History of Pridnestrovie (PMR)
August 1991: as Moldova declared independence from the USSR, the Slavic-dominated Eastern bank of the Dniestr river declared sovereignty, splitting from the Romanian-dominated rest of the country.
1992: armed forces on each side of the river clash over the status of the Pridnestrovian region. Pridnestrovie is created and Russian peace keeping troops are deployed along the river. The idea of a “common state” is accepted in principle. In reality, a militarized security zone separates Moldova from the breakaway republic.
Antiquity and Middle Ages
The area where Pridnestrovie is now located has been inhabited by Indo-European tribes for millenia, being a borderland between Dacia and Scythia. The Ancient Greek Miletians founded about 600 BC a colony named Tyras, situated on the mouth of the Dniester river (Tyras) near today’s Tiraspol.
In the early Middle Ages, the Tivertsy (Slavs), and the Vlachs are mentioned as living in Pridnestrovie. Turkic nomads such as the Petchenegs and Cumans were present in 11th-13th centuries, having controlled the territory especially from the military point of view (see Cumania). Following the Mongol invasion of Europe (1241), for a period of time, the territory was under Mongol control, and later under the Crimean Khanate, one of the five successors of the Golden Horde Empire. Genoese traders opened colonies on the shore of the Dniester around 1300, having to pay tribute for that to the Tatars. From the 15th century, parts of what today consists Pridnestrovie was briefly ceded by the Tatars to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, when they were called Dykra. The territory was conquered by the Ottoman Empire around 1700 , becoming part of the Yedisan province. By that time the population was composed of Moldovans and Tatars.
Russian Empire
In 1792 the region was ceded by the Ottoman to the Russian Empire as a result of sixth Russo-Turkish War. Until the Russian Revolution, the current Pridnestrovie was divided between imperial guberniyas of Podolia, Kherson, and Bessarabia. The territories which now consist the breakaway republic, were part of the larger New Russia region, hence it witnessed a strong colonization process, with a multitude of ethnies being settled: lands were given to enserfed peasantry from Russia and Ukraine (see also Nova Serbia), and Jews and Germans were brought to facilitate economic development. Nonetheless, by the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of the inhabitants was constituted by ethnic Romanians (Moldovans).
Soviet Union
Pridnestrovie became an autonomous political entity in 1924 with the proclamation of the Moldavian ASSR, which included today’s Pridnestrovie as well as an area around the city of Balta in modern-day Ukraine, but nothing from Bessarabia, which at the time was part of Romania. Another reason for the creation of the Moldavian ASSR was the desire of the Soviet Union at the time to eventually incorporate Bessarabia. The Moldavian SSR, which was organised by a decision of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 2 August 1940, was formed from a part of Bessarabia (taken from Romania on 28 June, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact), and a part of the Moldavian ASSR which is roughly equivalent to present-day Pridnestrovie. In 1941, after Axis forces invaded Bessarabia in the course of the Second World War, they cut off the Soviet troops around Odessa along the river Southern Bug, then advanced over the Dniester river and occupied the region. By March 1943, a total of 185,000 Ukrainian and Romanian Jews had been deported and murdered under Romanian and German occupation of Pridnestrovie. The Soviet Union regained the area in 1944, and the Soviet colonisation of the region was resumed.
Secession to the Present
Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika in the Soviet Union allowed the political liberalisation at the regional level in 1980s. On 2 September 1990, the Moldovan Republic of Pridnestrovie was unilaterally proclaimed as a Soviet republic by the “Second Congress of the Peoples’ Representatives of Pridnestrovie”. On 22 December 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of USSR, signed a decree that declared the decisions of this congress legally void. Nevertheless, neither the USSR, nor Moldova, a Soviet Socialist Republic at the time, took any significant practical action, hence the new authorities in Tiraspol slowly got control over the region.
The War of Pridnestrovie involved armed clashes on a limited scale that broke out between the Pridnestrovian separatists and the Moldovan police as early as November 1990 at Dubasari. On 2 March 1992, Moldovan President Mircea Snegur authorized concerted military action against rebel forces which had been attacking Moldovan police outposts on the left bank of the Dniester, and on a certain smaller section of the right bank in the southern city of Tighina. The rebels, aided by contingents of Russian Cossacks and the Russian 14th Army, consolidated their control over most of the disputed area, but by no means over all of it, as later testified by Moldovan police and volunteer forces in battles at Tighina and Varnita, at Cocieri-Dubasari and Cosnita-Dorotcaia plateaus. As a result of this civil war, hundreds of people were killed, and thousands were forced to leave Pridnestrovie as refugees. Throughout 1992 fighting intensified, until a ceasefire was signed on 21 July 1992 which has held ever since.
The OSCE is trying to facilitate a negotiated settlement. Under OSCE auspices, on 8 May 1997, the Moldovan President Petru Lucinschi and the Pridnestrovian president Igor Smirnov, signed the “Memorandum on the principles of normalizations of the relations between the Republic of Moldova and Pridnestrovie”, also known as the “Primakov Memorandum”, sustaining the establishment of legal and state relations, although the memorandum’s provisions had diverging legal and political interpretations in Chisinau and Tiraspol.
In November 2003, Russia has proposed another memorandum, which contained the most detailed to date proposition on the creation of an asymmetric federal Moldovan state. To ensure the implementation of this plan, Russian troops were proposed to be stationed in Moldova for another 20 years [citation needed]. This plan was named “the Kozak memorandum”, after its author Dmitry Kozak, a counselor of the Russian president Vladimir Putin. It did not coincide with the Pridnestrovian position, which demanded equal status for Pridnestrovie and the rest of Moldova. In Moldova, demonstrations took place against the memorandum, when its full text was made public.
Vladimir Voronin, who before its publication was supportive of the plan, refused to sign it without the coordination of OSCE and UE. It is widely believed, although supported only by circumstantial evidence, that this reaction appeared after a high official of the US government phoned Voronin. Putin’s official visit to Moldova, that was due within days, was immediately canceled, and the Maastricht union of OSCE in 2003 was deadlocked mainly because of Russian-Western disputes over the Pridnestrovian issue. The formal refusal of Voronin was motivated as follows: the stationing of foreign troops on Moldovan soil contradicts the state’s neutrality stipulated by the Constitution of Moldova. The refusal resulted in the sudden and long-term cooling of relations between Moldova and Russia.
Source: Wikipedia and Documentaire
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posted: 11 January 2007
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