Twitter fuels revolt in Moldova

While you were sleeping there was an odd attempt at a revolution in Europe, and Twitter is getting much of the credit (or blame, depending on your point of view). Activists in Moldova, a small country tucked away in Southeastern Europe, briefly occupied Moldova’s Parliament building before government forces regained control of the capital.

People took to the streets to protest the results of elections on Sunday that saw Moldova’s Communist Party win 50% of the seats in parliament, giving them full control over the country’s government. Almost immediately youth groups in Moldova called for protests against the Communists in Chisinau (the capital), and they used SMS text messaging services and Twitter to spread the word. One group said they hoped their ‘tweet’ would attract about 1,000 people, instead 15,000 turned out – the huge numbers helped to turn peaceful protests into violent ones that led to riots and the brief occupation of parliament.

Parallels were immediately drawn between Moldova’s protests and the Orange Revolution in neighboring Ukraine that brought about a change in government in 2005. But unlike in Ukraine, where there had been wide-spread fraud in the elections that sparked the Orange Revolution, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which monitored Sunday’s election in Moldova, gave it a tentative thumbs up, saying that they had no evidence to back up opposition claims of vote-fraud or voter intimidation. The activists in this case seem to just be protesting the fact that their side didn’t win (you could call it the Norm Coleman strategy).

And here’s where the protests start to get strange. When people took to the streets in places like Ukraine and Georgia they called for democratic reforms, one demand made by protestors in Moldova was for unification with neighboring Romania, with some going so far as to fly the Romanian flag over the Moldovan parliament (Moldova shares many cultural and ethnic ties with Romania; the two languages are nearly identical). This has led Moldova’s President Vladimir Voronin to accuse Romania of being behind the uprising.

The economy also seems to have played a large role in the protests. Moldova is the poorest country in Europe, and remittances from Moldovan working abroad were an important part of their economy. But, because of the global recession, many Moldovan migrant workers lost their jobs and were forced to return home – striking a blow to Moldova’s economy and causing a big spike in unemployment.

For now the Communist government seems to be in control, but the situation remains tense. And this week’s uprising could cause problems in the thawing of relations between Russia and the West. Like Georgia, Moldova has its own separatist region – Transnestr, which has been a quasi-independent state since the early 1990’s. Transnestr (a thin strip of land between the Dniester River in Moldova and the Ukraine border) is hoping for full independence and economic ties with Russia. There is speculation that Transnestr may use the uprising in Chisinau and instability in Moldova as a justification for their own drive for independence.