Freedom is spreading like wildfire.
Moldova has pro-Western revolution even before poll is held
By Jeremy Page
Times UK
The Communist President responds to the public mood with anti-Russian rhetoric
IURI ROSCA is ready to paint the town orange. His headquarters in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, are draped in a huge orange banner showing him shaking hands with Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of last year’s “orange” revolution in neighbouring Ukraine.
He sports an orange scarf given to him by Mr Yushchenko as he rallies supporters ahead of Moldova’s parliamentary elections tomorrow.
He has even tried to book Chisinau’s central square to stage protests in case the Communist Government rigs the vote. “There is a communist dictatorship in our country and, consequently, there are conditions for a revolution,” he said this week.
Inspired by the upheavals in Georgia and Ukraine, Mr Rosca wants Moldova to become the next former Soviet republic to use an election to shake off Russia’s embrace and turn to the West.
The problem is: so does everyone else.
All the front-runners in the poll are calling for Europe’s poorest country to join the EU and withdraw from the Commonwealth of Independent States, which is a group of former Soviet republics.
Despite almost 200 years of Russian imperial and Soviet rule, most of Moldova’s four million people have closer cultural and linguistic links to neighbouring Romania, which will join the EU in 2007.
“The situation is different from Georgia and Ukraine,” said Arcadie Barbarosie, the head of Moldova’s Public Policy Institute. “The electorate is not so split and the Russia-oriented portion is marginal.”
Sunday’s election will be flawed, analysts say.
Washington and Brussels have already expressed concerns about media bias and the abuse of government resources.
President Bush pointedly called for a fair vote in Moldova in a speech last month. Russian commentators have already dubbed it the “grape” revolution because of Moldova’s vineyards.
But in many ways, this revolution has already happened.Europe’s last ruling Communist Party has made a dramatic U-turn since coming to power on a pro-Russian ticket, backed by Moscow, in 2001.
Vladimir Voronin, the Communist President, fell out with the Kremlin in 2003 over the breakaway region of Transdniestr, a sliver of land on the Ukrainian border where Russia has kept some 1,500 troops since a civil war in 1992.
Under pressure from the West, Mr Voronin suddenly backed out of a deal that would have made Transdniestr part of a Moldovan federation and allowed Russian troops to stay there until 2020.
But Mr Voronin also appears to have learnt his lessons from Ukraine. In the run-up to the election, his anti-Russian rhetoric has become ever more shrill.
He has refused to invite Russian election observers. He expelled 20 Russians for espionage. He even accused unidentified Russians of trying to assassinate him.
This week, he hurriedly arranged meetings with Mr Yushchenko and Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian President. “All of us have to understand that we are now independent and sovereign states . . . we appreciate relations with Russia but we cannot be like in the days of the Soviet Union,” he said this week.
Moscow, alarmed at the prospect of an anti-Russian alliance, has hit back. State-controlled Russian media have aired allegations that Mr Voronin accepted money from a mafia boss. The Duma has threatened to impose economic sanctions.
Russian officials have forged ties with a pro-Russian Moldovan bloc and a centrist opposition group, the Democratic Moldova Bloc (BMD). But, so far, Moscow’s efforts appear to have been in vain.
A recent opinion poll gave the ruling Communists 62 per cent support, ahead of the BMD on 21 per cent and Mr Rosca’s Christian Democrats on 12 per cent.
The opposition says that the poll was biased and that real support for the Communists could be as low as 8 per cent.
That presents the United States and the EU with a quandary.
If they question the validity of the election result, they could play into Russia’s hands by bringing into power a fragmented opposition with links to Moscow.
If they do not, the risk is that Mr Voronin does another about-face and re-aligns Moldova with Russia.
For the moment, the West appears to have settled for the devil it knows.
Mr Rosca still plans to bring his supporters out on to the streets. But without Western support his hopes of a Ukrainian-style revolution appear to be doomed.
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