Zwischen Arktis Adria und Armenien

The “Transnistrian Moldovan Republic” 229
Moldovan police. But it is obvious that the Russian high command tolerates serious
offences against the demilitarization of the Security Zone by the Transnistrian
side, such as the stationing of troops and war material in the historical forts of Bendery.
Since the summer of 1992, the conflict between Chişinău and Tiraspol’ has come
to a stalemate with a permanent solution yet to be found – despite serious negotiations
on the part of the CSCE/OSCE and numerous other international non-governmental
organizations as well as by the Russian Federation and the Ukraine. 52 A process of
bilateral talks between the two parts of the country, which began slowly in 1994 but
was seen by the Transnistrian side primarily as a diversion, came to a standstill in
2001 because of a zig-zag course on the part of the new communist government of
Moldova. No serious political intention to reach a lasting compromise has been visible
on either side of the Dniester – and probably neither in Moscow or in Kiev. The
result is a decade of stagnation.
VI. Trying to explain the causes of the conflict
Current research on the motives and driving forces behind the Transnistrian conflict
and its development has improved since the outbreak of open violence a decade
ago. Initial analyses of the conflict tended to interpret it as being ethnic, that is, as a
conflict between ‘(Eastern) Slavs’ or ‘Russians’ on the one hand and ‘(eastern) Romance-speakers’
or ‘Moldovans’ (or ‘Romanians’) on the other hand. At the time,
some experts on the region criticized this characterization by stressing the ideological
aspects of the conflict and the participants of the conflict into ‘Soviet nostalgics’
and ‘democrats’. In 1998, however, not less than ten studies were published, offering
a much wider range of explanations:
(1) The Norwegian political scientist Pål Kolstø and his Ukrainian colleague Andrej
Mal’gin interpreted the Transnistrian movement and the TMR as “a case
of politicized regionalism”: Following this argument, the conflict had ethnic
and ideological components, but neither ethnicity nor ideology were the driving
force. They identified the different regional identities on both sides of the
Dniester as the real cause – identities which had developed due to divergent
historical experiences. 53
(2) This revisionist viewpoint caused a direct response by two political scientists
from the United States, Stuart J. Kaufman and Stephen R. Bowers, who continued
to see the conflict as an ethnic one in the classical sense. According to
them, this ethnic character was difficult to decipher as the intervention of the
52 Concerning the negotiation process and the mediating role of the CSCE/OSCE see Gottfried Hanne,
“The Role and Activities of the OSCE Mission to Moldova in the Process of Transdniestrian Conflict
Resolution”, 2 European Yearbook of Minority Issues (2002/3), 31–51.
53 Kolstø, Malgin, “The Transnistrian Republic”, 103–104.
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