Vasile Nedelciuc, a member of the Presidium of the first Parliament and chairman of the parliamentary commission on foreign affairs of that period, said many big mistakes were made under the first Parliament and the first mistake was when the representatives of the People’s Front in Parliament, he being one of them, accepted to support a Prime Minister who headed a Government where 80-90% of the members were not their representatives, but the representatives of the other MPs. As the People’s Front didn’t have a parliamentary majority, this was a fatal mistake. The statement was made in a public debate entitled “Independence: steps forward and steps backward, in view of parties that held and hold administrative posts in the state”. This was the 93rd installment of the series “Developing political culture by public debates” that are organized by IPN News Agency and Radio Moldova.
Vasile Nedelciuc said he tried to oppose even if his colleagues had no idea what Parliament and a parliamentary majority meant. As a result, he was labelled the man of Moscow and of the KGB. The second big mistake was that the people didn’t understand that it is practically impossible to keep or develop the industrial inheritance from the old regime if you proclaim the independence. Many of the enterprises were controlled by Moscow. With the proclamation of the independence by the state, Moscow itself initiated the gradual stopping of financing of the economic entities in Chisinau. But some continue to assert in a demagogical way that the Democrats came and destroyed the economy.
The third mistake, according to Vasile Nedelciuc, was a political one. The Union was to be normally made. As this wasn’t made, there was declared the Independence. When there was a war on its territory, it wasn’t the case for the Republic of Moldova to become a CIS member, before a solution was identified. The entry into the CIS and the permanent neutrality are millstones on Moldova’s destiny. The privatization that continued with the second Parliament was the fourth mistake. There were good things in that period too, such as the Declaration of Independence in rather difficult conditions. “The Declaration continues to be a key document and will continue to be so for many years ahead.” Also, the first Parliament was the one that opened the door for young people to studies in Romania, but also made the first steps towards the West and the first approaches to the Heads of State of Europe,” he stated.
Another mistake in that period, later made by the Agrarian Democratic Party itself, which had an overwhelming majority of seats of MP, was the fact that insufficiently knowledgeable people didn’t realize that Romania and the other countries of the region were to become member states of the European Union. Those years should have been maximally used to build more ties with Romania so that Moldova had been accepted as a state with a special status within the European Union when Romania joined the EU.
Asked how realistic the idea of Moldova’s union with Romania was at that time, Vasile Nedelciuc said the union was wanted by everyone as it was something normal. “When the Soviet Union collapsed and we were occupied by Russians, where were we to go? If we had been like the Baltic states, we would have restored the Constitution that existed before 1944 and not all the comers would have taken part in elections and we would have developed like the Baltic states. But we were unable to restore the Constitution of the Kingdom of Romania as this no longer existed,” he noted.
The debate “Independence: steps forward and steps backward, in view of parties that held and hold administrative posts in the state” forms part of the series of public debates that are staged by IPN Agency and Radio Moldova within the project “Developing political culture by public debates” that is supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany.
