Negotiations – one step forward one step back

Talks over the Transdniestrian dispute run on both formal and informal tracks. There is both an international negotiation format and frequent direct contact between leaders in Chisinau and Tiraspol. In contrast to other post-Soviet separatist conflicts, the de facto authorities in Tiraspol are accepted as a direct party to the conflict.

There is a substantial record of bilateral agreements, dating back to the mid-1990s. One Transdniestrian official asserts that since the

1990s the two sides have signed 187 agreements and that the first step must be to implement them properly.⁷

Moscow unilaterally negotiated the ceasefire of 1992, but the political talks became internationalised in 1993 when the OSCE (initially the CSCE) first set up an office in Moldova. Ukraine joined the talks in 1995. By 2005 this format had become formalised as the

‘Five Plus Two’ format, convened by the OSCE and comprising the five parties of Moldova, Transdniestria, OSCE, Russia and Ukraine, as well as the European Union and the United States.

There is a broad international consensus on what a future political agreement should look like. It is set out in “Report Number 13” of November 1993 in which the Chisinau mission of the (then) CSCE summed up its understanding of the nature of the conflict. The report stated that “the present division of Moldova threatens not only the territorial integrity of the country but stability in Europe as a whole” but also noted “a distinct Transdniestrian feeling of identity and an apparent aversion of most Transdniestrians against being governed directly from the centre”. The report therefore made the case for an eventual solution in which Transdniestria should have an autonomous status with special rights but which would not undermine Moldova as a viable national state.⁸

Twelve years later, a law, passed in 2005 almost unanimously by the Moldovan parliament, fleshed out what this constitutional arrangement could mean in practice. It declared Moldova to be a single state, adhering to democratic principles and that the dispute with Transdniestria would be solved only by peaceful means. “The negotiation process with Transdniestria is conducted so as to achieve the goals of democratisation and demilitarisation of Transdniestria.”

Transdniestria was declared to be a “autonomous-territorial formation with special legal status,” with its own parliament (Supreme Soviet), symbols and three languages of Moldova, Russian and Ukrainian.⁹

7 Interview in Tiraspol, February 2018.

8 Document is at https://www.osce.org/moldova/42307?download=true

9 Text of law is at http://lex.justice.md/viewdoc.php?action=view&view=

doc&id=313004&lang=2

Both these documents basically set out a basically federal arrangement for Moldova. However, there is widespread scepticism on both sides as to whether this can be made to work in practice. In Transdniestria, many say that the Moldovan state, as currently configured, is not a project they want to be part of. They point to the example of Gagauzia as proof that Moldova has not honoured an autonomy arrangement for their territory. Gagauzia is a small non-contiguous region which is home to the Gagauz minority, who are Turkic in origin and language but Orthodox by religion and mostly pro-Russian by allegiance. The region was given special status under a 1994 law, but most observers, including the OSCE, say that most provisions of the law remain on paper and have not been properly implemented.

In what are in many ways mirror-image concerns in right-bank Moldova, the concept of “federalisation” is anathema to much of society. This reflects in particular fears of a solution to the conflict along the lines of the Kozak Memorandum of 2003. This was an initiative pushed by Moscow and its envoy Dmitry Kozak, accepted by Tiraspol and initially agreed to but rejected at the last minute in Chisinau, after the intervention of its Western partners. The draft plan for a “Federative Republic of Moldova” was seen at the time in Chisinau and Western capitals to give unacceptable veto powers to Transdniestria in an upper house of parliament created by the amended constitution of a reunified Moldova. Moreover, later additions to the draft text provided for a Russian peacekeeping force in Transdniestria after the settlement and up until the year 2020.¹⁰

Why the hostility to a federal solution? This issue shows up deep divisions within Moldova over its future constitutional structure. Many of the more strongly Romanophone parts of it have strong doubts about reintegration of Transdniestria into anything less than a unitary state; many of the minority who advocate union with Romania would probably be prepared to live entirely without Transdniestria, a territory that was only joined to them in the 1940s.

For these people, reintegration could be a proxy for allowing Russia

10 William H. Hill, Russia, the Near Abroad and the West, Lessons from the Moldova-Transdniestria Conflict, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington D.C/The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2012, p.139-148.

to influence their country again by the back door. As William Hill writes,

“Almost all of civil society in Chisinau had severe misgivings about granting nearly equal political status within the Moldovan polity to an entity that was widely perceived as an agent of Moscow, from whose fifty-year rule Moldova had just freed itself. Whether right or wrong, for a substantial portion of Moldova’s educated elite, and perhaps the population as a whole, the issue of federalisation was not just a question of adopting a particular political system. It also involved Moldova’s independence from Russia and very survival.”¹¹

Despite the many differences between Moldova and Ukraine, this point of view has been strengthened since the outbreak of the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, where there are fears that Moscow could try to use the two ‘People’s Republics’ as a Trojan Horse to weaken a new federated Ukrainian state (see Chapter 3).

Since the rejection of the Kozak plan, there has been deadlock in negotiations on the issue of final political status. However, there has been progress on de facto integration in other areas.

Transdniestria, whose businesses rely heavily on exports to the European Union, quietly signed up to Moldova’s Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) with the EU in 2016 (see below). Many Transdniestrians have taken Moldovan foreign passports, allowing them to travel more freely to the EU.

Since 2016, the OSCE has successfully promoted an “output-based” policy of “small steps” which benefit ordinary people and facilitate de facto integration of the two territories. Eleven working groups focus on a range of practical issues. In 2016, under the German presidency of the OSCE, a “package of eight” issues associated with the conflict was identified. They were small but significant for those affected. The eight were: 1) the issue of the recognition (apostolisation) of diplomas from Transdniestria in Moldova, allowing Transdniestrian students to use them to continue their studies abroad; 2) the issue of giving Transdniestrian vehicles registered international licence plates that would allow them to travel

11 Hill, Russia, the Near Abroad, p. 61.

beyond the borders of Moldova; 3) the integration of the telecommunications market; 4) the regulation of environmental standards in the Dniester River basin; 5) a review of criminal cases involving citizens from the other side of the river; 6) the operation of schools teaching the Moldovan language in the Latin script in Transdniestria; 7) ensuring access of farmers in Chisinau-controlled territory to farmland in Dubasari in Transdniestria; 8) the re-opening of the Gura-Bicului Bridge across the river, closed since 1992 and other issues of freedom of movement.

The re-opening of the Gura-Bicului bridge in November 2017 was a catalyst for resolution of the other issues. Six of the eight issues had been resolved by the end of 2018. Latin-script Moldovan schools were free to operate in Transdniestria. By March 2019, 240 diplomas from the Taras Shevchenko University in Tiraspol had been apostolised in Chisinau, allowing their holders to study abroad.¹² Several thousand Transdniestrian drivers had taken advantage of the chance to travel outside Moldova in their own cars. The numbers of people affected may have been only in the thousands, but the measures also had a wider symbolic significance. The success of these measures also raised the question of what are the next priorities, if momentum in the talks is to be maintained.