February 8 (SeeNews) - Moldova's president Igor Dodon said the opening of a NATO liaison office in Chisinau will not ensure the security of Moldovan citizens and he might consider calling a referendum on the matter, Dodon's office announced on Wednesday.
"I think that the opening of a NATO liaison office in Chisinau is not beneficial to the majority of Russian, of Moldovans in my country. I do not care what others are saying from the outside, I only care about the neutrality and safety of the citizens of the Republic of Moldova," Dodon said during a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday, according to a statement issued by the president's office. "In my opinion, opening this liaison office in Moldova will not ensure the security of Moldovan citizens."
In Dodon's opinion, the opening of a NATO liaison office in Chisinau is a provocation launched by the governing coalition in Moldova.
"This concerns NATO and the government of the Republic of Moldova but if this NATO office is opened in Moldova, we'll come back to this issue in the future and we’ll only take into consideration the opinion of the Moldovan population," Dodon added, according to the statement.
NATO deputy secretary general Rose Gottemoeller, who welcomed Dodon for talks on the partnership between the Alliance and Moldova, said that the new NATO liaison office, to open later this year, will not be a military base, but a small diplomatic mission staffed only by civilians.
"There will be no NATO troops in Moldova," Gottemoeller said at a joint news conference with Dodon. Her comments were published on NATO's website on Wednesday.
"NATO has long had liaison offices of this kind in other partner countries, such as Russia, Ukraine and Georgia," Gottemoeller added.
The agreement to open a NATO mission in Chisinau was signed in late November 2016 and ratified by parliament before Dodon took office. The mission is scheduled to open in March.
The largest political force in Moldova's 101-seat parliament elected in 2014 is an alliance formed by the Democratic Party (PD) with 20 seats and by PL with 13 representatives. Dodon, who was elected president in November 2016, is a former leader of the Socialist Party, the second biggest group in Moldova's parliament.
Dodon added that his country will request NATO to publicly sign a document that recognizes Moldova’s status of a neutral state.
The tiny landlocked ex-Soviet state of Moldova has a population of some 3 million. The country has strong historical and political ties with its western neighbour Romania, with more than 75% of the population speaking Romanian. However, some 10% of the population living predominantly in the internationally unrecognised separatist republic of Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova in the 1990s, speak Russian and identify themselves as Russians.