Chisinau, June 23 (Infotag). Over 20 members of the Tatars family, who were the owners of a cinema house in Comrat [the capital town of Gagauzia autonomous region in southern Moldova] are resolutely going to continue their hunger strike they started on June 1 “to defend our civil and property rights”.

The family convened a news conference in Infotag Thursday, and Dmitry Tatar, whose wife was the cinema’s official owner, voiced indignation that the Gagauzian authorities and local mass media are giving a distorted, wrong assessment of the ongoing property redistribution and human rights violation in the autonomous region.

He explained his wife Natalia could not come for the conference to Chisinau due to a sharp aggravation of her health condition. Concerning the court decision on recognizing the cinema purchase agreement as null and void, Dmitry Tatar said the decision was biased and “a sheer lie which pursues only one objective – to grasp the fat piece of land and a good building in the very center of the town”.

“We have challenged the decisions of the Economic Appeals Chamber and the Supreme Court concerning the return of the cinema building into the State’s ownership, and on June 29 a court hearing will take place concerning the ownership of the land the building stands on. However, under the pressure of the Gagauzia government, the Comrat municipal authorities have already locked and sealed the cinema, and are intimidating us. However, we have decided to rebuff their arbitrariness, and have appealed to many international organizations”, said Dmitry Tatar.

As was already reported by Infotag, the Gagauzian government’s privatization department has annulled the cinema privatization contract of 2001 on grounds that the Tatars have failed to meet their post-privatization investment and object development commitments.