Birth of a nation: Putting Pridnestrovie on the map

"No people must be forced under a sovereignty under which it does not wish to live." Those immortal words, spoken by a U.S. president, became the beacon of freedom and hope when Pridnestrovie declared its independence on September 2, 1990.

But in the absence of a single one-world government, who decides whether a country has the right to exist ... or if it must vanish from the map?

The United Nation's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is clear and straight to the point: "All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development." The UN General Assembly, in Resolution 637, agrees: "Self-determination is a prerequisite to the full enjoyment of all fundamental human rights." And, to drive the point home, UNESCO (in Barcelona, 1998) affirms that "the principle and fundamental right of self-determination is firmly established in international law."

So on the face of it, the issue is simple: The people of Pridnestrovian can freely determine its own political status as a separate, independent nation. In fact, it is a human right firmly established in international law. Case closed?

Not so fast. The UN does not equate self-determination with automatic statehood. The right to self-determination is the right of a people to determine its own destiny. The principle of self-determination is prominently embodied in the very first article of the Charter of the United Nations, yet not surprisingly most of the UN's members are leary of anything that could infringe their own territorial integrity.
In 1990, when Pridnestrovie emerged into freedom after life under Soviet rule, the right to self-determination was one of the four pillars on which Pridnestrovie based its Declaration of Independence. In and of itself, it is not enough to establish Pridnestrovskaia Moldavskaia Respublica in international law. But together with the other three pillars, the moral right to self-determination adds to an already convincing case for Pridnestrovie's statehood.

"In the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them." These words from the unilateral Declaration of Independence of the United States established the principle of self-determination. Along with similar developments in the French Revolution at the same time, they which marked the demise of the notion that individuals and peoples, as subjects of the King, were objects to be transferred, alienated, ceded, or protected in accordance with the interests of the monarch.
The core of the principle lies in the American and French insistence that the government be responsible to the people — the same democratic principle enshrined in Pridnestrovie's constitution, and on which Pridnestrovie in the true Jeffersonian tradition is founded; by the people and for the people.

Before the modern-day right of self determination, states felt that they had the right to justify allocations of territories to one state as opposed to another. A remnant of this principle, which was previously thought to have been discarded two hundred years ago, still lives on in the minds of certain OSCE- or State Dept bureaucrats who, along with Moldovan and Romanian politicians, feel that Moldova's dubious claim to Pridnestrovie's territory ought to be decided by them, rather than by the people who make up the only directly affected party.

Many states have come into being through a unilateral declaration of independence. The legality is often the subject of debate and unsurprisingly the previous government typically asserts that a unilateral declaration of independence is illegal. Often, international bodies and other countries decline at first to accept the legitimacy of the declared state and its government. When the declared state becomes a functioning entity gains diplomatic recognition over time and a form of retrospective legitimacy.

This was how the United States of America came into being. And most of South America, Central America, a large part of Asia, and even parts of Europe and Africa. In the case of Pridnestrovie, however, this is only half of the story. Pridnestrovie's grounds for existence are much stronger, for instance, than the grounds of the United States: Because in the case of Pridnestrovie, it is not a mere "breakaway republic": Rather, its independence came as part of the mutual dissolution of a previous, larger country which today no longer exists.

The fundamental right to self-determination is firmly established in international law. At the ratification of the UN Charter in 1951, the signatories introduced the right of all people to self-determination. Likewise, the OSCE also recognizes self-determination again and again: In the Helsinki Final Act adopted by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975, as well as the Organization's Charter of Paris for a New Europe adopted in 1990, and the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action of 1993.

Self-determination and democracy go hand in hand. Democracy means the rule of the people, by the people, for the people, and the principle of self-determination secures that no one people may rule another.

Self-determination is one of the most basic human rights, from which all other rights of man flow. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1970 committed the idea of the right for self-determination to the body of international protocol. UN Resolution 1514(XV) was adopted and guarantees the right to self-determination of all peoples.

If the legal case for Pridnestrovie's existence was based only on the right of a people to self-determination and its Declaration of Independence, it could be argued that it wasn't "enough". But in the case of Pridnestrovie, that is only part of the edifice on which the nation exists.

The other half of the equation lies in recent twentieth century history. Historically, Pridnestrovie was never part of Moldova. When Hitler and Stalin redrew Europe's borders in World War II, the two countries were forced into an artificial "nation" called the MSSR (Moldavian Soviet Soviet Republic); governed by Communist Moscow and never an independent country. Today, the MSSR does not exist. In the breakup of the Soviet Union, the MSSR dissolved into two successor states: Moldova and Pridnestrovie.

The historical record of this is clear and undisputable. When the parliament of the MSSR withdrew from the Soviet Union and became the Republic of Moldova it dissolved the union of Moldova and Pridnestrovie. The creation of today's Republic of Moldova took place with a Declaration of Independence which explicitly renounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, declaring it null and void, unilaterally suspending all legal consequences of the pact. With this act, parliament dissolved the MSSR, restoring Moldova's borders to its natural pre-1940 state. Nullifying the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact also automatically excluded Pridnestrovie from Moldova as it reverted the status of the area to that of the pre-1940 MASSR. As the successor state to this previous MASSR, Pridnestrovie's independence from Moldova was confirmed not only by Pridnestrovie's own Declaration of Independence but also by Moldova's.

Later, Moldova reversed its position and today pursues a claim on Pridnestrovie's territory. This claim, like Saddam Hussein's claim on Kuwait which happened at the same time in history, was motivated by economic reasons rather than based on any legal or historical grounds.

But does Moldova's claim amount to much of anything? The context, when analyzed, is no different than any of the more than one hundred other unresolved territorial claims in other parts of the world -- where one country believes that it has the rights to bits and pieces of lands of another, or even believes that it has the right to swallow up the other country whole. These conflicts exists on all continents. They can be resolved by war or by diplomatic negotiations, but usually they tend to just go away over time. And regardless, the existence of such claims are merely nuisances and never grounds on which to invalidate the right of the other country to exist. The basic rule for international legal sovereignty is that recognition is extended to entities, states, with territory and juridical autonomy.

Pridnestrovie has no claim on Moldova and regards Moldova's claim as merely a nuisance claim: A territorial claim made up on dubious grounds and based solely on greed. Pridnestrovie is willing to solve the issue diplomatically, with the historical and legal evidence that shows the nation's right to exist. Pridnestrovie has also proposed a democratic solution; a referendum among the people living in the country, giving them the right to choose their own future. Moldova, in the past, has only responded by force. A military invasion in 1992 left nearly 1,000 people dead in the streets of Pridnestrovie. If, in the future, Moldova again wants to go to war over the issue, small Pridnestrovie — just one-tenth the size of Moldova — will probably lose. But it will be a long and bitter fight defending its freedom and defending the last 16 years of nation-building in Pridnestrovie.

THE WORLD AGREES WITH PRIDNESTROVIE: Woodrow Wilson, President, United States of America, 1921: "No people must be forced under a sovereignty under which it does not wish to live." Strobe Talbott, US Deputy Secretary of State, 2000: "Democracy is the political system most explicitly designed to ensure self-determination. Democracy can be a vehicle for peaceful secession." National Self-Determination, Peace and Human Rights, 1998: "The principle of national self-determination is simple, for it is surely better that nations should determine their own destinies than that someone else should do it for them. The concept of national self-determination appears to express the idea of democracy, according to which the people are presumed to be best qualified to govern themselves. International law also appears to recognize the right to national self-determination unreservedly." John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty", 1859: "Political communities are entitled collectively to determine their own affairs." UNPO, 2006: "Self-determination is a fundamental condition for the enjoyment of other human rights and fundamental freedoms, be they civil, political, economic, social or cultural." International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, United Nations: "All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development." UN General Assembly, Resolution 637: "Self-determination is a prerequisite to the full enjoyment of all fundamental human rights." UNESCO, Barcelona, 1998: "The principle and fundamental right of self-determination is firmly established in international law."

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