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EU ready to rethink Moldova
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In just 100 days, the new Moldovan government coalition has managed to unblock the country's relations with the EU and with its neighbour and sister country Romania.
Since the former pro-Moscow president Vladimir Voronin resigned from his job last September, Moldova, with strong suppport from Romania, last month started long-due negotiations for an Association Agreement with the EU. The EU will also provide Moldova with financial assistance, topping up funds by the International Monetary Fund.
Vlad Filat has brought the 'rethink Moldova' strategy to Brussels' attention (Photo: Wikipedia)
This would hardly have been imaginable a year ago, when Moldova was still just another ex-Soviet mini-dictatorship, a poor country of 3.5 million squeezed between Romania and Ukraine. Then, in April 2009, Moldova had its own "Twitter revolution". Violent incidents started in the capital, Chisinau, after Mr Voronin's Communists claimed victory in general elections.
The clashes between protesters - their numbers swelled after appeals on Facebook and Twitter - and the police left three people dead and many wounded. The result of the unrest, and popular anger over the alleged torture of protesters (at least one person died while in police custody), were new elections in June. An inconclusive outcome was followed by Mr Voronin's resignation in September.
Since then, the country has been ruled by a motley - but surprisingly functional - alliance of four pro-Western parties who are now enjoying much needed support international support. The new head of government, Vlad Filat, has successfully brought to Brussels's attention his coalition's strategy called "Rethink Moldova".
On 24 March, at a donors conference in Brussels, EU enlargement Commissioner Stefan Füle praised the new government's reform efforts, which were "carried out despite difficult internal and external conditions."
"These reforms," said Mr Füle, "will have our collective support."
The EU has stepped up its help to Moldova, one of the top recipients of funds under the European Neighbourhood Policy. The Western donors – the EU, the International Monetary Front, the World Bank, and individual countries such as the US and Japan- have pledged €1.9 billion, mostly as loans and non-returnable grants.
Out of the total pledges, €273 million will come from the EU, as grants over the period 2011-13, an increase of almost 75 percent over what Moldova previously received. The Commission will also send a team of experts to Chisinau and in June talks will start on a visa-free travel agreement.
The visa problem remains the most sensitive issue. Moldovans cannot travel freely to the EU, although it is estimated that around one million people, more than a quarter of the population, live and work abroad, most of them in Romania, Italy and Spain.
Many Moldovans are keen to obtain Romanian citizenship. Moldova was a Romanian province until occupied by the USSR at the end of World War II. Since then, during the Soviet times, but also after the break-up of the USSR, the successive Russian-backed Moldovan regimes have maintained the fiction of a separate Moldovan language.
Relations between the two Romanian-speaking countries had been tense since the coming to power of the Communists in Moldova in the year 2001.
But, in the framework of the "Rethink Moldova strategy", relations with Romania have steadily improved over the last months and the interim president, former speaker of the Parliament Mihai Ghimpu, has taken the unprecedented step of acknowledging publicly that Moldovans and Romanians share the same ethnic origin and speak the same language: Romanian.
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