Natalia Morar, 25, a Moldovan who has already been banned from Russia for opposing the Kremlin, told the Guardian she feared arrest after organising a flash mob which ended with 20,000 people storming the parliament building.
Morar, who was tonight reported to be under house arrest, said she had not slept for two nights and was shuttling from one apartment to the next to outwit the police. “They have staked out my house and my mother’s,” she said. “They entered my apartment without a search warrant. If they find me they will arrest me – and what happens then, no one knows. I haven’t spoken on the phone or gone online for two days for fear of being traced.”
It was “ironic”, she added, that the tools she used to launch a revolution could now potentially betray her whereabouts.
The protests began after a conversation between Morar and six friends in a cafe in Chisinau, Moldova’s tiny capital, on Monday 6 April. “We discussed what we should do about the previous day’s parliamentary elections, which we were sure had been rigged,” said Morar, speaking at a secret location.
The elections brought a larger-than-expected victory for the incumbent Communist party. “We decided to organise a flash mob for the same day using Twitter, as well as networking sites and SMS.” With no recent history of mass protests in Moldova, “we expected at the most a couple of hundred friends, friends of friends, and colleagues”, she said. “When we went to the square, there were 20,000 people waiting there. It was unbelievable.”
The demonstrations continued into Tuesday peacefully. But later that day, with no response from the government, protesters swept police aside to storm the parliament building and the towering presidential palace opposite. Fire broke out in one wing of the parliament, and the young protesters vented their fury by wrecking computers and office furniture.
“Not only did we underestimate the power of Twitter and the internet, we also underestimated the explosive anger among young people at the government’s policies and electoral fraud,” said Morar.
This morning election officials in Moldova began a recount of votes, which was ordered by President Vladimir Voronin following the protests. The results of the recount will be announced on Friday.
Moldova, with a population of 4 million, is Europe’s poorest country, and a large number of young people are forced to find work in the west.
“The discrepancy between what they see and learn there, and what they come back to in Moldova, has just grown too much,” said Morar.
Despite controversy over the damage caused, Morar is “proud of young Moldovans” for having shown courage and taken to the streets.
She does not believe the current vendetta against her is purely the work of the Moldovan authorities, but sees the Kremlin’s hand in it as well: “It was when Russia expressed strong support for Moldova’s position on the elections, and condemned the protests, that they started targeting us.”
Morar was expelled from Russia in 2007 after writing a series of articles accusing top Kremlin officials, including Alexander Bortnikov, the current head of the Russian security services, the FSB, of being behind the murder of Russia’s central bank deputy head Andrey Kozlov in September 2006.
