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Moldova: The Republic of the Dead Voters

April 16, 2009
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By Dinu Popa

As I’m writing this text, events in Moldova are developing fast. A wide rift is opening between the new and the old and the price is high for this generation gap. Hundreds of young people, men and women, have been arrested by the police during the last week. Those who have been released have bruises all over their bodies and are reporting beatings and sexual assaults in detention. Two young men area dead, presumably of torture, and six people are missing for more than a week. The borders are closed for all the international media, except for the Russian journalists, and the Internet and phone lines are experiencing major disruptions. Moldova hasn’t known this kind of red terror since the times of Stalinism. What happened to this peaceful country?

As I see it, there are two separate conflicts developing at the same time in Moldova. The first one is what the leader of the Communists Vladimir Voronin, who is also the Moldovan president, called “an attempted coup d’état”. It allegedly involves some mysterious players from a number of countries, including Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, and even the USA. Conspiracy theories abound. During a political rally of the opposition Liberal parties, a number of well trained, well equipped young people came seemingly out of nowhere and led an attack on the authorities. Among the attackers were people who clearly didn’t look like citizens with a political affiliation. Some of them looked like convicts fresh out of a prison, even had their heads shaved. After throwing a barrage of rocks at the law enforcement officers they overcame the police lines and vandalized the buildings of the Parliament and the Presidency. There was no real attempt on behalf of the police to stop them. A handful of scared police trainees stood in front of one building with batons and shields in their hands, serving more as a target for attackers’ stones than a defense for the country’s most important buildings. It’s not clear who was behind that aggressive team of youngsters but a few of their leaders have been identified. According to the Moldovan president there is proof of foreign involvement, but no documents have been made public so far. The independent media, on the other hand, made a quick investigation and found that some of the people involved in the violence were from a Transdnistrian pan-Russian organization, and some others were from the CDPP (Christian Democratic Popular Party), an ally of the Communists. That’s right – in Moldova Christian Democrats are allied with the Communists. Another leader was a former presidential adviser.

The second conflict is the main one, although it is ignored sometimes by the foreign media because it is not as “sexy” as a violent riot. It became clear well before the ballot that the Communists are going to lose these parliamentary elections. Desperate to stay in power they rigged the vote, but did a sloppy job. The clues on how they did it are clear, although the facts are buried in the voters’ lists. According to the opposition leaders, who managed to examine a few of those lists, somewhere between 10 and 30(!) percent of the cast ballots are repeat votes. To achieve this, Communists manufactured hundreds of thousands of fictitious voters and even issued ID cards on their names. Forged identities used names of deceased people (yes, dead men voting) and identities of the people who left the country. I sometimes wonder if a “clone” of mine got busy voting somewhere is a remote Moldovan village these elections. Those lists are now at the heart of the second conflict. For two days Liberals got access to some of them, but later election officials refused to provide the rest, then the Communists contested in the court any access to the lists altogether, then another decision came to prohibit copying those documents. As of today it’s not clear if the opposition will manage to see all those lists.

These two conflicts “overlapped” a day after the elections. When the massive fraud scheme was uncovered and it became clear that the OSCE observers turned a blind eye over this electoral fraud people protested. Immediately the violence started and the police got a pretext to arrest hoards of opposition supporters. Both the peaceful protest and the violent attack happened in the same day a few hundred yards from each other. But while the opposition is trying hard to separate those two by presenting video recordings of the events and providing affidavits of many participants, the ruling party is busy entangling the protests and blaming the Liberals for the violence committed by the CDPP and the still unknown “foreign agents” from beyond the river.

With the borders closed and the foreign media prohibited to enter Moldova this difference of opinion may seem like a case of “he said, she said”, but it’s not the opposition that closed the borders and it’s not the opposition that is arresting young people and it’s not the opposition that’s hiding the voters’ lists.

Here are just a few other signs of the time -- yesterday an American official, the director of the NDI (National Democratic Institute) was deported from Moldova; for the last week Russian politicians were very busy congratulating Mr. Voronin for his party’s “victory”; young Moldovans are now “enemies of the Moldovan state” and are hunted by the police on the streets, in high schools, at the Colleges and Universities; my friend from Dallas, TX can’t call her sister, the phone lines in Chisinau are dead.

Moldova is experiencing the pain of a brutal Stalinist dictatorship, a price its people are paying for daring to question the results of a rigged election. We desperately need help from our Western friends and allies, because our country is small and weak and it’s at the intersection of all political evils. And because a wide rift is opening in our society – a gap between the new and the old, between the young people and old Communists, a power struggle between the Republic of Moldova and the Republic of the Dead Voters.

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Dinu Popa is an independent analyst, resident of Dallas, TX, working for a telecommunication company. He holds a master’s degree in Communication Studies from the California State University. He imigrated to the United States from the Republic of Moldova.

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