On the eve of a historic deal
with the EU, residents of Dorotcaia are lobbying to join their neighbour - the
breakaway Russian enclave of Transnistria. Transitions
Online reports
On an early spring day in
Dorotcaia in eastern Moldova,
about 100 people gather in the central square, in front of the renovated House
of Culture. Behind them, a monument dedicated to the Red Army soldiers who
liberated the village in 1944 shines in the sun. Mostly, the crowd is made up
of elderly men and women. The worried faces of the women are framed by the
headscarves so ubiquitous in this part of the world.
The group listens intently.
“They don’t invite you
into Europe.
They invite you into Europe’s ass,” a man on stage shouts into a microphone.
Piotr Dobrinski is the leader of the so-called local soviet, a ghost
institution left over from communist times and recognised only by the
authorities in Transnistria, the breakaway region of Moldova that sits across
the road from Dorotcaia.
Dobrinski, who considers
himself the real leader of the village, is trying to mobilise support for a
referendum on joining Transnistria, essentially a client territory of Russia.
Meanwhile behind the crowd an
anxious mayor, Andrei Lesco, takes small, nervous steps. He sizes up the
audience, looks at Dobrinski, and decides to make a move. He mounts the steps
and addresses the people.
“My duty, as the legitimate
mayor, is to ensure public order, to make sure that there are representatives
of the government who can hear you and your demands,” he tells them. “We all
want the Republic of Moldova to listen to our pain and our heart.” He pauses.
“But if you don’t want that, go to Transnistria.”
Suddenly, the men and women
start cheering happily. “Transnistria! We want to be in Transnistria!”
Lesco stands frozen. At the
end, an old woman shouts, “You can stay in Moldova if you want to.”
EU deal
Moldova is preparing to sign a
trade and association agreement with the EU on Friday 27 June, but only a few
who went to listen to Dobrinski are likely to care whether the country is
headed for EU membership, or whether Transnistria gets its wish to be internationally
recognised as an independent state. For them, Russians or Romanians are the
same.
What they really care about is
the land problem, and they hope Dobrinski can solve it.
When Transnistria declared
itself separate from Moldova, some in this village of 3,500 people owned
farmland on the other side of the road, and relied on it for subsistence. In
2003 authorities in the breakaway territory started limiting villagers’ access
to the land, but international negotiators helped broker an agreement to resolve
the impasse.
That pact expired in December,
and the parties have not been able to agree on a new one. The only subsequent
offer the farmers have received would effectively force them to lease land they
once owned. Some have agreed.
Thus, some 2,600 hectares –
about 85% of Dorotcaia’s farmland – is now off-limits to its residents unless
they sign the new agreement.
The government of Moldova is
working on a compensation plan for those who lost their land, according to
Alexandru Zubco, a lawyer and member of Promo-LEX, a human rights group in
Chisinau that mainly works on issues in Transdniester.
A week after the crowds came
to hear Dobrinski, deputy ministers from the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, came
to the village to talk about the land situation. They used words such as
“complicated”, “patience”, and “political insecurity” and gave the residents
little comfort. Across the road in Transnistria, some villagers said, people
have a better life.
“The pensions are higher, the
utilities are cheaper,” 71-year-old Ana Ivanovna said.
A few weeks later, Dorotcaia
seems quiet. On the main street, amid the post office, the House of Culture,
and the monument to Soviet heroes, is a tiny history museum crammed into a
shack.
Its director, Andrei Berzan,
said the village has long been caught between the east and west. It was on the
front line in the second world war from 1941 to 1944, and again in 1992 when
Transnistria fought a war to split from Moldova. On its streets have walked
German, Soviet, Moldovan, and Transnistrian soldiers. The Red Army monument
lists 700 Russian soldiers who liberated the village in 1944.
“Those were the real heroes,”
Berzan says.
The quiet is only an illusion.
In reality, the village is divided: some of its people have Transnistrian
passports and dream of a glorious future when Dorotcaia will join the
separatist region. Younger villagers, who don’t have nostalgic memories of
Soviet times, count the days until 27 June, when Moldova is to sign an
agreement on closer ties with the EU. They believe the pact will open the
borders and make it easier for them to travel and work in Europe. Only recently
Moldovans won the right to travel into the EU without a visa.
School wars
While the villagers in
Dorotcaia look fretfully across the road at the plots they used to till, some
students in a neighbouring village in Transnistria make a daily trip in the
other direction; heading to Dorotcaia to learn in a way not permitted by the
separatist authorities.
Stefan cel Mare si Sfant
school in Grigoriopol was one of only eight schools in Transnistria that obeyed
an order from the Moldovan government in 1989 to switch from the Cyrillic to
Latin script. A subsequent order from the separatist authorities forced them to
adopt the Cyrillic alphabet, and all schools in Transnistria were required to
teach in Russian, Ukrainian, or Moldovan, an ungainly hybrid of Romanian and
Russian using Cyrillic characters.
In 1996, when administrators
at Stefan cel Mare repeatedly asked for permission to switch back to the Latin
alphabet, the school came under intense pressure. Three teachers and administrators,
including principal Eleonora Cercavschi, were arrested and held for a week. In
a 2008
lecture she gave upon receiving a top international human rights award,
Cercavschi said she was threatened with never seeing her children again if she
persisted in teaching the Romanian language.
The educators were called
“enemies of the state” in the local press, and in 2002 police in Transnistria
“stormed the school and evicted the teachers, the pupils, and their parents who
were inside it,” according to a summary
of a case Promo-LEX argued before the European Court of Human Rights
in 2009 on behalf of Cercavschi, her colleagues, and other plaintiffs. In
an October
2012 ruling the court held Russia liable for violating the educators’
rights and ordered it to pay 1.02 million euros ($1.4 million) in damages. To
date the award has not been paid.
The principal and teachers
decided to move operations. They rented a couple of buses and – after reaching
a tacit agreement with Tiraspol, the de factocapital of Transnistria –
they started to teach “abroad” in Dorotcaia.
Every day, three buses filled
with kids of all ages cross the border and park at the gates of a school in
Dorotcaia. Three hundred pupils pour out of the buses with huge backpacks
filled with books in Romanian.
In the building, some of the
classrooms have filled up with Romanian-speaking children, while some have only
one or two pupils.
“Most of the parents who send
their children to our school keep it a secret. It’s a brave and risky decision,
but they fight for their right,” Cercavschi says.
Even with the unspoken
agreement, the school’s accounts in Tiraspol were temporarily frozen in January
2013, and the teachers could be stopped and arrested at the border at any time.
Ukraine comparison
Not far away, Ana Ivanovna is
hoeing weeds outside the broken wooden fence around her front garden. The
flowers on her blue headscarf match the tulips on her robe.
She’s cheerful and polite at
first but starts crying when asked about the land problem.
“The situation is very bad.
People are prohibited from crossing the border to sow seeds, but it’s the right
time now. We have nothing else to live off of. What are we supposed to do?”
Ivanovna remembers the war in
1992. She points out the spot in her yard where Moldovan soldiers made camp.
“They shot and destroyed my house. The windows, the armchairs, the fridge,” she
says.
She leans on the hoe and
whispers that she’s afraid of a new war. Asked about recent events in Ukraine,
she blames the clashes on “Ukrainian fascist nationalists”. She has nephews
working in Moscow and all her television channels are in Russian. For
her, Ukraine is
a land of chaos and anarchy.
“I keep hearing on TV that
Moldova will join the EU, then Romania, and all those fascists will come to
make us pay taxes on each cow and each chicken. I don’t want that. I’d rather
live with Russians,” she says.
In a little shop on the main
street, a shopkeeper explains how some people have negotiated the divide.
Valentina, who declines to
give her last name, says her husband has a veteran’s pension from fighting on
the side of Moldova during the separatist conflict. But it wasn’t enough for
the couple to live on, so she took Transnistrian “citizenship” and brings home
a pension three times higher.
That math is more or less
confirmed by Lesco, the mayor, who says the minimum monthly pension in Moldova
is 800 lei ($57), compared with 1,800 lei on the Transnistrian side.
Such largess is possible
thanks largely to money and subsidies from Russia. For years Transnistria has
not paid for its natural gas. The state-owned Russian energy giant Gazprom, which supplies
the territory, has not collected on a bill that is nearing $4bn. It also gets
$27m annually from Moscow for pensions.
Surrounded by candies,
sausages, napkins, and cheap cigarettes, Valentina uses an old abacus to
calculate. “If Moldova joined Romania and all these villages remained with
Transnistria, we would be very happy,” she says.
Referendums, petitions and
independence
Back in his office, Lesco
seems angry. Or perhaps he just hates journalists.
“You write about this and the
story gets bigger and bigger, while in reality there were only a couple of
drunks in the square, demanding something that they don’t even understand,” he
declares.
The Moldovan flag is
everywhere in this empty room: on the pink wall, on the desk, next to the
window.
“The newspapers said I’m the
one who doesn’t want to join Transnistria, that I’m the one who doesn’t want to
organise the referendum. But that’s a lie,” he says. “If they, the people, want
that, I’ll do it tomorrow. But I’m telling you, I can’t let a couple of drunks
decide the future of the village. What happens if Moldova joins the EU
tomorrow, Ukraine blocks the border with Transnistria, and the region is
strangled?”
Lesco, in his third term as
mayor, dismisses Dobrinski as a “charlatan".
“He has no office, no secretary, no
legislative or executive power whatsoever. He only jerks people around,
promising them a good future,” he exclaims.
Going outside for a
much-needed cigarette, Lesco warns that Dobrinski doesn’t give interviews.
It is easy to find Dobrinski –
or anyone – in such a small village. Helpful residents lead the way, insisting
that he is a good man.
His house is a small, square
building with green walls and little white hearts on the gates, which open only
when his daughter emerges to explain that he talks only with journalists from
Transnistria.
“He will give interviews to
anyone else when he gets an actual office and recognition. You’re invited to
talk to him on that day. He works a lot to help people,” she says before
turning around and walking away from the muddy road.
According to lawyers from
Promo-LEX, that help includes drawing up petitions supporting recognition of
Transnistria’s independence, to be sent to the separatist authorities. One
teacher from the Stefan cel Mare school says she saw her name on one such list
– although she had not signed anything.
