid-November date has been mentioned by the coalition) will reveal which politicians’ perceptions of those ghosts are shared by the voters. Already, many young people are visibly disappointed by the failure of other AIE leaders to stand by Ghimpu and support the establishment of the "Soviet Occupation Day."

The fact that Ghimpu was the only official to directly respond to Russia by advising Moscow not to meddle in Moldova's internal affairs has only brought him more support from the public. Ghimpu was also the only coalition politician to earlier show demonstrative support for April 2009’s youthful protestors, releasing a short video which showed top police officials physically abusing handcuffed youngsters, one of whom was later found dead with indications of a severe beating. It was only after the video release that some of the police involved were relieved of duty.

The Moldovan political analyst Vlad Lupan, a former senior official at the Moldovan Foreign Ministry, notes that Ghimpu's decree came out shortly after Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel supported forming a joint EU-Russian security committee. In his view, their agreement would probably serve as the channel to promote the Russian president's proposal for European security reform among EU countries, thus avoiding Washington and its known opposition to Medvedev’s strategic vision. As payback, Medvedev apparently agreed to offer the EU a bigger role in the Transdniester conflict resolution process. Both leaders explicitly mentioned the Transdniester conflict as a potential test case for the proposed security committee to look into.

According to Lupan, Ghimpu's decree sent a clear signal to the West that Moldova does not support the presence of Russian troops on its territory. While some in Moldova insist that the decree may undermine the EU’s ongoing foreign policy efforts with Russia, Lupan believes the decree offers the EU a very useful lever, as it would allow Brussels to request the withdrawal claiming the request of the host country.

Neighboring Romania, an EU and NATO member country, has also recently done an about-face on its policy toward the Russian troops in Transdniester. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bucharest presented this June a draft national defense strategy which clearly states that it views the stationing of Russian troops in Moldova, close to its borders, as a threat to national security. That would suggest that at least one EU member besides Germany will show a sharp interest in the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Moldova, in exchange for the EU's readiness to talk with Russia on a new European security architecture.

The current tension between Moldova and Russia represents further evidence that Russia continues to view coercive measures against its neighbors as the backbone of its foreign and security policy. Nevertheless, this approach may backfire, bringing results the Kremlin is not expecting. Russia played aggressively and boldly as usual, humiliating and offending the Moldovan government, while its officials claimed they knew better what the preferences of the Moldovan people are. Its renewed attempts to apply economic pressure were aimed at coercing the governing non-Communist coalition into obedience.

Even in dying a legal death, the decree may live on as a shaper of future Moldovan-Russian relations, and of Moldovans’ view of their recent history. The Constitutional Court, made up of justices appointed during the period of Communist-led governments, ruled the decree invalid on the ground that the president had exceeded his mandate in issuing it – a decision seen as purely political by the analyst Igor Botan, who maintains that Ghimpu’s move violated no constitutional or other legal provisions.

What is very clear, though, is that Moldova is still wrestling with the remnants of its Soviet legacy, be it in the form of political parties, the judiciary, or the political culture of its elites, who are not even able to respond to an offensive public remark by a foreign official. The fall elections will be a direct test of the effectiveness of the bold coercive methods Russia uses to promote its version of "the fraternal common history" with Moldova.