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Transnistrian Conflict on March 29 – April 11, 2004
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e-journal #28 |
Process of political talks
The Moldovan authorities have appealed to the OSCE Permanent Council to take additional measures towards the resumption of the process of political talks on the Transnistrian issue. The appeal was vociferated by the Moldovan Minister of Reintegration Vasile Sova on grounds that the provisions of the protocol signed in Belgrade this February, whereby a meeting in the five-sided format was to be convened by the end of March, were not fulfilled. At the same time, Minister Sova said that the Moldovan side followed the mediators’ recommendations and submitted its proposals on the basic political document drafted under the OSCE aegis last autumn in due time. Earlier, the Head of the OSCE Mission in Moldova William Hill accused the Transnistrian side of refusing, under various excuses, to schedule a date for holding a five-sided meeting.
The Russian military patrimony in Transnistria
The new Russian Foreign Minister Serghei Lavrov reiterated during the informal meeting of foreign ministers of the Russia-NATO Council on 2 April Russia’s position that the synchronisation of the ratification of the adapted Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty with the finalisation of withdrawal of the Russian military patrimony from Georgia and Moldova is not justified. The transcript of the press conference held by the Russian Minister at the end of the meeting quotes the Minister as saying: “The CFE Treaty is a document with binding legal power. In parallel, Russia has assumed certain obligations with regard to the evacuation of our military patrimony from Transnistria and the coordination with Georgia of the problems related to the method and terms of withdrawal of our military bases. We are involved in negotiations over our patrimony. What is left there is just the guard of weapons deposits. If we were to eliminate the guard, then the deposits would be ravaged, and our weapons might get as far as Europe. If the evacuation of weapons would only depend on us, it would have been long gone from Transnistria. Unfortunately, this depends, among other things, on the position of Transnistrian authorities. And our colleagues from the OSCE know about this. There have been proposed solutions to unblock the situation, with the involvement of the Moldovan authorities. If these had functioned, then the problem would have been eliminated. Similar things happened before, when, with foreign hands, the possibility of reaching a political agreement between Moldova and Transnistria was dynamited”.
At the same time, the US State Secretary Colin Powell said, quoted by the international press, that the main precondition for the joining of new states to the CFE Treaty is the evacuation of Russian troops and weapons from Georgia and the Republic of Moldova.
In its turn, the NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, on a visit to Moscow, refuted Moscow’s attempts to dissociate the issue of CFE Treaty ratification from the Russian military presence in Georgia and Moldova. He expressed his hope that the treaty will be ratified soon, but mentioned that developments will depend of how the talks go between the Russian Federation and Georgia and the Republic of Moldova on its military presence in these two states.
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