Communists will be playing the victim, analyst

The Communists’ Party (PCRM) will challenge the ban on Communist symbols the hammer and the sickle in the Constitutional Court. If it won’t manage to defend this right legally, then it will find other symbols that will look like the Communist ones. Meanwhile, it will be playing the victim, thinks analyst Igor Botan, director of the Association for Participatory Democracy (ADEPT). “Mihai Ghimpu’s achievement is that Communist symbols won’t remind people anymore about the period when a Communist Party was governing. This decision has been promoted by Mr. Ghimpu for quite a while. It’s suspicious, however, the decision of the other AIE MPs who preferred to vote altogether and shirked from personal voting”, said the ADEPT director. In Igor Botan's opinion, it’s strange that Parliament didn’t condemn the people who praised the regime as well. If a regime is denounced, then those who promoted it should be condemned as well for spreading the ideological seeds in the hearts of the youth, thinks the ADEPT director. “Naturally, the condemnation of the regime should be followed by lustration. We must understand why some people chose to gain from the regime and then turned into anti-Communists when it fell to gain once more. These people are profiteers and this must be emphasized”, said Igor Botan. The ADEPT executive director thinks that by adopting the decision to forbid Communists symbols and to condemn the totalitarian regime, the Liberal Party proved itself as a consistent party. However, the analyst is skeptical about the Liberals’ gain from this bill. “By making its colleagues vote for this decision, PL made sure that Dodon’s reformatting dream was unattainable. Those who voted with PL are now in the anti-Communist camp and can’t ally with the PCRM”, concluded Igor Botan. After long debates, the Parliament in Chisinau condemned on July 12 the totalitarian Communist regime of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, on the basis of two bills proposed by the Liberal group. The first bill condemned the regime and its symbols. The second bill modified the Law on political parties by forbidding the use of Communist symbols for political purposes. After the vote of the parliamentary majority, the Communists’ Party MPs walked out of the assembly hall without making any statements.