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“The Social Democratic Party of Moldova (PSDM) regards the statements delivered by Mr. V.Voronin, chairman of the Communist Party of Moldova (PCRM), at a news conference on February 9 as the peak of cynicism. These statements represent a complete lack of shame and respect for the people of country which he rules. These are aberrant statements aimed to compromise the opposition and to mislead the national and international public opinion.

PSDM says the following regarding the irresponsible statements of Mr.Voronin: the Communists are already falsifying the March 6 elections and therefore they will not be legal because: a) PCRM has set up a full control on the governmental, public and affiliated mass media; b) PCRM has launched an unprecedented campaign of black PR; c) PCRM intimidates and pressures the opposition by using all administrative resources; d) PCRM manipulates the public opinion both via the controlled mass media, and through alleged independent surveys;”

As “the local public authorities have refused to create conditions needed for a meeting with electors and the reaction house in Floresti was locked up, the chairman of the Christian Democratic People’ s Party (PPCD) Iurie Rosca had to meet with voters in the open air. The hostility of the local administration over PPCD representatives has a permanent nature, being fueled by mass media affiliated to the power and its electoral agents.

Three persons assaulted on Saturday, February 12 Iurie Rosca si Andrei Groza, PPCD candidates for the March 6 parliamentary elections, in the Floresti downtown while they were disseminating electoral leaflets to residents of this city. The three men swore and threatened Rosca and Groza, urging them to leave the city. Even more, they beat Groza in the face. To stop these illegal actions, Mr.Rosca pulled out a gun and threatened to fire in defence of his fellow. The three men withdrew and continued to swear”, the news agency FLUX reported.

The PPCD leaders held a news conference and invited the other opposition forces to publicly promise that they would not create any post-electoral alliances with PCRM. According to the PPCD leaders, if vote is necessary just to block the presidential election, this should be done to hold the early parliamentary polls.

PPCD chairman Iurie Rosca described the accusations of PCRM that Coalition-2005 supports the Democratic Moldova Bloc (BMD) and the Transnistrian separatist regime as groundless.

Journalists asked the PSDM leaders at a news conference whether they back the opinion of PCRM that Coalition-2005 is politically engaged to support BMD and the Transnistrian regime. The PSDM leaders dismissed the accusations of PCRM against Coalition-2005, saying that PCRM likes only the reports praising the Communists.

“The way the broadcasting company TeleRadio-Moldova (TRM) has presented the political actors demonstrates that this institution practices the political partisanship and indicates the tendency to reflect the current reality from the government’s point of view,” reads a TRM monitoring report undertaken by the Association of Electronic Press (APEL) on January 3–31 (Based on a news by agency Info-Prim).

Indeed, APEL confirmed that President Voronin was perfectly right when he indicated the lack of professionalism at TeleRadio-Moldova in late December.

On the other hand, the news agency BASA-Press quoted Sergiu Batog, producer-general at TeleRadio-Moldova, as saying that the report of APEL “has no relevance because the APEL chairman heads the administration of [Chisinau Mayor] Serafim Urechean, a competitor in the [March 6] electoral race”.

Batog claimed that Alexandru Dorogan, chief of the municipal mass media department in the capital, “is trying to hide in this report the shortcomings of the municipal audiovisual institution, which promotes just one electoral competitor.” “This is a mafia of NGOs which lobby for a single electoral competitor”, he added.

PCRM secretary Victor Stepaniuc said that the Russian-language newspapers Moldavskye Vedomosti and Komersant Plus, which commented on his interview to the news agency Reporter.md, used inadequate methods. Comments of these newspapers coincided with the decision of Russia’s State Duma to consider the opportunity to introduce economic sanctions against Moldova, and therefore they had an electoral nature.

Victor Stepaniuc said the following in that interview: “We had always been named as a pro-Russia, pro-East party. We respect the Russian culture, Russian people, but we must have an independent state. It’s time to tell your enemy that he is an enemy of yours, your opponent that he is an opponent of yours; there are times when things go smoother and when things go out to surface.

We will settle the Transnistrian problem together with European structures, politicians from Russia, Ukraine and Romania. I cannot say when. Unfortunately, there are many Russian chauvinists in the entourage of President Putin. I am a Marxist-Leninist, but Lenin was not a chauvinist, he was a personality who promoted the right of people to self-determination.”

Indeed, the conclusions of Victor Stepaniuc make a wonderful correlation with conclusions of Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Boris Tarasyuk, who described the Transnistria settlement as “one of the most important tasks of the national security of the Ukrainian state” at a recent conference titled “Ukraine, the European Union, Russia: Provocations and Possibilities for New-Style Relationships”. “Transnistria is a black hole of Europe for Ukraine, where somebody is becoming rich while hundreds of thousands of people face poverty. I am sure that the existence of this and other marionette regimes which obstructs the creation of the united Europe is convenient nor to the Russian Federation from strategic point of view”. (Based on a story by INFOTAG).