Moldova does not plan to leave CIS – President

Moldova does not intend to quit the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), President Vladimir Voronin told the 28th meeting of the Interparliamentary Assembly of CIS member countries, on the occasion of organisation’s 15th anniversary, which took place in St. Petersburg on Thursday, May 31. In his speech delivered at the meeting, Voronin asked what CIS is in fact – a project for the future or a mechanism to forget the common Soviet past. “It is a complicated question, especially for Moldova, which declared that the strategy of its political, legal and economic modernisation is directed towards the European integration. It might seem that in this case Moldova should leave the CIS, to choose once and for all one of the integrations and build relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other countries of the Commonwealth exclusively on the basis of bilateral relations. However, Moldova is obviously not acting in this way. Moreover, it does not even intend to do so”, the head of state said. Explaining this option, the President says that “we should not fight for the free movement of persons, goods and capital to the West and limit to the East. Any asymmetrical development path diminishes the possibilities of peoples, puts artificial options between good and good in front of them. Any unilateral way of development creates new borders, new hard to cross barriers”. Voronin says that “we are obliged to thing globally, to exclude isolationism, nationalism, xenophobia, and the wish to isolate from the rest of the world”. In his speech, the President said that the CIS member countries should find the necessary powers to make the organisation truly active, dynamic, in the centre of which is the human being with its rights and freedoms not the egoistic interests of the political elites. “Otherwise the new generations from both sides of the new barrier, artificially created, will believe the doubtful truths about the foreign, mercenary and false West, or about our native impotence for democracy and rule of law”, Vladmir Voronin said at the meeting of the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly