I realize there will be people insisting the parallel is not accurate, and maybe even misleading. Without any offence, I’ll advice those to get informed better about what happened in Moldova during 6-9 April 2009, and in the days following the mass youth anti-communist protests.
You might say well, it is really not possible to compare the two cases. However, in my view both the Uzbekistan’s Andijan massacre in May 2005 and the Moldova’s anti-communist protests in April 2009 have one common thing – people protested against an authoritarian government, defending their rights, resisting against the misuse of power by the incumbent government. Only time will reveal all the atrocities committed against the young protesters. Though, even the small evidence collected by the civil society groups and domestic human rights watchdogs is terrifying. Two young people are dead, tens missing, hundreds are imprisoned in conditions that the superficial visit of a UN envoy have found “cruel, inhuman or degrading”. And the UN visitor was not allowed to enter two other detainees’ facilities, which we can certainly expect to have even worse conditions.
This is a Moldovan “Andijan” which takes place at the border of the European Union, and under the indifferent eyes of the Western ambassadors stationed in Moldova. Regardless many revealing videos and photos that the local media has made public, the EU ambassadors, these wannabe champions of human rights and freedom, have not yet reacted. They are waiting, exactly the way they did after the elections were claimed rigged by the opposition. What is the difference between someone committing a crime and another watching that apathetically, while having the ability to stop it? You tell.
So what would follow? I think we should expect what I have named the “Karimov effect”. That means the incumbent government will just bend its foreign policy towards Russia, accepting the Kremlin’s protection and patronage, exactly the way Karmov did in Uzbekistan after the Andijan. In fact, everybody has burned their bridges – the West because of its inactivity has encouraged cruelties of a magnitude that only Hague will have to investigate. These will get public anyway, because it became too big and ugly to be hidden. And the West will have to react even too late, for that carrying guilt in years to come.
Europeans are crappy strategists because they way too much perceive international affairs through geopolitics. They were afraid that Moldovan Communists will fall back into the Russian sphere of influence, and that is why I suppose they’ve been advising their capitals to keep quiet. However, by keeping quiet they allowed the Moldovan incumbent government to get too deep into crap. Now authorities see no other choice than to do futile attempts of hiding what they have done. When they will understand it is not possible and some more young protesters’ bodies will come up, then their only way will be to go seeking Kremlin’s protection. Exactly the way Karimov did after Andijan. I even don’t want to imagine what price they will pay to Moscow.
The first signs of that are already visible. Communists have done what Moscow has wanted so much – they are expelling the NDI country director, Alex Grigorievs. It makes Kremlin happy by hinting United States was behind a (phony) “color revolution”, – a version in which many crackpot Europeans, plagued by a hysteric dislike of the United States, will believe. We do not have a Western military base to request its liquidation and withdrawal of Western military (like it was in Uzbekistan), however we can do more – we will probably host a Russian one, so that it can defend us against “the aggressive alliance”. So, when you see the Europe’s headlines reading “Why we lost Moldova?” go and ask your countrymen, exiled to Moldova and which carry the once proud but now not so popular here name of “EU ambassadors”.
