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Officials in the renegade Moldovan province Transnistria on Wednesday rejected a proposal their military join Moldova's, signaling no change in the region's hard-line stance against reunification.
Russian-speaking Transnistria seceded from Romanian-speaking Moldova after a civil war ending in 1992. No country has recognized Transnistria's de facto independence.
Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin in an newspaper interview published Tuesday suggested a first step to reunification could be the joining of the two sides' armed forces under a common command structure.
Lieutenant General Vladimir Atamiuk, chief of the Transnistrian General Staff, in comments to the Interfax news agency rubbished Voronin's proposal, calling it "the simplest form of populism."
"We can't place the cart before the horse," he said. "At present there is no political solution to the Moldova-Transnistria question ... and that makes other initiatives impossible."
Voronin in the Izvestia newspaper called for substantial disarmament by both sides, who continue to maintain tens of thousands of troops in one of Europe's poorest and most remote regions, fifteen years after the end of a shooting war.
"We have two useless armies on the territory of Moldova," Voronin said. "And they should be reduced to a minimum ... and joined under a common command structure."
Voronin's offer suggested all heavy weaponry such as tanks and artillery currently deployed along the de facto border between Moldova and Transnistria be "melted down into scrap metal," and reduction of existing combat units to lightly armed security forces.
The Moldovan president in the article called for "neutral" peacekeepers to maintain peace in the region - an indirect criticism of Russia, which supports the Transnistrian side and maintains some 1,500 troops in Transnistria, despite a promise to remove them by the end of 2003.
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