Moldovan Leader Urges Calm, Seeks Softening of Laws Fueling Ethnic Strife

Moldova’s president appealed Sunday for an end to street demonstrations and urged his Parliament to reconsider laws that have stirred ethnic unrest and violence in the republic.

The speech by President Mirca I. Snegur marked the first time that the ethnic Moldovan leadership has accepted blame for separatist movements in the Turkish-Christian Gagauz region of southern Moldova and in the predominantly Russian and Ukrainian Dniester area in the east, lawmakers said.

It came one day after a meeting in Moscow with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in which Snegur and representatives of the separatist groups agreed to a moratorium on acts that led to the ethnic crisis in the small Soviet republic.

Details of the moratorium have not been worked out. Lawmakers said it probably would mean the Gagauz and Dniester regions would suspend their recent declarations of sovereignty and planned elections.

In return, the republic’s government would soften a language law that made Moldovan the national language and required people in dozens of jobs, ranging from doctors to hairdressers, to pass tests in the language by 1995.

The law has stirred resentment among Russian speakers and Gagauz residents, who speak a Turkic language.

“We are not giving up our national rebirth, our language, alphabet, symbols and so on,” Snegur told lawmakers Sunday. “Simply, we must go back and look for where, maybe, we have gone too fast for our fellow citizens.”

The Moldova republic, formerly called Moldavia, was carved from territory seized from Romania in 1940. The republic declared independence of Moscow in July. The Turkic Gagauz minority declared a separate republic in August, and the Dniester population declared a breakaway in September, claiming discrimination by the Moldovan, or ethnic Romanian, majority.

In Romania, thousands of demonstrators on Sunday demanded reunification with their ethnic kin in Moldova. About 2,000 Romanians marched to the Soviet Embassy in Bucharest, shouting “We want Bessarabia back!” Bessarabia is another name for Moldova. About 4,000 Romanians in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu voiced similar demands.

Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, who attended the meeting between Snegur and Gorbachev, went on Soviet television Saturday night to warn that Moscow would take tough measures if Moldova did not restore order.