MOLDOVA Yeltsin and the generals "MOLDOVA must give up its unrealistic views. I do not understand why Moldova wants at any price to be a unitary state". Thus the Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev in an interview in the French daily Le Monde (June 7-8, 1992), commenting on the bloody clashes between Moldovan troops and forces fighting to establish a breakaway "Slav" state in the Eastern region of Moldova.
Kozyrev's support for redrawing Moldova's borders are one among many recent expressions of belligerent intent by Russian leaders such as St. Petersburg's Anatolii Sobchak and vice president Alexander Rutskoi, who raged on June 20 that "everyone must keep in mind that Russia will not tolerate such treatment of Russian-speaking people any longer"
Such remarks highlight the death of the hopes summed up by Moldovan president Mircea Snegur after the failure of the August 1991 coup by hardline conservatives that the new Russian leaders under Boris Yeltsin would "know how to put relations among peoples on a new basis, unequivocally ruling out intrusions into the affairs of other peoples"
UKRAINE MOLDOVA CHISINAU Tiraspol Tighina (Bendery) ROMANIA
Black Sia conciliation, engaging in a continuous armed campaign to consolidate their hold on the region. These efforts were stepped up after the August 1991 coup. At first the Moldovan leadership advised no armed resistance by Moldovans in the DR region, no doubt hoping that the Russian authorities would help them regain control. However as it has become increasingly clear that the Russian authorities, despite repeat nements, re repeated negotiations and agreements, are neither able nor apparently willing to put a stop to the aggression, Moldovan authorities have begun to develop their own armed forces, and may have accepted Romanian aid to this end.
Army involvement alleged
A crucial and revealing part in these events has been played by the (former) Soviet 14th army, based in Tiraspol in the centre of the DR. Troops from this army were widely reported to have been involved in the most recent fighting on the DR side, and of having supplied the DR forces with weapons. Army and Russian political authorities, meanwhile, while occasionally expressing dismay at such insubordination, have done little to stop it and much to make it possible. On December 13, 1991, the 14th army's chief General Gennadii Yakovlev accepted a post as head of the DR's security forces, to which the head of the CIS' armed forces Shaposhnikov mildly replied that "the armed forces must not get involved in conflicts within or among republics".
The following month, as Ukraine took charge of the surrounding military district, the 14th army was placed under direct CIS control, under the supervision of a certain General Gromov, a close associate of former Soviet Interior Minister Boris Pugo,
COLIN MEADE - July 2, 1992 M OLDOVA, which assumed independence on August 27, 1991, just after the coup, is the successor to the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was formed after the annexation of the Romanian province of Bessarabia under the terms of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1940 -Bessarabia having become part of Romania at the end of the First World War.
Under Soviet rule many Russians settled in Moldavia, mainly as industrial workers in the East of the republic, part of a planned policy of asserting Moscow's control over non-Russian republics. Currently around two thirds of the republic's population of four and a half million people is Moldovan - ethnically and linguistically Romanian — with 14% Ukrainian and 13% Russians. In the disputed Transdniester region, meanwhile, there are around 40% Moldovans, 28% Ukrainians and 25% Russians.
As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the coming of perestroika and glasnost saw a revival of Moldovan nationalist demands, with a countervailing centralist mobiliza8 tion of sections of the Russian-speaking population and also the 150,000 Turkish speaking Gagauz minority. As elsewhere, many non-Moldovans living in the cities, especially in the capital Chisinau (Kishinev), were prepared to back the independence movement. Thus six of 12 Gagauz deputies voted for the 1991 independence declaration, as did a substantial number of Ukrainians and Russians.
Trusting in the EC, the UN, but above all in Yeltsin, the Moldovan leadership has made efforts to accommodate the Republic's non-Moldovan population: amid protests both from the radical nationalist Moldovan People's Front and the Russian Interfront, a 1989 language law envisaged the retention of Russian "alongside Romanian" for the transaction of official business between nationalities; all residents have been offered citizenship, while Snegur has repeatedly ruled out reunification with Romania - one of the main bugbears for the Russians (although, again, the People's Front is in favour of reunification).
However the pro-centralist forces of the "Dniester Republic (DR)", proclaimed in September 1990 and the "Republic of Gagauzia" have shown no inclination to
International Viewpoint # 233 • July 20, 1992
who committed suicide after the failed coup in which he played a central role. On April 1 Moscow's control over this force, which operated on Moldovan territory, was reaffirmed, and, despite a promise from Yeltsin on May 28 to withdraw it, it remained in place.
While Yeltsin has taken his distance from the extreme nationalist statements of his deputy, Rutskoi, in effect he has assisted in the pursuit of the same programme. Yeltsin likes to present forces such as the 14th army as having a "peace-keeping" role rather than pursuing Russian imperial goals, but he has been firm in his determination to ensure that Russia retains the backbone of the former Red Army and himself stated after the coup that he was prepared to consider border revisions. Thus his occasional "distance" from the army/nationalist camp does not stop the latter from doing what it wants.
What it wants was explained by one of Yeltsin's allies among the army brass, General Dmitri Volkogonov; out of the current army of four million a more streamlined force of 1.5 million will be created, its goal being to concentrate on defending Russia's borders and domestic order (International Herald Tribune, June 22, 1992), while a military leader of the DR, Vladimir Ryliakov, saw the aim of the current actions as being the "preservation of a single army and a single economic space across the territory of the Soviet Union"
Pretext for intervention
Indeed a Moscow dominated enclave in Transdniester would provide succour for attempts to create "independent" areas based on the Russian population in neighbouring Ukraine, in their turn providing pretexts for direct intervention "to protect Russian lives" by Russian forces.
This has always been the plan of the Great Russian chauvinist currents, led by the likes of Viktor Alksnis or Aleksandr Nevzorov, who have been regular visitors to the DR. On one occasion a number of officers of the former USSR MVD Special Purpose Police Detachment (OMON), wanted for crimes by the Latvian government, arrived in the DR (two were captured by Moldovan police and handed over to Latvia, prompting protests by pro-imperial groups in Moscow and elsewhere).
The increasing assertiveness of Great Russian chauvinist forces both in the non-Russian republics and at the centre, where a pan-Russian mood seems almost universal amongst new and old political elites, sheds some retrospective light on the facility with which the "democrats" gained power after the August coup attempt. The continuing influence of a figure such as General Gromov says it all; the army brass
MOLDOVA / BELARUS