This was submitted to a major international publication, but didn't fit into what it needed (also, perhaps, it was a little late, as we hadn't agreed on covering the events of March 16). I post it here because I think there are some interesting points to be made about the repercussions of the annual March 16 war veterans march and counter-demonstrations. It is written in a news analysis style.
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Deafening sirens from “anti-fascist”
counterdemonstrators on March 16 disrupted a march to commemorate Latvians,
mostly draftees, who fought on the German side in World War II, but they also started
off a week of political tremors in the Baltic country that uncovered some
sinister cracks in Latvia’s ruling three-party coalition.
The loud counter-demonstration against
the march by a dwindling number of Waffen-SS veterans and around 1 000
supporters, set events in motion that could tighten laws regulating freedom of
assembly in Latvia and perhaps impose special restrictions and penalties on
forms of expression deemed to commit “sacrilege” against national symbols.
Going along with such measures could be
the price that Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis of the centrist liberal Unity
party must pay for maintaining the tense “stability” of Latvia’s coalition and
for turning a blind eye to the creeping influence of the nationalist right. Otherwise,
nationalist politicians would have sought a vote of confidence against the man
responsible for policing the annual veterans march and accompanying
counter-demonstrations, Minister of Interior Rihards Kozlovskis, a member of
the liberal Reform Party. The relatively new party has been moribund in recent
voter polls and its unlikely to get seats in Latvia’s parliament when elections
are held in late 2014.
The screws on expression could be
tightened because another member of Latvia’s government coalition, the National
Alliance, which brings together several right-of-center nationalist factions,
was outraged at the disruptive protest by a small group of demonstrators, many
of whom were Latvian Jews. The counterprotestors denounced the Waffen-SS march
as a glorification of Nazism even while admitting through a spokesman, Josif
Koren, that most veterans were probably not Nazis.
As non-Germans, Latvians were not
allowed to join the Nazi party. In pre-war Latvia, which had an authoritarian
regime from 1934 to 1940, the small fascist “Thundercross” movement was banned.
Its leader Gustavs Celmins was driven into exile only to return with the German
occupation of Latvia in 1941, then fall out with the Germans and end up in a
series of concentration camps to finally be liberated by American forces in May
1945. Mr. Celmins died in San Antonio, Texas, in 1968.
As the March 16 sirens turned to
booming Russian wartime music and then to a stentorian voice reciting wartime
Nazi crimes in Latvia and elsewhere, two members of the Latvian parliament or
Saeima, representing the National Alliance, rushed a rapidly-set-up cordon of
riot police and, failing to get close enough to topple the
counterdemonstrators’ loudspeakers, tore down some posters of photographs of
cringing Latvian Jewish women about to be shot by a German Einsatzgruppe or unit dedicated to executing civilians.
One of the parliamentarians, Janis
Dombrava, threatened to have fired the policemen who restrained him from continuing
his rampage ripping down posters. He later apologized on television for having
acted “in an emotional state” because the Latvian police had been ordered “to
protect those committing sacrilege against our sacred place (the Freedom
Monument) and our national soldiers.” Mr. Dombrava’s quasi-religious phrases
may set the tone for what the National Alliance wants included in any new
legislation pertaining to public assembly, demonstrations and the like.
Mr. Kozlovskis apologized for the
events of March 16 despite the fact the City of Riga under mayor Nils Usakovs
of the opposition and allegedly “pro-Kremlin” Harmony Center was responsible
for granting permission for both the march and the counter-demonstration. In
withdrawing its demand to call a vote of no confidence against Mr. Kozlovskis,
the National Alliance under its co-chairman Raivis Dzintars, who was also
involved in the March 16 scuffle with police, gave the Interior Minister a
three-month grace period to push through legislation to prevent a repeat of the
events of March 16, by which the nationalists meant the use of deafening sound
and permitting two opposing events in such close proximity, but also the “
sacrilege” of allowing a protest by those seen as disloyal and subversive –
among the milder epithets hurled at the counterdemonstrators.
Some of the harsher remarks were
phrases like “Jews don’t belong here” using an older Latvian word, which
phonetically is pronounced zheeds but
is close to the Russian zhid, a term
of abuse. While pre-war Latvian Jews referred to themselves as (plural) zheedee, the accepted present day word
is the Latvian word ebreji or
Hebrews, a shift in use roughly like the move from “Negro” to “Afro-American”
in the US over the past few decades. In another disturbing sidelight to the
March 16 events, wreaths left at the Freedom Monument by the
counterdemonstrators to Jewish victims had ribbons with memorial texts removed
and were then covered by flowers laid by the veterans and their sympathizers.
While no public figures from the
National Alliance made any remarks about Jews, the mutterings among those
gathering ahead of the Waffen-SS veterans march suggested that there were some
anti-Semitic and extremist elements in the crowd, almost all of them too young
to have participated in World War II. This gives some credence to claims by
Latvia’s “anti-fascists” and some sympathizers who came to Riga, such as New
York Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, that the Nazi aspect to March 16 was not in
the veterans, but in some of their younger followers.
It would be unfair to say that the
National Alliance has anything to do with Latvia’s handful of neo-Nazis. The
“All For Latvia” component of the National Alliances states that it is for
“positive nationalism” in the English-language page of its website and
elaborates by saying that “Latvian
nationalism to us means the elevation of kinship to the level of whole nation.
Each Latvian is like a family member, who may not be forsaken in adversity, who
must be cared for in difficult times, and who is worthy of respect or
compassion by the mere fact of being one of our own.”
Nonetheless there are parallels between
the Latvian nationalists and similar political movements elsewhere in Eastern
Europe, such as the Jobbik party in Hungary. The readiness of the party not
only to urge respect for Latvian national symbols but to enforce it under
penalty of law suggest an authoritarian streak, although elsewhere in the
world, there is a mixed picture of laws on such matters as flag desecration,
ranging from First Amendment protection in the US to misdemeanor and disorderly
conduct penalties in some European countries.
The National Alliance and some of its
sympathizers in recent months have also pushed such “culture wars” issues as
opposing gender equality education in primary schools. The nationalists
criticized a book adapted from a Danish textbook suggesting that kindergarten
children switch gender roles, with girls playing boys’ games and the like.
However, a nationalist politician didn’t hesitate to bring military weapons
(presumable disabled) such as rifles, machine guns and grenades into a private
kindergarten he owns as part of a lesson in “patriotism” for pre-school
children.
Some political analysts, such as Iveta
Kazoka, a researcher at Latvia’s Providus Center for Public Policy says “ I am
not convinced that the National Alliance wants more repressive laws with regard
to demonstrations because they themselves may wish to organize such
demonstrations. They will try to define restrictions that their own activities
won’t fall under, but that will be hard to do in human rights terms.
Ainars Leijejs, a Latvian journalist
covering political affairs points out that the nationalists are not the only
politicians narrowing democratic rights. Mr. Dombrovskis Unity party backed a
change in Latvia’s law on referendums, raising the minimum number of signatures
to get a referendum initiative started to 30 000 for 10 000 earlier. This was a
reaction to last year’s failed referendum to make Russian a second state language
in Latvia, which some commentator said was evidence that the voters at large
will simply reject controversial referenda without raising the threshold for
initiating them.
