Global Policy Forum

By Michael Wines

From his fancy black-Formica-and-glass office atop the Parliament building, overlooking the soaring marble obelisk crowned by a glowering Lenin, Grigory Marakutsa appeals to the outside world: don't believe what you hear about the Trans-Dniester Republic.

Of course, that assumes that you have heard anything at all about it, which is no given. Not a single card- carrying nation recognizes the Trans-Dniester region as an independent country. A breakaway Russian-speaking province of Romanian-speaking Moldova, shaped during a decade of self- rule by a curious blend of Soviet political theory and piratical business ethics, the "republic" is a ghost nation - strong enough to resist retaking by Moldova, but too weak to win statehood.

It shows up on maps, but only the ones printed here, as a Rhode Island- size speck of land wedged between Moldova and Ukraine. Otherwise, it exists largely in the minds of people like Mr. Marakutsa, the beefy, balding chairman of the Trans-Dniester Supreme Soviet. It is not easy being the chief legislative officer of a governmental shade, with all of the chain-rattling and bumps in the night that implies. People say spooky things about the Trans-Dniester Republic, as Mr. Marakutsa himself allowed during a recent long interview here.

"They say our weapons are in Chechnya," he said. "They say that it's a criminal economy, that it has criminal leaders." Canards, all: "We have caught and turned over criminals - not just one, but dozens.

"This information can be given by names, not just numbers."

Some also say that the region is a hotbed of smuggling and a potential haven for terrorists. "I can assure you," Mr. Marakutsa said emphatically, "that neither terrorists nor smugglers will find a place on our territory." They also say that the feared director of internal security, Maj. Gen. Vadim Shevtsov, is actually Vladimir Antyufeyev, a former Soviet shock trooper wanted by Interpol for his role in an attack on the Interior Ministry of Latvia in 1991 in which five people died.

Mr. Marakutsa frowned. "There's probably some bit of truth in that," he said.

There is probably some bit of truth to most of what people say about this place, which is what makes it so spooky to outsiders. There was a time when the mere words "breakaway Moldovan province" might have been a punch line in a David Letterman monologue. But after Afghanistan, even tiny ghost nations, bound to no international code and ruled by shadowy figures, have ceased to be funny.

In the shards of the old Soviet Union, there are at least four: Chechnya, the war-ravaged southern Russian region; Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed chunk of Azerbaijan claimed by Armenia; Abkhazia, a separatist chunk of western Georgia; and this one. Each is frightening for its own reasons, usually involving religious or ethnic extremism.

The Trans-Dniester Republic is unique, the experts say, in that it is rooted not in religion or ethnicity, but in its ability to turn a fast and often illegal buck. Oazu Nantoi, the program director of the Institute for Public Policy in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, called it "a zone uncontrolled by any state."

"And it is very easy," he said, "to use this zone for false documents, for military training, for different types of illegal financial operations." Symbolically speaking, Mr. Nantoi said, the region "is a black hole."

It presents itself as a Communist museum piece: a slice of Moldova that decided after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 that being back in the union was not just desirable, but worth staging a rebellion.

With considerable help from the Russian 14th Army, which was based there, the region won a brief and bloody war for quasi-independence from Moldova. With Russia's tacit support, it has kept it.

Today, the charming if rundown capital, Tiraspol, is peppered with Lenin statues, plastered with the Trans-Dniester hammer-and-sickle and red-star emblem, and papered over with slogans like "Our unity is with Russia!" In truth, Russians are but a quarter of the population here. Russian is nevertheless the dominant language, Cyrillic the standard alphabet and the ruble the name of the currency. President Igor Smirnov, a former Russian factory manager and the mayor of Tiraspol in Soviet times, even sports Lenin's bald pate and pencil-sharpened goatee.

Just as in Soviet days, prices are heavily subsidized - a pack of American gum costs barely a nickel - and outsiders are repeatedly stopped and asked for identification. Outsiders call this a Potemkin ideology. Much anecdotal evidence, and a few hard facts, suggest that the region's raison d'íªtre lies elsewhere.

Consider weapons: with but 7,500 men in uniform, it maintains a small- arms factory for what it calls its self- defense. Its products have persistently been linked to conflicts in the Balkans, Chechnya and Africa. "The national liberation army in Macedonia was financed and received arms as a result of their connections" with the Trans-Dniester Republic, Charles King, a professor of government and expert on Moldova at Georgetown University in Washington, said in a recent interview.

More powerful armaments, from rocket launchers to armored vehicles, are said to have been smuggled out of a 40,000-ton complex of weapons dumps - Europe's largest - on a Russian base here. The republic claims a share of the aging munitions as its own, blocking international attempts to destroy the stockpiles.

Or look at trade: after the Trans- Dniester Republic and Moldova briefly set up a joint customs operation, 1998 figures uncovered by Mr. Nantoi showed that Trans-Dniester, with but one-sixth of Moldova's population, imported 6,000 times as many cigarettes as the rest of the country. Mr. Nantoi said he believed that most of the cigarettes were illegal knockoffs of Western brands, illicitly made in Ukraine and exported through the Trans-Dniester Republic as far as Germany. Experts say the region is also a major transit point for smuggled alcohol and up to 700,000 tons a year of petroleum products from Russia and Ukraine.

The pipeline also runs the other way: the Ukrainian port of Odessa, historically a smugglers' cove, is said to be a major outlet for the region's arms and other contraband. There is also compelling evidence of money laundering and smuggling by Russian companies with financial stakes in industries here. The director of the Trans-Dniester customs authority, Vladimir Smirnov, is the son of the president, who elevated the department to a cabinet ministry recently to free it from constraining oversight.

Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian and Eurasian organized crime at Keele University in England, said in an interview that the Trans-Dniester Republic maintained an uneasy peace between five to seven international criminal gangs with varying holds on power. The lure of easy money has not only deeply corrupted this enclave, he said, but has penetrated both Moldova and Ukraine. Ukraine has resisted efforts to assert stronger border controls over the region. Mr. Nantoi, once an adviser to a Moldovan president, quit after the government censored his efforts to expose corruption of the customs agreement with the Trans-Dniester Republic.

From counterfeit pharmaceuticals to bootleg CD's to narcotics, Mr. Galeotti said, Trans-Dniester and Moldova are becoming a "turntable" where illegal goods are imported, given a stamp of legitimacy and shipped out for purchase elsewhere. So the experts say, anyway. As Mr. Marakutsa noted, that sort of behavior would be against the law.

"How do we export them?" he asked. "Through Ukraine? Through Moldova? I think this is said against us to find support in other countries to discredit us. There are no such facts. And in fact, it is impossible."

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