Opposition in Moldova to picket embassies of EU member-states

Moldova’s opposition will be picketing the local office of the European Commission and the embassies of EU member-states in the days of the summit of the EU’s so-called Eastern Partnership format, Vladimir Voronin, the leader of the Communist Party and the former President of Moldova told reporters Monday. “We demand that the EU leadership tell Moldovan government to stop political abuse of the country, to resign immediately and to allow the nation to exercise (the right to) a free and democratic expression of its will,” Voronin said. “The so-called European choice declared by the authorities doesn’t mean any potential membership of this country in the EU but envisions only the introduction of economic and political subjugation to Brussels and restrictions on any fruitful cooperation with Russia and the Customs Union (the Eurasian Customs Union that embraces Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia at present — Itar-Tass),” he said. “Those who speak about Vilnius /Lithuania’s capital where the Eastern Partnership summit will be held — Itar-Tass) as a bright prospect of some sort are sheer liars because Vilnius means nothing but blunt absence of any prospects at all, and the European ones in the first place,” Voronin said. “It implies duties without freedoms, the split of the country without any hope for peaceful reunification, and an irreversible installation of the power of gangsters, oligarch and contraband operators,” he said. “It will be irreversible solely on the grounds that those bandits will steer the country along an anti-Russian course, not the pro-European one.” The Communists gathered a many-thousands-strong meeting on Chisinau’s central square over the weekend. It waved the motto urging the authorities to renounce the initialing of an agreement on association between Moldova and the EU. Initiators said the meeting had brought together more than 50,000 people who had come from all across the country. “Moldova can become a European country only by joining the Customs Union, which will give its people many opportunities for full-fledged development of their homeland,” Voronin said while taking the floor at the meeting. He expressed greetings to “the people and the government of Ukraine that have displayed political will and have not succumbed to pressures from Brussels, which wanted to force Ukrainians into serfdom.” Only a week is left before the summit in Vilnius where Moldova hopes to initial the agreement on association and free trade zone with the EU but the attitude to that event in Moldovan society is highly variegated. The most recent opinion polls show that the number of proponents of integration in the EU and proponents of getting membership in the Customs Union is more or less equal.