PL and PNL commemorate victims of Soviet regime separately

The Liberal Party commemorated the victims of the Soviet occupation regime with a meeting on Tuesday, June 28, in the Great National Assembly Square in Chisinau. An hour later, the National-Liberal Party proponents arrived in the square as well. They organized a march on the same occasion, from their headquarters on Calea Iesilor Street. As soon as the National-Liberals arrived, PL finished its manifestation, Info-Prim Neo reports. Historian Anatol Petrenco declared at the PL meeting that the Soviet troops installed slavery in Basarabia, as people were obliged to work to exhaustion. The chairman of Historians’ Association in Moldova, Gheorghe Negru, said that after the territorial “amputation” of Romania, a similar thing happened to Basarabia, which lost the districts of Hotin, Ismail and Cetatea Alba. “The Soviet administration started by arresting and exterminating the Romanian elite, the members of the previous administration and parties, the members of Sfatul Tarii (the National Council)”, he said. Gherorghe Negru quoted Russian historians, according to which, about 90,000 people had been arrested and deported between June 28, 1940, and June 13, 1941. In September, 1940, the Latin writing was forbidden and replaced with the Russian one, according to a decision of the Central Committee Bureau of the Communist Party in Moldova. “We suffer the consequences until today. We lost our way to modernity, we don’t know where to go- East or West? CIS or Europe? We have become a land with an uncertain identity, unable to distinguish Russian imperial myths from our own national values”, added Negru. The first Speaker of Moldova, Alexandru Mosanu, said that whoever denied this truth, denied the documents of the National Renaissance and Liberation Movement. “The decision to proclaim our independence was based, first of all, on the historical argument”, stressed Mosanu. “1812, 1940, 1992- these are years when either the Soviet, Tsarist or democratic Russia took our lands and divided us, the Romanians, in different states and camps”, declared Mihai Ghimpu, leader of the Liberal Party. He is confident that one day, true and democratic Russians will come into power in Russia and they will accept that every people have the right to decided its own destiny. “That’s why we have no money, no roads, no schools, no houses. The 1940 occupation halted the course given by God for us to build houses for our families in a truly free country”. Maria Crudu, a 71 year old pensioner, remembered the night that ruined her childhood. “In the night between July 5 and 6, 1949, they came and took us outside. I and my little sister were crying, we didn’t understand what was happening. They put us in a cart, then in a train. My mother was pregnant and about to give birth”, she recalls. The women spoke about the famine that followed, when she and her family were left without homes, animals, provisions. “My father worked as a woodcutter all day long”, she said. According to PL, about 200 people participated in the manifestation. The march organized by PNL and several NGOs started with a memorial service officiated by priests of the Metropolitan Church of Basarabia, which was followed by a recital of patriotic poetry and songs. According to the PNL leader, Vitalia Pavlicenco, the action gathered people from different districts of the country. On June 28, 1940, Russian troops occupied Basarabia as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Germany and Russia, signed on August 23, 1939. On June 24, 2010, the interim President of Moldova at that time, Mihai Ghimpu, decreed June 28 the Soviet Occupation Day. On July 12, the decree was annulled by the Constitutional Court.