Poet Ion Hadarca, an influential politician at the dawn of independent Moldova and one of the members of Parliament who voted for Moldova’s independence on 27 August 1991, finds the country, 17 years later, to be living a phase of political and social uncertainty. Ion Hadarca has told Info-Prim Neo that he is not quite happy with what is going on in Moldova now, as the country departed much from the great achievement of 27 August 1991. The fact that the Declaration of Independence is barely mentioned today is a consequence of a scheme meant to bury those events in oblivion. According to Hadarca, the preparations for the great event of proclaiming independence had begun in mid 80s together with the first debates of the intellectual class, after which the advocates of the restructuring started forming democratic movements, which later grew into the People’s Front. Those stages paved the way for the Great National Assembly of 27 August 1989, which was a landmark event for the revival of the national consciousness, a fusion between the aspirations of the intellectual class and those of the people. Then was the election of the first democratic parliament, which actually was the generator of the Declaration of Independence, preceded by the proclamation of sovereignty, the first of the kind in the whole USSR. Furthermore, it was the first Parliament that adopted, at Hadarca’s suggestion, the already abandoned national anthem “Deşteaptă-te, române” (“Awaken Thee, Romanian”), which, says Hadarca, brought the nation back to its “natural course of history, language, and geographic space”. The declaration of independence was supposed to be followed by a continuous process of democratization and integration into the democratic space of the European community, but that didn’t happen, says Hadarca. According to him, the war waged by Russia, the imperial policy, the economic blockade and the secessionism ruined all hopes and dispersed the democratic forces, which were too weak at that time to turn ideas into action. “Let’s not forget that Romania didn’t know how to react to the Declaration of Independence, either, but to assert that those intellectuals, that generation suffered a fiasco is a lack of responsibility by some people that want to deny everything but have nothing to give instead”, says Ion Hadarca, adding that he places all his hopes for a brighter future in the upcoming parliamentary elections.