Kyiv Post, Ukraine
July 21 2005

No easy answer in Transdniester
Jul 21 2005, 02:28

A plan introduced by Ukraine to resolve the 15-year struggle over the
disputed region of Transdniester, the territory east of the Dniester
River in Moldova, has met with some success, and augurs well for the
larger diplomatic leadership role Ukraine wishes to play.

The document, devised by Ukraine’s National Security and Defense
Council Secretary Petro Poroshenko, envisages an autonomous
Transdniester within a sovereign Moldova, and democratic elections
to the Transdniestrian parliamentary body by the end of the year.
Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin called the document the “most
checked out and promising” in the history of the conflict when the
Moldovan parliament voted to support the plan on June 10.

Yet, true to the form of the labyrinthine negotiations, “indispensable
conditions” subsequently demanded by Moldovan legislators have
proven to be irrevocably repugnant to key guarantors Transdniester and
Russia. All in all, despite Ukraine’s efforts, significant improvements
to the situation continue to be elusive.

This is dangerous, not only for Ukraine but all of Europe. Continued
resistance on the part of the key actors will only perpetuate
the malfeasance and lawlessness that has come to characterize the
regime ruling the Russian-speaking enclave of 670,000 people. Known
colloquially as the “black hole of Europe,” Transdniester allegedly
rakes in huge profits through tax-free trafficking schemes involving
arms, drugs, cigarettes and other products. Viorel Cibotaru, program
director at the Institute for Public Policy in Chisinau (IPP),
estimates that Transdniestrian authorities have generated between
$1 and $2 billion in illegal revenue, some of which is used to pay
pro-Transdniestrian lobbies in Kyiv and Chisinau. The area is also
notorious for its panoply of human rights violations.

Ukraine has a vested interest in reigning in this Wild West of
south-eastern Europe, given the Western course envisioned for the
country by President Viktor Yushchenko’s administration. Borys
Tarasyuk, the head of Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, called ending the
conflict “one of the most important tasks for Ukrainian national
security” in February.

Imperial shenanigans

Transdniester has been affiliated with Russia since 1792, when
it was incorporated into the Russian Empire. The rest of Moldova,
which was also briefly a part of Tsarist Russia but historically a
principality of Romania, was only added to the Soviet Union during
the Second World War, when it was combined with Transdniester to make
the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic.

Unlike in Ukraine, where the Soviets cracked down on ethnic loyalty
in favor of a stateless Soviet identity, they encouraged Moldovan
nationalism. Considered artificial by many Moldovans today, the
project was a way to quell ethnic identification with Romania.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, the majority population of ethnic
Ukrainians and Russians in Transdniester balked at the idea of being
joined to Romania, a possibility being considered by the rest of
Moldova. The conservative Soviet politicians in power in Transdniester
exploited the natives’ anxiety, and took the opportunity to declare
the independence of the Dniester Moldovan Republic (DMR), as the
Transdniestrian state was branded, in 1990. A short civil war soon
broke out over the split, with the conflict ending when the Russians
intervened militarily in the spring of 1992. Around 1,700 Russian
peacekeepers still police the region, with Russia seen as attempting
to safeguard a foothold in its old sphere of influence by supporting
Transdniester’s de facto independence from Moldova.

A mini USSR

Transdniestrian President Igor Smirnov and friends have more or less
made Transdniester a living museum of the Soviet Union, retaining
the region’s infrastructure from the communist era, when the area was
Moldova’s industrial heart, and mimicking Soviet efforts to control
the minds of the masses.

Transdniester touts its own brand of nationalism while billing itself
as the last bastion of Moldovanism (again, a construct promoted by
Stalin), which it pits righteously against a Romanianized Moldova. On
my recent trip through Tiraspol, Transdniester’s capital, I saw
freshly-painted slogans that proclaimed, “The DMR is our pride!” and
profiles of Lenin displayed prominently on scruffy government
buildings.

Does the average Transdniestrian buy into this anachronistic
ideology? Difficult question. First of all, many grassroots NGOs
and Western organizations committed to democratizing the region have
been harassed or barred from working by Transdniestrian authorities –
making objective information about the native mindset hard to come
by. But Natalya Belitser, an expert at the Pylyp Orlyk Institute for
Democracy in Kyiv who has worked extensively with the region, proffers
that Transdniestrians still have a “Soviet mentality that makes them
unaware of the attractiveness of democracy.” Media mostly limited to
Transdniestrian and Russian sources, “informational brainwashing,” as
Belitser puts it, and poverty conspire to keep political consciousness
low. A poll conducted by the IPP in February 2005 shows that only
27 percent of non-Transdniestrian Moldovans are concerned or very
concerned about politics.

And in Moldova proper political consciousness and democratic freedoms,
while hardly perfect, are widely seen as being better realized than
on the other side of the Dniester.

At the same time, the isolation and grinding poverty of Transdniester –
which has an official GDP even lower than Moldova, the poorest country
in Europe – must be hard to ignore, as is that along with a Soviet-like
state come bizarre manifestations of its corruption.

One notable example is the brand-new, state-of-the-art soccer stadium
in Tiraspol’s vacant and derelict outskirts, as out of place as a
spring in the middle of a desert. There’s even a Mercedes-Benz outlet
in the stadium’s bottom floor, which no one save the region’s elite
could ever dream of patronizing.

An equally lavish Orthodox church has also reportedly been erected
in Tiraspol. While these structures in some way benefit the local
population because they are officially public facilities, more
frequent, covert forms of corruption don’t. As a result, “people are
becoming more and more tired,” says Belitser. “They want normal lives.”

But intimidating governance, coupled with the low political
consciousness, easily stifles dissent.

“Human rights don’t exist in Transdniester,” says Maxim Belinschii,
a lawyer at the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Moldova.

Stefan Uritu, the Committee’s president, says that the right to
free and fair elections; freedom of speech and mass movement; and
an independent judiciary are all systematically violated. He also
alleges, as the Helsinki Committee has formally attested, that the
Transdniestrian regime is responsible for more insidious offenses,
including the deaths and/or disappearances of locals critical of
the regime.

Transition in Transdniester?

According to conflict resolution theory, the Transdniestrian dispute
is one of the easiest to solve because, unlike conflicts in other
Eurasian hotspots like Chechnya, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, the
dispute isn’t predicated on religious or ethnic hatreds. “The conflict
is an artificially constructed political issue,” Belitser explains.

On the other hand, those benefiting from Transdniester’s lawlessness
are not inclined to see the regime dismantled any time soon.

“The main task of the Transdniestrian regime is to keep it going as
long as possible,” says Viorel Cibotaru, the program director at IPP.
If the current regime maintains power and drive, as the stalled
negotiations unfortunately suggest, “one hundred years from now,
this game will still be the same.”