Julie McLaughlin

Most people have trouble finding Moldova on a map, and it isn't

getting any easier. A growing number of people are dedicated to making the

country vanish from the map — and most of them are Moldovans.

It began when about 15,000 people, almost all of them young, went

onto the streets in Chisinau, the capital, a month ago to protest

the outcome of the recent election. They claimed it had been stolen

by the Communist party, but that wasn't their only complaint. When the

scene turned ugly on 7 April and the crowd stormed both the parliament and

the president's offices, many of them were chanting "We are Romanians" and

carrying Romanian flags.

The buildings were looted and partly burned, and President Vladimir

Voronin's government arrested several hundred rioters (although

almost all have now been released). He also accused Romania of backing the

protesters, expelled its ambassador and imposed visa requirements for

Romanians. In reply, Romania President Traian Basescu declared that he

would not tolerate a "new Iron Curtain," and changed Romanian law to give

Moldovans easy access to Romanian citizenship.

Since Moldova is Europe's poorest country and Romania is a member

of the European Union, a Romanian passport that allows visa-free travel to

all 27 EU countries is a very attractive asset. Moldova already has

one-third of its working-age population working in EU countries (mostly

illegally), and depends on their remittances for over a third of its

national income.

The Romanian embassy in Chisinau has received 650,000 applications

for citizenship, says President Basescu, many of them covering several

people. He suggests that up to one million Moldovans (a quarter of the

total population) have already decided to seek Romanian citizenship.

Vladimir Turcanu, a member of parliament for Moldova's ruling

Communist Party, told the BBC, "This mass granting of Romanian

citizenship is a way to assimilate the Republic of Moldova. We see it a

threat to the statehood, a threat to the integrity and sovereignty of our

country." He is quite right, but it's likely that a majority of the

population in both Romania and Moldova see that as a good idea.

Moldova was part of the old Soviet Union, and Russia has already

condemned the Romanian action. There are still Russian troops in a

breakaway part of Moldova, the so-called "Transdnistria Republic," that

illegally declared its independence in 1990. Are we heading for another

confrontation like the Russian-Georgian one that exploded into war last

year, only this time right on the borders of the European Union instead of

the far side of the Black Sea?

Probably not, although the situation is both tangled and fraught.

For one thing, landlocked Moldova, sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine,

has no common border with Russia. For another, the pressure to unite

Moldova and Romania comes mainly from within Moldova itself, although most

Romanians feel sympathy with it. Because, as the rioters succinctly put it,

most Moldovans really are Romanians.

Moldova, also known as Moldavia or Bessarabia, was one of many

former Balkan principalities that re-emerged from Turkish rule as the

Russian empire drove the Ottoman empire south in the course of the 19th

century. Most got their independence, including what is now Romania -- but

Moscow decided to keep Moldova even though it had always been

Romanian-speaking. After the Russian revolution in 1917 Moldova did manage

to unite with Romania for a couple of decades, but the Soviet Union took it

back as part of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.

There was a good deal of deliberate Russification in the following

decades, and the narrow, industrialized, densely populated strip east of

the Dniester River ("Transdnistria") wound up with a two-thirds majority of

Russian and Ukrainian speakers. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991

they fought a small civil war and broke away from Moldova, fearing that the

Romanian-speaking majority in the rest of the country would unite with

Romania.

That didn't happen: the European Union wasn't interested in

expanding that far east, and Romania didn't want to sabotage its own

chances of joining. But now Romania is safely in the EU, so that is no

longer a consideration -- and things are getting rough in Moldova.

The Moldovan government is not a tyranny. It is an elected

government that is Communist in name only, and the most recent election was

certified free and fair by observers from the Organization for Security and

Co-operation in Europe. Older people, nostalgic for the stability of the

Soviet past, vote Communist because they think their pensions will be safe

-- and a high proportion of younger people have left the country in search

of work.

The protesters claimed electoral fraud, but the split is really

more generational than political, with younger Moldovans believing their

future would be brighter than Romanians. In theory, the solution is easy: let

Moldova west of the Dniester join Romania, leaving the Slavic majority in

"Transdnistria" to become another outlying enclave of Russia.

But this is "post-Soviet space," so nothing is easy and theory

doesn't work. This one will run and run.