Romania’s president has offered to fast-track citizenship for up to one million Moldovans, saying Bucharest could not stand by idly as an “iron curtain” descended on its eastern border.
The provocative move, which would effectively give EU citizenship to almost a quarter of the population of Europe’s poorest state, comes following rising tension over contested elections there earlier this month.
Moldova’s Communist government has blamed Romania for fuelling the unrest and last week expelled its ambassador.
Moldova’s ruling Communist Party leader Vladimir Voronin, a former Soviet general, has accused Romania of trying to stage a coup as part of plans to annex Moldova, with which it shares ethnic and language ties.
Romanian president Traian Basescu told parliament late on Tuesday that his government must speed up the process of granting Romanian citizenship to ethnic Romanians who live in Moldova. “I have asked the government as a matter of urgency to change the citizenship law so we can facilitate and speed up the process of regaining citizenship for those Romanians and their families who lost it abusively,” he said.
Romania’s move would give citizenship to anyone who has at least one grandparent who was once a Romanian national. The two countries were linked for centuries, which has often led to tension.
Moldova is divided between speakers of Slavic languages, many of them marooned after the fall of the Soviet Union, and speakers of Moldovan, a variant of Romanian, who tend to support the opposition.
A senior Moldovan Communist MP said the government there would respond by outlawing dual citizenship.
Tensions have been mounting in the nation of 4.4 million people since elections on April 5th handed a 49 per cent victory to Mr Voronin’s Communist Party, leaving it one seat short of the 61 needed to appoint a new president.
Three opposition parties say the election was rigged by padding out the electoral roll with the names of the dead and long-term emigres.
The opposition fears that a recount, begun yesterday, may favour the Communists, who are just 200 votes short of an outright victory. It also wants to continue vetting the electoral roll, a process suspended by a court decision last night.
Vlad Filat, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrat party, yesterday criticised what Moldovans see as EU passivity in the face of human rights violations on its border.
“We understand . . . they have to engage with [Mr] Voronin, but the serious human rights abuses . . . are more urgent,” he said.
– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)