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Off the air: TVR1 has been taken off the air by Moldova's regime despite a valid license to broadcast until 2011

CHISINAU (Tiraspol Times) - As human rights defenders are accusing Moldova of censorship, TV viewers who want to watch the Romanian-language channel TVR1 can no longer see it on the screens.

Effectively immediately, the regime of Communist Party president Vladimir Voronin ordered TVR1 off the air, in a heavyhanded move which brings back memories of the time when Voronin was a Soviet general and the head of the dreaded Interior Ministry of the MSSR.

Censorship is today on the rise in Moldova, Europe's poorest country, as the regime shut down the transmissions of TV station TVR1. The public service station from Romania says that the shutdown is arbitrary and illegal, and points to the fact that it has a valid license to broadcast legally in Moldova until 2011.

In a protest note sent to the Moldova Audio-Video Coordination Council (CCA) on Thursday, the Romanian public TV station (TVR1) shows that it has a broadcast license valid until 2011.

" - TVR and the Romanian government made all the necessary steps in order to continue the broadcast. At the time of the decision, SRTv (the TVR managing company) was up to date with all its financial obligations and it still owned the no. 014557 license, valid from 2006 through 2011", TVR officials informed.

A minority Moldovan official who wanted to keep TVR on the air was outgunned earlier this week: Vlad Turcanu stood up as a defender of freedom of expression, and termed the decision to pull the plug on TVR1 as an abuse and violation of the current Moldovan legislation.

Turcanu, just like TVR1 itself, points out that SRTV holds a licence that is valid until 2011 and which is guaranteed by national laws.

Pattern of censorship crackdowns

The latest move to ban media which is critical of the Moldovan government follows other crackdowns over the past year.

TV Gaugauzia had its broadcast signal lowered to a forced level where almost no one could watch it, and one day before a critical election, a radio station in Chisinau which is critical of Vladimir Voronin's Communist-led government went off the air. Antena-C's broadcasting signal was interrupted in a move which prompted sharp criticism from international organizations.

" - We are extremely concerned about the interruption of Antena-C's broadcasting signal, which deprives people in Chisinau and in large parts of Moldova of an important alternative source of information and analysis," said Louis O'Neill, the Head of the OSCE Mission to Moldova, at the time. Antena-C has still not been allowed to return to the air in its old format, and today the radio listeners in Moldova are served up a diet of bland, pro-government propaganda which is void of any real critical analysis.

In neighboring Transdniestria, which functions as a separate independent country, no TV or radio stations have been ordered off the air. Both government-run and private channels are available, as well as foreign channels from neighboring Ukraine and Moldova which are being broadcast freely without any sort of interruption or scrambling attempts.

Cable TV networks in Transdniestria also carry a wide variety of Western television channels, including the BBC which is highly regarded by viewers in Tiraspol and other cities on the east bank of the Dniester river.

Transdniestria (officially Pridnestrovie) is also known under names such as Transnistria, Transdniester, and Transdnestr. The mostly Russian-speaking area declared independence in 1990 and is two-thirds Slavic. Like Moldova, it too has received international criticism of a limited press freedom. But whereas the situation in Transdniestria has drastically improved over the past five years, the same can not be sad for Moldova where the government is shutting down critical media and was recently fined by the European Court for Human Rights for arbitrarily closing down a critical independent newspaper.

See also:
» Moldova censorship: Critical radio station still off the air [1]
» Human rights activist jailed in Moldova; radio station silenced [2]
» Press freedom 2007: Down in Moldova and Ukraine, up in Transdniester [3]