04/10/2009
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'TWITTER REVOLUTION'
Fearing Uprising, Russia Backs Moldova's Communists
This week's peaceful protests in Moldova that transformed into riots have raised the possibility of an anti-Communist revolution like those seen in Georgia and Ukraine. Now Russia is stepping in to back Moldova's old guard, but the country's tangled history could prove to be diplomatic quicksand for the West. More protests were brewing on Friday.
The unexpectedly passionate protests in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau this week -- spurred by an election on Sunday that kept the Communist Party in power -- have moved Moscow to denounce the uprising. Now the electoral crisis in this corner of the former Soviet Union is shaping up as another showdown between east and west -- and one that might just hobble Washington's Russian charm offensive.
Monday's Twitter-organized student protest brought some 10,000 people to Chisinau's main square, who accused the government of rigging Sunday's vote. The protest turned violent on Tuesday, with some demonstrators throwing rocks and storming the Moldovan parliament. The original protest organizers, including a journalist named Natalia Morar -- who said she only expected 300 people to show up -- have distanced themselves from the violence.
Now Morar has been charged with "calls for organizing and staging mass disturbances," according to the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS. Moldova's current president, Vladimir Voronin, has belittled the protests and accused neighboring Romania of organizing a coup. He even expelled Romania's ambassador on Wednesday. "When the flag of Romania was raised on state buildings, the attempts of the opposition to carry out a coup became clear," he said. "We will not allow this."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lined up behind Voronin on Thursday and described the protesters who ransacked the parliament as "pogrom-makers" bent on destroying the country.
Reunification With Romania?
In the West, the uprising looked like another post-Soviet "color" revolution, a people's movement against an old-guard Communist regime, such as Georgia's 2003 "Rose Revolution" or Ukraine's 2004 "Orange Revolution." From Moscow's perspective, that's exactly the problem. "The Moscow authorities are afraid of spontaneous mass protests in the regions … and, for this reason, Russian television is showing what is happening in an exclusively negative light," Dmitry Oreshkin, a Moscow-based political analyst, told Reuters. "It is beneficial for the Kremlin to show the consequences of peoples' protests to justify why it needs to be tough."
The Duma, or Russia's lower house of parliament, has called on the EU to condemn the protests. But some of the anti-Communist opposition parties in Moldova want to join the EU, if possible by reunifying with Romania. The two nations were unified for a while before World War II, and about two-thirds of Moldovans claim Romanian descent. Reunification was a campaign issue in Sunday's election. "If Romanians and Moldovans decide in favor of a union," one European diplomat said in last week's run-up to the vote, "the EU will not oppose them."
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