Moldova on the brink

By Aussiegirl

Hat tip to Orange Revolution -- here's an article I had missed by Dick Morris, in Front Page Magazine, who has been doing yoeman's work in helping these East European former Soviet countries stage their own peaceful elections and democratic revolutions. He wonders why the State Department appears to be doing it's usual job of backing the status quo instead of taking President Bush's speeches to heart. Are you listening, Secretary Rice? Or are all your credentials as a Moscow watcher causing you to see the world in the old Cold War terms -- of not riling up Mr. Putin?

FrontPage magazine.com :: Eastern Europe's Orange Revolution by Dick Morris:

To paraphrase Marx and Engels, a specter is haunting the tyrannical former communist regimes of Eastern Europe ? the specter of the Orange Revolution.

Once safe ruling their impoverished enclaves of repression and corruption, the ex-communists, who go by such euphemisms as ?moderate centrists,? are now facing massive popular revolt and a spreading demand for freedom and real democracy.

Beginning in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, the orange tide spread to Ukraine, where it engulfed the former nomenklatura and apparatchiks of the Soviet era and forced them from power. Now the revolution spreads, on its own as they all do, to tiny, oppressed Moldova.

Born in infamy by a provision in the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, Moldova was split off from Romania and given to the Soviet Union, where it languished as a ?people?s republic? until 1991. But this battered and oppressed land of 4 million mistook the democratic promises of former communists who turned out to be controlled by the Russian mafia. Their leader became the richest person in the nation through unfathomable corruption.

The stench became so pervasive that, in 2001, a desperate electorate turned the mobsters out and put the unreconstructed communists back in charge. The repression that followed was predictable. Free media was snuffed out, opposition politicians were ?investigated? and, in local elections, opposition parties had no access to the media and were denied permits for their meetings and rallies.

But the birth of freedom in Ukraine has inspired the tiny Christian Democratic Party, under the charismatic and tireless Iurie Rosca, to aspire to create a genuinely free Moldova."