How did Moldova’s President Answer to one of ZdG’s Investigations?

Ziarul de Gardă, a 15-year-old investigative newspaper, was summoned to court by the president on January 28, accused of violating the dignity and honor of the president. 

And although ZdG has written critically about all Moldova’s presidents and almost all of them have been dissatisfied, it’s for the first time ZdG receives a prior request, from a president of a state, asking us to retract alleged defamatory misstatements.

Several days earlier the president was answering to the top eight questions of the week, during the President Answers TV show, broadcast by Moldova 1, the state-owned TV channel. 

The president began with a question related to a recent investigation about the president’s luxurious vacations, published by ZdG. 

“Recently you saw some attacks regarding some photos that appeared 10 years ago, that I was somewhere on vacation […] First, most of the data from the so-called investigation are false,” says President Igor Dodon, probably referring to ZdG’s last week’s text regarding his luxurious vacations of the last 10 years. 

And if a state president announces that a journalistic text from a media institution is fake, we’ve expected Dodon to explain what exactly is fake – whether he wasn’t in Seychelles, Dubai, on exotic islands, in hotels owned by the family of the former Prosecutor General of Russia, etc., or whether he was, but the salary of a public servant allowed him all these vacations. 

The president can sue us, and that’s exactly what he did. On January 27, after that TV show, an envelope with a prior request, signed by Igor Dodon, was sent to the newsroom.

ZdG had big expectations from the request. However, we found three mistakes only in the lawyer’s name. Also, the request contained no address, no phone number, no data to help us send an answer. 

And although, the president said that most of the data in an investigation of four pages of A3 newspaper format are false the two-pages request mentions a single sentence that he wants to be retracted, failing to explain what is false in that sentence. 

The president didn’t bother himself to offer evidence instead, he announced that the state will monitor the mass media. 

“We are now monitoring all media sources. Daily there are over 250-300 attacks against Moldova’s President. Now we’re doing an assessment, about how much this would cost. I want to tell you that it amounts to around 77,700 to 103,600 euros (1.5 to 2 million lei) daily. There are financed Facebook accounts, shows created and broadcast on different youtube channels, things which happen daily,” the president said in the video program. 

According to his mission, a president of a state has to defend the citizens, not himself. The president has to guarantee the state’s security, the right to justice, social and medical security for young people beaten or stabbed in the streets, for children killed on pedestrian crossings, or women stabbed in their homes, and for oncology patients seeking expensive treatments abroad. 

However, it appears the president has decided to guarantee that journalists will not criticize him anymore. 

At the same time, apparently the presidency does not monitor the media outlets affiliated with the Socialist Party, maybe because these media praise him non-stop.  

And as a citizen and taxpayer, I am asking myself where did Igor Dodon take the money to daily monitor those who criticize him.

However, Dodon also seemed interested in who finances those criticizing him.

“We need to understand where do you take this money to fund campaigns against the president and I think we will find the sources.” 

That sounds like a presidential threat against the media criticizing the abuse of a dignitary. It is clear that he is not interested in finding who is funding Accent TV, NTV, a large number of web pages and newspapers as they do not criticize the president. 

This is the first step towards totalitarianism. It appears that the guarantor of the Constitution didn’t read for a long time Art.34, on the right to information. 

But Moldova’s Constitution has not yet been canceled.

On the day the envelope, with the prior request signed by the head of the state, reached the newsroom the president was in Strasbourg, displaying on social networks photos from his meetings with several European officials, including pictures from his meeting with Dunja Mijatovic, current Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe.

In 2011, when ZdG had been sued by two corrupt prosecutors, who demanded over 60,000 euros (1 million lei) from ZdG, and the judges also corrupt ruled in favor of the prosecutors, Dunja Mijatovic, a representative for Press Freedom within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe made a tough call to the authorities in Chișinău. 

– The public status of plaintiffs should be taken into account when sanctioning a media outlet. Public figures should tolerate a much higher degree of criticism and even inaccurate facts reported about them than ordinary individuals. By choosing to act as public servants, they knowingly put themselves in the limelight of public life and should be open to scrutiny by the media;

These standards are vital for investigative journalism in a democratic society. Issues of corruption discussed in the article in question present an important topic that the public has a right to know about.