Radio România Internațional

Tag: Republic of Moldova

  • April 7, 2014

    April 7, 2014

    The Government of Romania has today decided to reduce the value-added tax for foodstuff, non-alcoholic beverages and food industry services from 24% to 9%. The measure will be implemented as of June, six months before the new Fiscal Code takes effect. For the rest of the products, the VAT will be lowered from 24% to 20% as of January 1st, 2016. For bread, the VAT was slashed to 9% in September 2013. According to experts, the increase of the VAT from 19 to 24% in 2010, in the context of the economic crisis, led to a mere 1.5% increase in revenues to the state budget. The Government believes this reduction to encourage consumption and implicitly the economic growth, although there are also voices that warn that a VAT decrease would widen the budget deficit. PM Victor Ponta says however that the measure will not affect the state budget balance.



    In Bucharest, the Senate and Chamber of Deputies convene today in a joint meeting to change the Parliament Rules of Procedure. This regulation must be brought in line with the Constitution, so that decisions to approve requests to lift MP immunity may be taken on a simple majority vote. On the other hand, the Constitutional Court is to review on April the 8th the notifications filed by President Klaus Iohannis and other political players, including the National Liberal Party in opposition, after the Senate turned down a request by anti-corruption prosecutors regarding the arrest pending trial of former transport minister Dan Sova, accused of accessory to abuse of office. The request has been approved by a majority of the Senators attending the meeting, but it was eventually dismissed on grounds that the meeting was lacking quorum. The President said Parliament’s attitude in such cases led to an institutional jam that hinders judicial procedures and obstructs justice.



    The National Statistics Institute in Bucharest announced a downward adjustment of its economic growth forecast for this year, from 2.9% to 2.8%. In another move, the Institute improved its estimate of the GDP growth in the last quarter of 2014, to 0.7%, compared to 0.5% as it had previously estimated. The industry and communications sectors have made the most substantial contributions to the GDP. According to the National Statistics Institute, new orders in the processing industry increased in the first two months of this year, by 1.4%, compared to the corresponding period of 2014, mostly due to the rise in operations reported in the durable and intermediate goods industries.



    The Republic of Moldova commemorates today six years since the so-called “Twitter revolution” of 2009, which led to the ousting of the communists. The communist party, in power at the time, was accused of rigging the legislative elections, and on April the 7th their opponents organised a large-scale street protest which spiralled into violent clashes. At least one protester was killed and several hundred others were arrested. After the protests in April, the Opposition blocked the election of the country president in Parliament, which led to early elections won by the pro-European parties.



    The US once again called on Greece to finalise a reform plan worthy of the financial support of its lenders, the US Treasury said on Monday, at the end of a meeting with the Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis. The day before, he also had a meeting with the IMF director, Christine Lagarde, and the two tried to dispel fears that Athens will not be able to pay on Thursday the 450 million Euro owed to the IMF. Greece is waiting for the EU to provide 7.2 billion US dollars, the last instalment in a 240-billion euros bailout programme offered by the European Union and the IMF since 2010.



    The Romanian tennis player Simona Halep, no 3 in the world, was nominated for WTA best player of the month of March, alongside American Serena Williams and Spain’s Carla Suarez Navarro. Halep (aged 23), already voted as the best player of February in the WTA website poll, won her first Premier Mandatory title, at Indian Wells, and in Miami she reached the semi-finals, and was defeated by world leader Serena Williams. In 2015, Halep has also won the tournaments in Shenzhen and Dubai.

  • The Republic of Moldova, a priority for Romania’s foreign policy

    The Republic of Moldova, a priority for Romania’s foreign policy

    A human chain formed on Sunday ran all the way from the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Bucharest to the front gate of the Moldovan Embassy. This action of solidarity was aimed at convincing the authorities to lift passport restrictions for crossing the Romanian-Moldovan border on Prut river. The organisers of the event, the Actiunea 2012 Platform, whose underlying objective is the re-unification of Romania and Moldova, says it filed a number of requests with the Romanian Foreign Ministry and the Moldovan Embassy to Bucharest with a view to granting EU citizens free access to Moldova based on either a passport or an ID card. The Moldovan Youth Organisation also filed a similar request with the Moldovan and Romanian Foreign Ministries.



    Actiunea 2012 members say Romanian citizens can travel freely to 58 destinations using their ID cards only, which makes holding a passport almost useless. Many Romanians actually have their passports issued particularly to cross into Moldova. Additionally, organisation members say Romania is Moldova’s main trade partner at present, followed by other European Union states. Without support from the European Union and Romania, Moldova could never have coped with the Russian ban on wine and fruit. Lifting passport restrictions on border crossings would render the access of EU citizens to the Republic of Moldova much easier.



    Last week, Moldovan Foreign Minister Natalia Gherman met Romania’s Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu in Bucharest. The two reviewed the main topics on the bilateral agenda, with a special focus on Romania’s support for Moldova’s pro-European actions. Bogdan Aurescu, speaking to Radio Romania:



    “On the sidelines of our meeting, we also met the Mixed Committee for European Integration which both myself and Minister Gherman chair. Taking part in this meeting were eight institutions from Romania and Moldova each. We tackled joint cooperation projects with utmost pragmatism. I have been conveyed a message of firm commitment by my Moldovan counterpart as well as the other participant institutions to maintain Moldova on its European track”.



    The integration of Romania’s neighbour, amidst security threats from the post-Soviet geo-political space, is also high on the agenda of the Informal Group for Moldova’s European Action, which will meet this year at the initiative of Romania and France.

  • Romania Delivers Gas to R. of Moldova

    Romania Delivers Gas to R. of Moldova

    Without logistics support, the Republic of Moldova’s pro-European choice would remain purely theoretical. More than two decades since it proclaimed its independence from Moscow, in 1991, Chisinau still depends heavily on Russian hydrocarbons. And the difficult negotiations this week in Brussels, through which the EU secured an agreement between Kiev and Moscow on Russian gas deliveries to the West, via Ukraine, are tale-telling for the strategic importance of natural gas. The so-called gas war, through which Moscow has repeatedly punished both Ukraine for its pro-Western orientation, and Europe for supporting the Ukrainians’aspirations, is a scenario that might be repeated in Moldova at any time.



    Built precisely to reduce Chisinau’s reliance on Russian imports, the pipeline connecting the cities of Iasi in Romania and Ungheni in Moldova is operational as of Wednesday. On August 27th, last year, when Moldova celebrated its national day, the Romanian PM Victor Ponta, his Moldovan counterpart Iurie Leanca and the EU Commissioner for Energy, Gunther Oettinger attended the official opening of the pipeline.



    Construction works took one year and cost 26 million euros, most of the funds coming from Romania, with the balance covered by the EC. More than half a year after the official inauguration, Romania started to provide gas to the Republic of Moldova. The price, 255 US dollars per thousand cubic meters, is significantly lower than the one charged by the Russian supplier Gazprom, 332 dollars. Over one million cubic meters will reach Ungheni this year, and from there it will be fed into the central network of the Moldovan national supplier, Moldovagaz.



    But this will only cover part of the needs of the country. The Government in Chisinau says talks are already underway with foreign partners, regarding the extension of the Iasi-Ungheni pipeline to the capital city. With a capacity of 1.5 billion cubic meters per year, the extended pipeline might cover most of the country’s natural gas demand. But the extension entails costs of over 60 million euros, of which Brussels is only willing to provide 10 million.



    Diversifying its energy sources is vital to the future of the Republic of Moldova, the US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in his turn, during a visit to Chisinau on Tuesday, when he met Moldova’s President Nicolae Timofti and the new Prime Minister, Chiril Gaburici.

  • 1989 in Bessarabia

    1989 in Bessarabia

    Bessarabians, just like the Romanians, celebrate a quarter of a century since the fall of communism and the end of the Russification policy that plagued their territory. We spoke to history professor Sergiu Musteata from Chisinau State University, about 1989 in Bessarabia:



    “Between 1985 and 1989, things were changing in the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic. It is interesting that the first demands of the people in the capital Chisinau were not just economic and social, they also had to do with the language and alphabet. Of course, the first word was ‘liberty’. If we look closely at the pictures, we notice that in many of them people hold signs with the word ‘liberty’. That was their main concern. People wanted to talk freely, they wanted to tell the truth as it stood. The worst offence for those people was being unable to talk and write in their mother tongue openly. That is why the first demands in Chisinau, which went on for the rest of the year, regarded the language and the alphabet. Starting in January 1989, after discussions started by the Writers’ Union in 1988, people started to join efforts towards having a single language, even though the Politburo of the Communist Party was laying hurdles in their path, even though it was trying to criticize the effort and call it provocation, even though they tried to ban certain public assemblies. People started to assemble in greater and greater numbers, and in the summer of 1989 they numbered several tens of thousands.”



    Chisinau was seething, like the other capitals of republics in the union, under the impact of Perestroika and Glasnost policies promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev. The national demands were the same for all the nations oppressed by the USSR for 70 years. Sergiu Musteata believes that it was the Grand National Assembly in Chisinau of August 27, 1989 that triggered true change in Bessarabia:



    “On August 31, 1989, the law passed for switching to a Latin language and alphabet. Over the course of an entire year, writers demanded that the Soviet imposition of the Cyrillic alphabet be reversed. They challenged those norms that prevented a good knowledge of Romanian and corrupted it. This way, the elections for the Supreme Soviet brought to the forefront a new elite, men of culture, especially writers, who formed a team on behalf of Moldova to attend the meetings of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union in Moscow. They had the courage, in 1989, to say that the Hitler-Stalin pact was a crime against humanity. They demanded that a commission be created in the Soviet Parliament to discuss the impact of that document. For the first time in Chisinau, the newspaper called ‘Literature and Art’ published the secret addendum to that treaty, which had that far been considered a myth. That’s when it was published for the first time, and it turned out that based on this document the world got divided.”



    Liberty eventually triumphed in Chisinau, just as it did in Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Kiev, and other capitals across the Soviet Union. Sergiu Musteata:



    “What happened in Chisinau marked the spirit of the national liberation movement. In 1987, things were discussed with no small amount of fear, in 1988 publishing started, and in 1989 freedom of expression and association burst forth. For the first time, in 1989, people started waving the tricolour flag at meetings, saying that the tricolour was their true flag. Also in 1989, later that year, for the first time, a large-scale meeting was held around the idea of uniting Bessarabia with Romania, in the context of condemning the Hitler-Stalin pact. The cultural and historical slogans inclined towards social and economic issues: economic independence, autonomous administration, which in the following years led to the declaration of sovereignty, and, in 1991, to the Declaration of Independence.”



    Sergiu Musteata recalled how the year 1989 led to Bessarabian Romanians re-gaining their identity. He speaks from experience:



    “In 1989 I was a first-year history student, and I remember that I took part in many public manifestations. On November 7, when traditionally there was a military parade to celebrate the Bolshevik revolution, for the first time in Chisinau people had the courage to step in front of the tanks to stop them in their tracks. Since then there have been no more tanks in the marches in the grand national square in Chisinau. People came out with flowers, and the soldiers, no matter their ethnicity, went no further. They stopped, hugged the passers-by, and received their flowers. For the first time, the Communist Party leadership fled the official stand. It was a sign that society was changing, that society wished for a different leadership, that it wanted something else. It was a sign that the time of the totalitarian regime, which had kept millions in fear, was now over.”



    Bessarabia had a much smoother transition to democracy than Romania, despite having a much more traumatic past.

  • Tough Negotiations in the Republic of Moldova

    Tough Negotiations in the Republic of Moldova

    Moldovan president Nicolae Timofti has scheduled the first plenary session of the new Parliament in Chisinau on December 29, 2014. Presidency spokesperson Vlad Turcanu said that the president chose this date hoping that by then pro-Western parties will manage to reach an agreement with a view to forming a majority in Parliament. Having won last month’s elections, the three parties have been holding talks with a view setting up a ruling coalition. Here is Vlad Turcanu:



    “The president hopes that over the next period, parties should conclude negotiations and thus set up a Parliament majority. The president awaits the setup of a ruling coalition, irrespective of its structure. At the same time, you know well where the president stands regarding the need to continue our efforts to acceded to the European Union. Therefore the president hopes the new coalition will be pro-European”.



    Negotiations between the three pro-European parties are held behind closed doors, so that little has transpired regarding progress made so far. The Moldovan media has been speculating that the Liberals have suggested to their future coalition partners to split ministry portfolios based on a practice used in the European Parliament. More exactly, the faction that grabbed the highest number of seats chooses the first mandate, while nominations for the second and third portfolios are to be made by those parties that grabbed a smaller number of votes. The Liberals’ initiative has been met with a great deal of reluctance however by representatives of the Democratic Party, which claims that although this model could be viable for the nominations of the new ministers, it is unacceptable when it comes to agreeing on the highest-ranking positions in the ruling coalition. The three pro-European parties, the Democratic Party, the Liberal-Democratic Party and the Liberal Party jointly hold 55 of the 101 seats in the Moldovan Parliament, enabling them to have a majority and thus vote in the new Government. On the other hand, the Communist and Socialist parties have also entered the single-chamber Moldovan Parliament. The two parties’ programmes provide for closer ties with the Russian Federation. In Bucharest, Romania’s president Klaus Iohannis and Prime Minister Victor Ponta have discussed the situation in the Republic of Moldova. The two officials expressed hope that the two countries should carry out further joint projects in 2015. Victor Ponta:



    “The president, the Government, as well as all political and administrative structure in Romania, must continue to support Moldova in 2015 as well and do more for this country”.



    On Monday, Moldova signed the contract for the delivery of natural gas supplies from Romania. The move is seen as a step forward for the country’s efforts to curb its dependency on Russian gas imports.

  • Transdniester – a frozen conflict

    Transdniester – a frozen conflict

    For political analysts with a good memory, the Ukrainian crisis this year is nothing but a reenactment of the geo-political and war games Russia played 25 years ago. At a smaller scale, in lab conditions if you like, what happened in Crimea in spring and in Donbas in summer was patented in Transdniester in the early 90s. With only 40% ethnic Romanians and the rest of Ukrainians and Russians, the region had been forcing its way out of the republic even prior to the break up of the Soviet Union. The separatists’ main argument, albeit ungrounded, was that the Republic of Moldova could have become part of Romania, to which it had actually belonged until its annexation by Stalin back in 1940.



    The secessionists saw their dream come true in 1992, when the former Soviet republic, which had proclaimed its independence a year before, had to concede defeat in an armed conflict, which left hundreds of dead and was settled with the intervention of the Russian troops on the separatists’ side. Initially presented as a punctual mission, the presence of the Russian troops in Transdniester became permanent.



    It’s already been 15 years since the OSCE summit in Istanbul, when Russia, led at that time by president Boris Yeltsin, pledged to pull out its troops and weaponry from the east of the Republic of Moldova. Under president Vladimir Putin, Moscow’s troops deployed in Transdniester have changed only their name; from occupation troops, which they are de facto, overnight they were called peacekeepers.



    Last week, from the rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly, the Republic of Moldova’s Foreign Minister, Natalia Gherman stood again for the pull out of the Russian contingent and its replacement with an international civilian mission. The presence of the Russian troops in Transdniester has been spawning additional obstacles to the peace process, Mrs. Gherman bluntly put it, hinting at the almost never-ending 5+2 talks, which brought together the representatives of Chisinau, of the separatists, Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE, with the EU and the USA as observers.



    Also in New York, concurrently with the UN General Assembly proceedings, Romanian Foreign Minister, Titus Corlatean, reiterated the top priority importance Romania attaches to the settlement of the frozen conflict in the neighboring Republic of Moldova. Reaching a political agreement based on observing Moldova’s territorial integrity and sovereignty with a special political status for Transdniester remains a main objective of the pro-Western government in Chisinau and its partners in Bucharest, Brussels and Washington. However, everyone knows that nothing can change in Transdniester without a green light from Moscow, the protector and financial supporter of the secessionists.

  • Independence Day in the Republic of Moldova

    Independence Day in the Republic of Moldova

    The President of Romania, Traian Basescu, wrote to his Moldovan counterpart Nicolae Timofti that Bucharest will always stand by the Republic of Moldova. The Romanian President’s message reads, among others, “Moldova’s European endeavours and the well-being of its citizens, to which we are tied by a long history and, more importantly, by great friendship, will always be the project the dearest to my soul.”



    This has been in fact a constant element of the post-communist Romanian foreign policy. Regardless of their political affiliation, all Romanian presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers made the support for the Republic of Moldova a priority. When the Parliament in Chisinau complied with the will of the thousands of people gathered in the streets of the city and proclaimed the country’s independence from Moscow, on August the 27th, 1991, Romania was the first country in the world to recognise the new state. This put an end to half a century of Soviet occupation marked by suffering and tragedies.



    Today’s Republic of Moldova lies on some of the eastern Romanian territories annexed by Stalin’s Moscow in the summer of 1940. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Romanians took refuge in Romania, while other thousands were deported to Siberia. The arsenal of Stalinist repression included abusive arrests, summary trials and executions. The regime brought colonists from across the Soviet empire to replace the locals who had left. The Romanian community however survived, and the fall of the USSR found it prepared to break with Moscow.



    Proclaiming its independence was however just one step in a long and difficult journey. In 1992, the pro-Russian secessionist province of Transdniestr came out of Chisinau’s control, after an armed conflict that killed hundreds and was ended by the intervention of Russian troops on the separatists’ side. In the first decade of the new century, power in Moldova was held by the impenitent pro-Russian communist party headed by a former Soviet police general, Vladimir Voronin.



    It was only in 2009, when a pro-Western coalition of three parties came to power, that the Republic of Moldova was able to embrace and promote European Union accession ambitions. Having signed free trade and association agreements with the EU, Moldova is now viewed in Brussels as the success story of the Eastern Partnership. The courage and consistency with which both its politicians and the public implemented painful reforms entitle Moldova to hope that the independence proclaimed 23 years ago will soon be reinforced by the prosperity and the rule of law entailed by the European integration.

  • The Republic of Moldova and Ukraine in the EU spotlight

    The Republic of Moldova and Ukraine in the EU spotlight

    At the end of last month, the Republic of Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine signed Association and Free Trade Agreements with the European Union in Brussels, Ukraine having already signed the economic section of the Association Agreement earlier this year. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barrosso referred to the agreements as a historic success, which nevertheless depended on the three countries stepping up reforms that would bring their political, economic and cultural life closer to EU standards.



    Romania was the first EU Member State to finalise the ratification of the aforementioned Association Agreements.



    “EU enlargement on Europe’s south-eastern borders should remain a top priority on the EU agenda, including after the new leadership of EU institutions is sworn in, which will be key to defining the priority agenda of the Union in the coming period”, Romanian Foreign Minister Titus Corlatean said in Dubrovnik upon attending the Croatia Forum international Conference. EU enlargement is all the more important, Minister Corlatean argues, against the backdrop of rising Euroskeptic and Europhobic attitudes.



    Focusing on the process of the EU integration of states in the Western Balkans, Croatia Forum brought together European high-ranking officials, Foreign Ministers from EU Member States and countries targeted by the enlargement policy, alongside representatives from China, Japan, the United States and New Zealand.



    “EU enlargement had and will continue to have a major role in strengthening the position of the European Union at global level”, Titus Corlatean also said in his keynote address, which highlighted the undisputable benefits the enlargement process has brought about to the Union as a whole and to the newly integrated states. Romania is a telling example in this respect, considering the important economic progress our country has reported over the last few years, Titus Corlatean added. He went on to say that Romania’s macroeconomic indicators reflect a sustainable economic growth and confirms our country has fulfilled all European criteria for fiscal discipline.



    In a telephone conversation with president Traian Basescu, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko extended his gratitude to Romania for being the first EU country to ratify the agreements and for its full support. In turn, president Basescu said the ethnic Romanian community in Ukraine also fully supported the territorial integrity of Ukraine, as well as Poroshenko’s efforts to put an end to the conflict in Eastern Ukraine.