Ion Hadârcă, head of the 1991 Moldovan Government in exile, said he squarely brought up the possibility of Bessarabia’s unifying with Romania during a meeting with then Romanian President Ion Iliescu, to only be refused.

During an IPN debate dedicated to the events of August 1991, Hadârcă said the disintegrating Soviet Union prompted a group of Moldovan politicians to act.

“In Bucharest, we first were received by Adrian Năstase, the foreign minister. Later, we were granted an audience with Prime Minister Petre Roman. Our repeated plea was to get support for the de facto Government of Moldova, for the democratic processes and the condemnation of the August Coup. The third meeting was with President Iliescu. We had no authorization to discuss political matters. I was just a symbol of the situation in which we found ourselves. We did, however, bring up the subject of the Ribentrop-Molotov pact, and that was the key moment of the meeting with Romania’s top leadership”, said Ion Hadârcă.

It was in this context, says Hadârcă, that Iliescu was asked to reclaim Romania’s old territories so that Bessarabia could again become part of it.

“I said that it was only natural that our Mother Country reclaims its right over this piece of territory that was taken away with that dictatorial treaty of 1939. Things were already set in motion: the Baltic republics already proclaimed their independence and left the Soviet empire, while we remained stuck in limbo. We were occupied in 1940 and now we needed to return within our natural borders”, added Hadârcă.

However, Iliescu had a “pragmatic” approach.

“We were told that Romania just got rid of the Ceaușescu regime and the totalitarian system, that there was bad blood between Romania and its neighbors over the Quadrilateral. We were told that the world was unstable around Romania, so much so that the country risked disintegration. Under the Paris treaty, Romania was recognized within the established borders. And the Helsinki Final Act stipulated the immutability of borders of all countries, so changing borders was unacceptable”, Hadârcă recalled his meeting with Iliescu in August 1991.

The debate was the 259th instalment of IPN’s Political Culture Series, run with the support of the Hanns Seidel Foundation.