Some belated (unpublished) thoughts on the March 16 events in Latvia

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.

Latvian Security Police backs away from being a NeoKGB

The Latvian Security Police seems to have backed off from being the "neo -KGB" that it was in 2008, when it arrested an economics lecturer and questioned a musician for making remarks about the banking system and the Latvian currency, the lat. That incident inspired me to start this blog.
Now it seems that the Security Police (Drošibas policija/DP) have refused to act on a request by National Alliance Saeima deputy Raivis Dzintars that the DP investigate statements by a teacher of Russian language and literature that he was " disloyal to Latvia, because the regime (meaning the government) was causing problems for his family."

The DP refused to act on Dzintars request saying that:  " A person's subjective attitude toward the state, including one that is negative, cannot be the basis for evaluating whether a criminal investigation should be started."

Let's hope this has killed any plans for using the DP as an unofficial "loyalty police" by the sometimes disturbingly authoritarian Nationalist Alliance.
While I don't believe the Security Police are yet a hotbed of libertarians, it will be difficult for them to back off from this stance and go back to acting as a chilling effect on political expression. Good stuff does happen here from time to time.

Uldis Freimanis, a nationalist radical "goal post" for free speech, is found dead

Uldis Freimanis, a Latvian nationalist with radical public views on many issues, was found dead near his home in Riga. Freimanis, born in 1943, bore no signs of foul play and by some reports, had been suffering from a heart condition. A regular, placard-bearing participant at anti-gay and radical nationalist demonstrations, Freimanis was last seen organizing a commemoration of the end of the first Soviet occupation of Latvia when German troops entered Riga on July 1, 1941. Historically, Latvians' joy at seeing the Red Army driven out vanished quickly as it become apparent that occupation by Nazi Germany simply mean a change of shooters of Latvian citizens and their specific targets. This seemed lost on the organizers of the most recent event.
For me, Freimanis, no matter how strange and repugnant his publicly expressed views, which included strident anti-Semitism and homophobia, was a kind of litmus test of free speech in Latvia. He was a goal post for tolerance (non-censorship) of radical and offensive expression. Free speech is not for "nice" opinions, "moderate and balanced view", political correctness, etc. Freedom of expression is to protect the views that most of us may hate and be shocked by. If we both defend the right to peacefully express such views, at the same time as we express our own rejection of their substance and our arguments as to why they are wrong, we are doing the work of citizens defending both freedom and a democratic society.
I had a slight acquaintance with Freimanis, and he lacked some of the cold hostility and hatefulness I have felt from other, younger Latvian right-wing radicals. In fact, I sent him some digital photos of his son, who is a soldier with the Latvian army honor guard at the Freedom Monument and was hoping to send him a photo of his participation at the latest July 1 commemoration, which gathered a few dozen supporters. He was a cordial man in the few encounters I have had with him, and can only express my condolences to his family and my regrets that he will not have a chance to re-examine his views and convictions, which I see as being outrageous, but which he had every right to express,

Nationalists turn dangerous dogs on bad journalism

Latvia’s National Alliance (NA), which I have always suspected to be discreetly (and sometimes not so) teetering on the edge between democracy and (crypto)authoritarianism, has called out the worst of the dogs in Latvia on what I will be the first to say seems to be a ratshit piece of distorted TV news.

Jānis Dombrava, a parliament or Saeima deputy from the NA filed charges with the Latvian Security Police (the guys who arrest college economics instructors for commenting on the economy) against the Russian language TV channel First Baltic Channel.  The reason was an alleged distortion of events ahead of the March 16 commemoration event for the German-drafted Latvian Legion.

I arrived too late at this event to see what happened myself, but from other news reports and You Tube footage, representatives of the Latvian Anti-Fascist Committee and Europarliamentarian Tatyana Zhdanok arrived some time ahead of the planned Legion (formally, Waffen-SS) commemoration and laid a wreath by the Freedom Monument in memory of  the victims of Nazism. The wreath even had a ribbon with these words in Latvian on it.

Some time after the wreath was laid, persons apparently somehow sympathizing with the organizers of the Legionnaire event arrived and covered the anti-Fascist wreath with tulips, then placed a red-white-red emblem representing the Latvian flag and the shoulder flash of the Latvian Legion over the defaced wreath. This was, by any standard, an act of vandalism, since the base of the Freedom Monument is often the site for flower and wreath-layings and different floral arrangements have always peacefully co-existed. Zhdanok and Josif Koren of the Anti-Fascist Committee noticed the defacement of their wreath from nearby and approached to try to restore it and move the large insignia.

At this point a confrontation started with someone who acted as if he represented the organizers of the Legion commemoration.  He tried to prevent Zhdanok and Koren from taking away the insignia and restoring their wreath. He firmly but politely asked them to leave, as “the next event” was about to start. On one of the You Tube videos, there is a point in the confrontation at which a voice off-camera shouts “ Jews do not belong here!” Koren is Jewish and I believe Zhdanok is also of Jewish descent, so this was a provocative and insulting remark, but it was not uttered by the man with whom both were having an argument over the wreath.

In the First Baltic Channel news item (I do not understand Russian, but got the gist of it), the sound of the male voice saying “Jews do not belong here” was attributed to the man with whom Zhdanok and Koren were arguing. From what I have seen, he said nothing of the kind, although the remark seems to have come from one of a not insignificant number of wackos who had gathered for the Legion commemoration.

The Russian language TV spot  appears to have been, to put it mildly, a manipulation of the truth that should be exposed, denounced and perhaps reprimanded by the National Electronic Media Council. Some journalist organizations should also censure this kind of thing.

However, whatever distortion the First Baltic Channel may have made, it is no reason to run to Latvia’s “neo-KGB”, the Security Police, whose record on free speech and press freedom is spotty, to say the least. While the TV channel’s violation of journalistic ethics is reprehensible, it is a greater danger to journalistic freedom to use a repressive police agency as a tool of enforcing “good journalism”. Even if the blatant distortions by the First Baltic Channel is not the best test case, dragging them before the Security Police, even getting the Security Police involved in media content in any way will have a chilling effect on all media (perhaps, especially, the Russian-language media).

All of which leads me back to the nagging thought that just under the surface of the NA’s nationalist and democratic veneer, there may be an authoritarian streak that grabs for the biggest and most (unpredictably) dangerous stick around, to invoke repression rather than criticism and debate. And while on the subject of March 16, it reminds me of a very interesting man, an American academic from Lithuania that I met on the fringes of the March 16 event. He is Dovid Katz, whose main activity is the study of Baltic dialects of Yiddish, but who also aligns with the Anti-Fascist view that yes, fascism is really coming back to the Baltics because some old geezers gather along with some younger wackos and neo-Nazis. I honestly believe that these anti-Fascist guys have the volume, brightness and contrasted jacked up all the way on their picture of things. No, the Nazis are not really coming back in the Baltics or Eastern Europe. Yes, there are wackos around, as in the US (where Nazis marched in Skokie in the 1970s, all kinds of crackpot racist and anti-Semitic or perversely philo-Semitic Jesus is returning to the Temple in Jerusalem so glory to Israel sects about) and that is about it.

As far as I know, the NA didn’t condemn the defacement of the wreath laid by Zhdanok and Koren, which would have been the right thing to do. They at times traipse around issues of anti-Semitism (one of their members, who was criticized for this, even used the term “intelligent anti-Semitism”, whatever that means). This is the kind of stuff that feeds the paranoia about the Nazis coming back. Calling in the Security Police feeds my paranoia about a party in the government undermining media freedom.

A dialog of fools thrown to the thought police and more on the fashionista scandal

www.pietiek.com, an interesting hybrid of a Latvian wiki-leaks and some borderline hatchet-job investigative journalism reports that the scandalous electronic  correspondence of Latvia's new foreign minister Ģirts Valdis Kristovskis and Latvian-American physician Aivars Slucis is being turned over to Latvia's post-independence zombie of the KGB thought police, the Latvian Security Police (Drošības Policija).
Kristovskis, corresponding about a year ago with Slucis, a financial supporter of radical nationalist causes in Latvia, wrote that he broadly and in principle agreed with a screed in which the US-based Mayo Clinic doctor said he would be hard pressed to treat Latvians and Russians equally were he practicing medicine in Latvia. The e-mail also referred to the possibility of starting a medical facility in Latvia that would only treat ethnic Latvians.
There was, of course, a major uproar when this correspondence was disclosed even before the ink was dry on whatever document was signed nominating Kristovskis as foreign minister. A vote of no-confidence against him requested in the new Saeima (where the newly-elected legislators had barely learned how to operate the electronic voting system) failed,  but the whole scandal set the tone for the generally shambolic way the new Dombrovskis government was put together.  But that is another story.
The free speech issue at stake is that neither Dr. Slucis anti-Russian remarks, nor the reply by Kristovskis should be the subject of a police investigation. What both sides wrote, however deranged or offensive it may look, is and should be protected free expression. Period.
I will repeat again -- free expression is not something that protects only nice expression, rational expression, polite expression etc. Free expression protects all forms of thought and opinion, starting with the most extreme views. Once we let police power start examining "extreme" expression -- where will they go next?
The almost black humor crackpot part of Slucis'  views is that as a physician, he would be bound to treat enemy combatants in a war. I don't know (I doubt it) if any injured Taliban have been flow to the US and "outsourced"  for treatment to the Mayo Clinic, but I think that Slucis would have to take them as patients. Certainly that would be his duty were he a military doctor,  or in the unlikely situation that foreign terrorists were wounded by police during an incident in Rochester, Minnesota and rushed to the Mayo Clinic as the nearest hospital.
However you analyze the complex tensions that sometimes exist between Latvians and Russians in Latvia, both ethnic groups are not engaged in armed conflict. Yet Slucis makes statements that would not apply even in an armed conflict (in World War II, American doctors treated Germans whose language they didn't understand and who had been killing  Americans minutes earlier. They may not have liked it, but they treated them).  Arguments, not police, should be used against crackpot opinions.

MORE ON THE FASHIONISTA SCANDAL
While on the subject of the bizarre, it is worth noting that my post on the expulsion of fashion blogger and magazine editor-in-chief Agnese Kleina from the Riga Fashion Week drew more than 2 000 hits in a single day to my blog. This was amazing, because to me this was a marginal matter, hardly a case of the government banning a public protest or arresting a journalist. It was actually my gut reaction to what seemed to me to be irrational mistreatment of a fellow journalist.  But nothing I have ever written on this blog has ever gotten the same level of attention, especially considering that most Latvians may find my slang-ridden American English prose a bit difficult to understand. I had no idea that the fashion industry (of which I know nothing) had so many followers
Anyway,  I got a couple of e-mails from  Jeļena Stahova, the president of the Baltic Fashion Federation, who explained her reasons for banning Kleina.
She sent  a longer e-mail in Latvian, but the salient points (here in an edited  Google translation) were as follows:

The decision on refusal of accreditation  for A. Kleina, by the Baltic fashion Federation and in particular by the Riga Fashion Week Autumn session was made  this year In the spring, when I got to publications of Latvian Style and Fashion Awards ceremony. The reason for this was Kleina in her unethical comments  in a  blog, where she mocked thje event for members, leaders and everything that happened on the runway, in a way that is inconsistent with the word"Journalist" and which  was inconsistent with any professional journalism general ethical standards.Her remarks on the RFW poster  had nothing to do with this case. 


My original post was a borderline rant, so I am glad that Jeļena didn't take offense, especially as I know about as much about the fashion business as a dog knows of the Catholic mass (translating, loosely, the Latvian expression  ko suns zin no dievkalpojuma) .  I don't know what Agnese Kleina wrote earlier to anger the Fashion Federation and Jeļena, but as far as ethics go, there is a difference between blogging and "straight" (no reference to sexual orientation)  journalism. Blogs are there to express opinion, and the ethical standards are much looser. In writing news, it is unethical to distort facts, etc.  so to say that 50 people watched XY's collection demonstration when there were clearly 200 people there, or to confuse colors, etc. would be bad journalism. But to express a strong opinion in a blog is another story. Perhaps it is foolish to offend members of a close-knit and sensitive community (the Latvian fashion scene) knowing that they may react strongly to being offended. But that is more a question of tact than journalistic ethics. 
So I hope I have made an effort to be fair to the other side :).  Do I get another 2000 page hits for this?

Confusion about free speech rights in Latvia

This is a video commentary I made on the confused and inconsistent application of the freedom of speech and assembly in Latvia after the events on May 9 and the upcoming Baltic Pride (as well as the March 16 event to commemorate the Latvian Legion).