ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

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with the Transnistrians on that level before except through the OSCE Mission, and Washington agreed it was worth making the effort from a bilateral standpoint. Smirnov was, of course, a thug but I had experience in dealing with those from Belgrade. He was not even a Moldovan. He had come to Transnistria from Russia after the Soviet break-up and led the secession effort, and afterward he turned the territory into a big moneymaking machine. You have to understand that, while the war had its origins in some real ethnic tension that arose when the Soviet Union broke up, by 1998 the ethnic component of the conflict was kept alive artificially. Relations between Romanian and Slavic speakers were much improved. There was no real threat of unification between Moldova and Romania. Transnistria still existed because it was turned into an economic fiefdom for Smirnov, his family and his cronies. I used to call it Europe’s biggest duty free shop. It was basically a big staging area for smuggling operations. Enormous amounts of money were made by smuggling goods into Ukraine and Moldova proper through Transnistria to avoid taxes and customs duties. Many people in both Moldova and Ukraine were complicit in this and made money from it. Q: How did this work? PERINA: The basic scenario was something like this. A shipment of goods would come into the port of Odessa marked as destined for Transnistria. The Ukrainians would allow it to pass duty free to Tiraspol, the capital of Transnistria. Then it would be smuggled across the border back into Ukraine or into Moldova without payment of any duties. This was relatively easy to do. Moldova had no checkpoints because it did not want to imply that Transnistria was a separate country. As for Ukraine, there were many entry points along the lengthy border. People on the Ukrainian side who were in on the scheme also paid off customs officials, and so on. With high duty items like cigarettes and liquor, the profits were enormous but many commodities besides these were also smuggled. I heard estimates of hundreds of millions of dollars generated through such a scheme. Clearly many people in Moldova and Ukraine were involved and had a vested interest in keeping this going, including very high-ranking people in the Ukrainian government. That is a major reason why it was so difficult to get Ukraine to put pressure on Transnistria. But getting back to Smirnov, when I arrived and Lucinschi was president of Moldova, the conflict had become fairly benign. There were still formal talks to resolve it but the tensions were low. In fact, Smirnov sometimes actually visited Chisinau from Transnistria. I first met him at a Russian Embassy reception that he was attending. The relationship between Transnistria and Moldova became much tenser after Voronin became President. In any case, Smirnov was hardly isolated, and we saw no benefit in avoiding talking to him. I received the Department’s concurrence to have some meetings and try to persuade him to find a resolution to the conflict. This had to be done carefully because Smirnov was of course looking for ways to make any contact with Westerners look like recognition of an independent Transnistria. During my first visit to Tiraspol, the Transnistrians wanted to have television cameras, a formal lunch and so on. I refused all this and said I would only come for a meeting and no protocol functions. The Transnistrians agreed because they wanted a dialogue. Altogether I met with Smirnov about half a dozen times during my tour. They were frustrating talks. 98
Q: How so? PERINA: Well, he felt under no real pressure to change a profitable arrangement. His only interest was in keeping it going. It was clear that the ethnic issue was no longer a concern even for him, although he still used it publicly as a pretext for secession. The real issues were all economic. He wanted to retain Transnistria as a money making operation. Unlike in other secessions, say Kosovo or Abkhazia, the Transnistrians did not insist on being recognized as an independent country, having a UN seat and so on. Their so-called foreign Minister Valeri Litskai once told me that they would be happy to be like Taiwan: not recognized as a separate country but free to have all their own economic relations. “Just let us do our business,” he would argue. The problem is we could not allow that because it was hurting all of Moldova badly. Tax revenue was lost by the Moldovan government. Foreign investors were afraid to go into a country with an unresolved conflict. It was draining resources that were needed for development. We wanted Moldova to be stable and successful, and Transnistria was clearly an obstacle to that. An additional problem was that a lot of Moldova’s industry was located in Transnistria. This had been done since the days of Stalin so that the industrial base would not be directly on the frontline. But it was industry that Moldova as a whole needed badly for its economy. It was unfair for just the Transnistrians to exploit it. There was, for example, a steel plant which was one of the largest and best in the former Soviet Union. When I was preparing for my confirmation hearings, I looked at the trade figures and I saw that the U.S. had a trade deficit with Moldova. I could not believe this. I asked the desk to look into this, and it turned out that we were one of the importers of rolled steel from Transnistria. These are the steel rods that are most often put into construction concrete, and importing them was not illegal because there were no U.S. sanctions in place against Transnistria. On the contrary, the U.S. was purchasing so much Transnistrian steel that on paper we had a trade deficit with Moldova. Q: How did the Russian troops in Transnistria fit into all this? Were they selling their tanks in the background? PERINA: There were two categories of Russian troops, with the distinction between them often deliberately blurred by the Russians. One category was several hundred Russian peacekeepers who were there ostensibly to maintain a ceasefire. The Moldovans had agreed to these but regretted the agreement almost before the ink was dry. The second category was several thousand troops who were remnants of the Soviet 14 th Army that had been stationed in Moldova during the Cold War. They were ostensibly there to guard the military weapons and stockpiles left over from the 14 th Army and not yet withdrawn. This included over 40,000 tons of ageing ammunition stored at a military base in Transnistria called Cobasna. The Moldovans wanted the stockpiles plus the Russian troops out of Moldova but the Russians claimed that Smirnov would not let them withdraw the weapons and ammunition and they could not let this materiel fall into his hands by leaving. There was a lot of theater in this because the Russians in fact had means to put pressure on Transnistria if they really wanted Smirnov to let them leave. But Smirnov did claim that all of this materiel belonged to Transnistria, just as other Soviet 99
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The Association for Diplomatic Stud
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Holbrooke visits Albanians Dayton M
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throughout the country were execute
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capitalists and so on. At that time
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taken to an apartment which initial
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Q: You said that after Cleveland yo
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they agreed to send me there. Marxi
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most comprehensive collection of in
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Q: What was the background of your
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is there from that trial?” I thou
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word that he was going to come to a
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Q: During the Vietnam War, there wa
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very different interpretations. The
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Q: So you were there from 1979? PER
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I will always remember that staff m
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was very tough. We did suspend the
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line was that a person was made to
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there. The Polish economy was nose-
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Q: What sorts of issues did you tal
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war. But I can tell you that the So
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museums. Even in the private sector
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to the Soviet Union. Everything tha
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phrases “Open this gate, tear dow
Page 47 and 48: PERINA: Yes, they did. Jumping ahea
Page 49 and 50: Those plenary sessions I actually w
Page 51 and 52: PERINA: That is exactly right. The
Page 53 and 54: Q: OK, in 1989 you’re going to th
Page 55 and 56: PERINA: This was an issue because o
Page 57 and 58: position in Europe, and really the
Page 59 and 60: Soviet domination. They had histori
Page 61 and 62: Q: That was my impression as well w
Page 63 and 64: welcoming dinner in a restaurant an
Page 65 and 66: Q: How were you received by the Ser
Page 67 and 68: eard, and he functioned as everythi
Page 69 and 70: Part of the reason that we didn’t
Page 71 and 72: One of the more interesting people
Page 73 and 74: Q: So what was happening with Kosov
Page 75 and 76: Albanians were very anxious to have
Page 77 and 78: I remember Holbrooke’s first visi
Page 79 and 80: cannot now remember what finally tr
Page 81 and 82: Q: And this was not an idle comment
Page 83 and 84: price for having a very bad leaders
Page 85 and 86: PERINA: Certainly during the period
Page 87 and 88: Q: So you took over the Holbrooke r
Page 89 and 90: PERINA: Not really. We coordinated
Page 91 and 92: why I believed that it was not wort
Page 93 and 94: Q: Can you give a brief summary of
Page 95 and 96: PERINA: Well the American interests
Page 97: shorter visits of three to four wee
Page 101 and 102: Q: Still, it strikes me that all of
Page 103 and 104: As for the European Union, most Mol
Page 105 and 106: PERINA: Nagorno-Karabakh is the mos
Page 107 and 108: e called the “Prague Process” w
Page 109 and 110: we physically crossed the front lin
Page 111 and 112: were about three-quarters of the po
Page 113 and 114: down to the Black Sea. Since I was
Page 115 and 116: PERINA: It is difficult to say. He
Page 117 and 118: political interests to keep it goin
Page 119 and 120: a huge personal embarrassment. It l
Page 121 and 122: clearly followed the advice because
Page 123 and 124: good governance and so on. In its b
Page 125 and 126: Deputy Secretary, Richard Armitage,
Page 127 and 128: PERINA: Relations with Europe were
Page 129: End of interview 129
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