Echoes from Kosovo reach Pridnestrovie, bringing new hope to status talks

Imagine living in a country which is not on the map: You can't travel, because officially, you are stateless. Your country is not recognized and your vote, if you want to cast it, is called illegal by some of your closest neighbors.

That's life for the inhabitants of Pridnestrovie (also known as Transnistria), a self-proclaimed country between Moldova and Ukraine - but whose 16 year old claim to independence is recognized by neither of the two, and whose borders are subject to what in the eyes of the Transnistrians amount to an economic blockade aimed at forcing them to their knees and to shatter their dreams of statehood.

Now, with the West making its case for why Kosovo should be granted independence, there is fresh hope for Transnistria and some of the other international orphans. Affirming the value of precedent in conflict resolution is important, and Kosovo is not a special case, however much international leaders would like it to be. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, in the real world, events set precedents and it is a sign of political maturity to prepare for them. The same arguments for why Kosovo should be granted independence can be used for other conflicts with similarities. As documented by Mike Averko, a New York based analyst, Pridnestrovie has a better case for independence than Kosovo.

While Kosovo and Pridnestrovie are different, they also share a fundamental similarity: two minority peoples felt imprisoned inside a newly independent state against their will, after the break-up of a communist-era multi-ethnic federation. And that is not the only similarity. The sacking of Bender and Dubossary in 1992 by Moldovan armed forces, including the indiscrimate air shelling of civilians, has eerie parallels with the despicable behaviour of Slobodan Milosevic's forces in Kosovo in 1998-99. Fortunately, in this war, there was no brutal retaliation – the inhabitants of Pridnestrovie merely defended the territory which they had already declared independent, and at no time did they ever invade Moldova or attempt to cross their border to attack any Moldovan towns or villages.

Kosovo has advanced somewhat more in terms of its democratic institutions, but Pridnestrovie is fast catching up and is performing well, especially compared to Moldova itself. It has an elected president, an opposition which is in control of Parliament, a relatively free media and a strong civil-society sector. Minorities receive schooling in their own languages, with education materials are published in Moldovan, Russian and Ukrainian.

To argue that Pridnestrovie, today, is part of Moldova is a claim bordering on the surreal. The territory has succesfully broken away already and has, for the past 16 years, been fully de facto independent. Modern Pridnestrovie has nothing to do with modern Moldova. The people of Pridnestrovie are willing to look at almost any alternative except a "return" to a state which was created a year after they themselves declared independence and which they have never felt part of. Meanwhile the Moldovan claim rests on one fundamental point: their territorial integrity of the modern Republic of Moldova within the borders of the old Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR). This is a shaky foundation on which to base a claim on: In its own 1991 declaration of independence, the new Republic of Moldova specifically referred to the 1940-creation of the MSSR as being "null and void." It was this act which joined Pridnestrovie to Moldova in the first place. Before 1940, and the creation of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, the two were separate, just as they are today.

Meanwhile, with Moldova unwilling to yield and Pridnestrovie steadfastly proclaiming the independence that it fought a war for, the result is complete deadlock and hundreds of thousands of people living as miserable hostages to this deadlock.

What is to be done? Both Kosovo, to the West, and the Caucasus, to the East, may offer a clue. Renowned Caucasus expert Thomas de Waal, writing about the conflict in Abkhazia, rules out new troops, saying categorically that "war is unacceptable: it would destroy thousands of lives and all the fragile progress that has been made and Russia would inevitably be dragged in."

In contrast, maintaining the status quo is at least peaceful, but offers no long term solution for more than half a million people trapped in limbo in a place that the world still refuses to see for what it is. Moldova paints Pridnestrovie with the blackest of black, in a cold war mixed with economic war that is holding back investment and making the economies of both sides poorer and poorer every year. As in other breakaway territories, a policy of isolation and hatred is driving the separatists further and further away, as author Dov Lynch shows in a book funded by the United States government. A blind insistence merely on remaking Moldova within its Soviet-era borders displays a lack of statesmanship and political vision, doing more harm than good. It is time for for a fresh intellectual approach. The tired mantra of antisecessionism must yield to a realistic approach where no final-status option should be ruled out in the negotiations.

Why, if democracy is based on the will of the people, should we not allow Pridnestrovie to at least make an argument for sovereignty? Balancing their claim to independence with the true facts of Moldova's claim to territorial integrity will bring about a much more positive and realistic process which could end the agony. As in Kosovo.

A real solution to this post-Soviet conflict can come with an offer of recognized sovereignty to Pridnestrovie, while at the same time making tough demands on them over democracy, press freedom and human rights. It is here that Kosovo holds out a positive model: On a balance between the theoretical construct of territorial integrity and the very real needs and desires of the people who live there, the will of the people wins. Slowly, the international community is abandoning the mirage that borders are written in stone for the next thousand years, and arguing over something more real: Kosovo's obligations towards its neighbours and minorities.

Realism must come to the fore if we have any hope about solving the Transnistrian conflict without further bloodshed. The unrecognised countries are told that the Soviet borders are inviolable, so no matter what they do to improve human righs and democracy at home will simply not matter one bit, one way or the other, to the international community. That is the wrong message to send, and, says Thomas de Waal, "the Kosovo process is useful because it challenges those assumptions. Surely, now that the precedent has been set, the debate has to be about democracy and minority rights more than about territorial integrity."

In Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian asked him "So we were inside Azerbaijan for seventy years. How many years do we have to spend outside Azerbaijan for the world to recognise that we have left them behind for good – twenty, thirty, seventy?"
In Transnistria, on its own for the past sixteeen years, many now ask the same.

Columnist Michael Garner adapted this piece from arguments developed by Thomas de Waal for the Caucasus region during the first half of 2006. Tom de Waal is Caucasus editor of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in London and co-author of Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus.