The Public Association “Za Russkii Iazyk” (“For the Russian Language”) has launched a campaign to collect signatures in support of the Moldovan (!) and Russian languages on the territory of the Republic of Moldova. The citizens will be asked to sign if they agree that Moldovan should be the official language and Russian should be the official interethnic communication language. The initiators of the campaign intend to collect up to 500,000 signatures during three months.

The signatures will be collected by volunteers. These could be found in tents or would form mobile teams with the symbols of the public organization. As of September, information about the exact place where the campaign will start will be published on the organization’s website zarea.md and on its Facebook page. The organizers aim to gradually embrace the whole territory of the country.

In a news conference at IPN, the representative of the Civil Society Council working under the President of the Republic of Moldova Sergey Mișin said the collected signatures will be submitted to the Government and Parliament. Consequently, the legislative body will be requested to specify in the legislation that Moldovan is the official language of the Republic of Moldova, while Russian is the official interethnic communication language. Later the Government could bring all its regulations in compliance with these changes.

Sergey Mișin disapproves of some of the MPs’ intentions to amend the Constitution and replace ‘the Moldovan language’ with ‘the Romanian language’ and to annul the law on the functioning of languages. “The representatives of the power lie when they say that nothing happened and the law works. This shows that they intentionally want to change the name of the official language into Romanian and, respectively, to remove Russian from communication and also other languages spoken by the national minorities that live in the Republic of Moldova. We will not allow this to happen,” he stated.

Mihail Ahrentsov, of the Public Association “Za Russkii Iazyk”, said Moldova is close to an interethnic conflict. The Moldovan language and the Russian one are subject to pressure. “I fear replacing ‘the Moldovan language’ with ‘the Romanian language’ in the Constitution and adding the Russian language to the category of foreign languages will be the next steps that will be taken by the government,” he stated.

The initiators of the campaign called on the public organizations and parties that are not indifferent to the given problem to join the signature collection campaign.