March 16 "freestyle" with sirens, songs and scuffles

And so another March 16 with its commemorative march and counter-demonstrations passes, this time with no one attempting to limit anyone's free speech - at last. Long learning curve, Latvia. The next step after the events of the first "freestyle"  March 16 would be somewhat better planning to separate the marchers and the contras, especially since the Latvian Antifascist Committee had planned a rather loud audio protest. It could have been better placed near the Laima clock and the Chili pizzeria, so that every marcher passing would have heard the protest message without it booming at the flower-layers at the base of the Freedom Monument, which was, at least officially, a moment of remembrance of the dead.
The counterdemonstrators decorated their location with photographs of people being shot during the Holocaust, mostly in Latvia, but some of victims in Russia. In any case, these things happened before the Latvian Legion was formed, and the only connection could be that some of these killings (in Russia and Belarus) could be attributed to the Latvian Police Battalions, formed soon after the German occupation in 1941 and used for purposes other than combat. One task for historians (unless I have missed research on this) would be to document, to the extent possible, what persons from the Police Battalions were transfered to either of the two Latvian Waffen-SS divisions and whether any of them could be linked to war crimes. That would set the record straight to the extent possible after 70 years.
On the "Latvian"  side, there was some needless ugliness. The wreaths laid by the Antifascist Committee were, again, defaced rather than simple moved aside to make room for the flowers from the veterans and their supporters. If the Latvian Tennis Federation comes and lays flowers after the Latvian Basketball Federation has placed a wreath, they would just politely move it, wouldn't they? I also heard mumblings in the crowd that "Jews should not be here". This is deranged. Jews have been "here" in some cases for hundreds of years, they were and are Latvian citizens and have a right to remember their dead when and how they please (which is exactly what the Legionnaire supporters say about the old war veterans). The Jewish and other victims of the German occupation died in the same war as the veterans, and they, unlike the Legion or the Latvian units of the Red Army, were non-combatant civilians. Wacko theories that all the Jews of Latvia deserved to be shot because a few Jews (mainly from Russia) were linked to Soviet power have no place in serious discussion (and Latvians also played a prominent role in establishing the USSR, so where to we go with that? Answer - 1937, end of story for most of them. Do we want to go on along these lines?).
Another disturbing thing was that someone placed a photograph of one of the most decorated Latvian Waffen-SS officers, Roberts Ancāns, at the base of the Freedom Monument. Ancāns, an Obersturmfuhrer  in the Waffen-SS is covered with medals and regalia, including the Iron Cross, all for heroism in battle, multiple wounds and the like. Ancāns came into the Legion via the Police Battalions, before that, he volunteered for the Latvian Army before the war and occupation, intending, as lawyer, to become a legal affairs officer. He later emigrated to the US, where he died in 1982, He probably was "clean" of any suspected misdeeds, as he cleared the screenings that ex-Germany military refugees were subjected to. But whatever the story was, putting a person in full German regalia in the middle of a field of flowers, behind two wreaths from the anti-fascists that had been defaced and buried in other flowers just sends the wrong message. I could see placing a photo of General Jānis Kurelis in his Latvian Army uniform (he did end up in the Waffen-SS, but led a mutiny against the German authorities) among the flowers, but not someone who broadcasts the absolutely wrong message at first glance.
Finally, I am surprised (unless I missed someone at the earlier sessions) that there were no mainstream Latvian media covering the conference organised by the Anti-Fascist Committee, which was attended by some American former and serving state legislators, as well as a former Belgian and German member of the European parliament, and Latvia's MEP Tatyana Zhdanok (admittedly, a controversial "pro-Russian" politician who wins no popularity contests among the ethnic Latvian population). Here, they would have heard an explanation of the counterdemonstrators' motives. There was also a former Russian-born member of the Israeli Knesset, who tragically died while in Riga to attend the conference.
In any case, here is my video on the events:

UPDATED Denies Claim Latvian journalist consented to psychiatric hospitalization

UPDATE:
Leonīds Jākobsons has categorically denied to Latvian media that he consented to be placed in a mental hospital for obeservation, essentially calling the pietiek.com story misleading or a fabrication. Jākobsons says that he was placed in the hospital despite protesting the decision to put him under observation to the investigating prosecutor. 
The police and prosecuting authorities have not denied that they (or so they claim) had the legal right to confine Jākobsons for 30 days of observation (a measure usually applied in civilized countries to those suspected of a crime so violent or bizarre that, instead of a pre-trial confinement to jail, the suspect is examined to settle the possible issue of sanity at an early stage). I could see this being done, God forbid, to someone firing a sniper rifle at the maiden topping the Latvian Freedom Monument and loudly shouting that the pink crocodiles in the nearby Bastejkalns park canal were dancing and singing a song telling him to do this.) But it should not have been done to Jākobsons. 

The Latvian investigative journalism portal Pietiek.com claims that the Latvian journalist Leonīds Jākobsons consented to being confined to a mental hospital for observation in connection with an investigation of his role in publishing leaked e-mails from Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs.

The story (in Latvian) is here: http://www.pietiek.com/raksti/_neka_personiga__noklusejis,_ka_jakobsons_pats_piekritis_ievietosanai_psihiatriskaja_slimnica
It mentions that the psychiatric examination was based on a 20 year old medical record that may have questioned Jākobsons mental stability.
Pietiek.com also indirectly mocks those journalists and public figures who hastened to call Jākobsons hospitalization (where he says he was together with murder suspects) an outrage.
While the issue of exactly how and why the controversial editor of the Russian-language kompromat.lv ended up in the "loony bin", and why it was not reported at the time (late 2011?) is a gap in the whole story and may reflect flawed journalism, it is also possible that Jākobsons was pressured into agreeing (perhaps facing pre-trial arrest in a similar social environment of murderers, thieves, etc.).

New outrages against a journalist in Latvia?

The Latvian prosecutor’s office has filed criminal charges against the Latvian journalist Leonīds Jākobsons, who edits a website in Russian, www.kompromat.lv, fr allegedly stealing and publishing some e-mail correspondence by Riga’s mayor Nils Ušakovs, a member of the Harmony Center party.

The correspondence seemed to suggest that Ušakovs was in touch with some shady characters in Russia, as well as with a local Russian diplomat later labeled a spy.

So far, there is no evidence that Jākobsons himself cracked Ušakovs gmail account, rather, that someone provided him with the already “stolen” emails, so it is difficult to understand how the journalist can be brought up on these charges. When the Latvian television journalist Ilze Jaunalksne’s phone conversations, recorded by the State Revenue Service, were leaked, it was the Revenue Service employees who were guilt of illegal wiretapping, not the media that published the transcripts.

At the same time the investigative television news program Nekā personīga (Nothing Personal) revealed that Jākobsons had been committed to a mental hospital for 30 days for observation in connection with the criminal investigation. This kind of abuse of journalists has not been seen since the Soviet era under the KGB secret police. Then, most journalists were obedient to the Communist regime, and only people

The alleged incident took place in November 2011, so that the filing of charges occurred with remarkable speed for Latvia. It took twice as long to file charges against persons suspected of taking bribes from the German automaker Daimler, and when personal, partly nude private photos of a public figure and advisor to the Latvian president were circulated on the internet, the perpetrators were never found.

In any case, the incident is similar to Wikileaks or event the Pentagon Papers, because it concerned the Riga mayor’s correspondence in an official capacity, suggesting ties (possibly, if not probably inadvertent) with Russian intelligence, as well as attempts to influence the content of some Russian-language media. The news value of the information provided could be considered as overriding any privacy issues. It would be another story if the mails were purely personal – to the mayor’s wife or family friends. But even some personal correspondence of a public figure, such as an official having an extramarital affair in a context where this would be politically damaging or signal dangerous risk-taking, could be news that overrides privacy considerations.

The Jākobsons case, especially the part about confinement to a mental hospital when a brief interview with a psychiatrist would have sufficed to determine that he wasn’t a raving loon, is very disturbing, though I am unaware (nor has anyone fully reported) the exact details. Once can suppose that it happened shortly after the journalist had his website servers seized.

A few months later, Jākobsons, while coming home with his young son, was attacked and had his face slashed by unknown goons. The police investigation of that case, which left the journalist in the hospital healing a slashed cheek similar to the wound inflicted on Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie Chinatown, has failed to find the persons responsible. Local reporters, who rushed to the site of the slashing, found a disorderly crime scene in the apartment building staircase, with both media people (photographers, cameramen, journalists) and nonchalant uniformed police trampling possible evidence.

As a sidelight, the independent Latvian weekly magazine Ir has been sued by four different allegedly “aggrieved” parties whose honor and reputation (or in one case, “traditional values”) have been injured by stories in the print and online publication. They must be doing something right.

Another needless flag-burning uproar

I am no fan of flag desecration, but however one may feel about it, it is a form of symbolic expression and is not punished as a crime in countries with a high degree of democracy and individual freedom, although there are Western countries that have laws on flag and national symbol desecration. They are not a good idea.
There has been another case in Latvia that has, yet again, caused a needless uproar. Someone was caught on a mobile phone camera attempting to burn or scorch a paper Latvian flag (not a protected flag under the law, if I am not mistaken). The incident happened on independence day, November 18. This triggered a frenzy of outrage, especially as the perpetrator appeared to be Russian. A girl responsible for filming and posting the incident was also reportedly threatened.
Now the Latvian Security Police – the same guys and girls who were arresting university lecturers just a few years ago for expressing opinions about the national currency – responding, apparently, to the outcry, have found the suspect and have launched a criminal investigation. As all that time and effort was being spent, I can imagine the members of some terrorist sleeper cell using Riga as a hideout laughing all the way to their safe house. This is the sort of thing, if anything, that the Security Police should be looking out for.
Can you imagine that, because they were looking for one fuckwit who should not be punished for what he did, the Security Police missed clues that the sleeper cell was using Latvia to prepare for an attack on an airport or city in western Europe? Sorry, missed that because we were hunting for a teenager who burned a red-white-red paper pennant.
Also disturbing, but perhaps not that different from a redneck response in the US, was the torrent of foaming at the mouth commentary asking that the flag scorcher (you don't really see it completely burn in the video) be deported, imprisoned, whipped, lynched, even summarily excuted (though that may have been black humor irony). It reinforces the evidence from polls and surveys that Latvian society is deeply authoritarian. That is dangerous. If for no other reason, flag and national symbol desecration laws, it is to stop what amounts to the legal and enforcable “sanctification” of property and symbolic objects to make it clear that the state stands above and can repress individuals for disrespecting it.

At least the US Supreme Court still understands the essence of the problem:

The Government may not prohibit the verbal or nonverbal expression of an idea merely because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable, even where our flag is involved. Nor may a State foster its own view of the flag by prohibiting expressive conduct relating to it, since the Government may not permit designated symbols to be used to communicate a limited set of messages. Moreover, this Court will not create an exception to these principles protected by the First Amendment for the American flag alone.

From Texas v. Johnson - 491 U.S. 397 (1989)

Perhaps the Latvian courts and the courts of a few other countries claiming to be democratic could look to this example?

Bad, stupid moves on free speech in Latvia

It has been a bad couple of days for free expression in Latvia. I will rank the cases starting with the one I consider the most brutal (and brutishly dumb) – the nursing home Gauja in the town of Garkalne that expelled Anita Arikāne, a 41-year old woman patient suffering from severe cerebral palsy for a blog she typed by holding a toothbrush or other object in her mouth.

The management of the nursing home said that the blog, published on the Latvian social network draugiem.lv was offensive to the staff and management of Gauja. After a cursory look at Anita's blog (it is rather chaotically organized and difficult to follow) I found nothing directly insulting to the nursing home. That does not mean there was no criticism, I just did not see anything that could be considered libelous – no untrue allegations of physical abuse, negligence or neglect. To be sure, Anita appears profoundly disabled and in need of constant care, something that would be extremely frustrating for even a few weeks, never mind a lifetime. Moreover, caregivers in Latvian nursing homes are underpaid and overworked – or, at least, that is a reasonable assumption. So some friction between the staff and a patient seen as privileged (Anita got her own room and an internet connection) could well have occurred. But to evict a disabled patient effective November 1, with apparently no process of adjudication, appeal or mediation seems the height of brutish cruelty and an abuse of Anita Arikāne's inalienable right to free expression. 

While we are on the subject of dumb behavior by country bumpkin municipalities (that may not be the right term for a coastal town in Latvia), it brings us to a refusal by the town of Salacgriva (which hosts the Positivus music festival in the summer) to allow a group of Latvian atheists to put up a poster that said “ You don't believe in God? You are not alone!” . The refusal was based on the argument that asking people to contact the Latvian Atheist Society was not a commercial advertisement for goods or services covered by municipal regulations pertaining to permits to post commercial bills on public property (lighting poles). As the Atheist Society points out, this was a contrived excuse to refuse to display an “anti-religious” message.

Not to be outdone by their opponents in Salacgriva (in terms of doing something off-the-wall), the atheists whose right to free expression was violated are now asking the Riga municipal building department (seems the municipal agencies that hand out building permits also give permits to put up posters) to remove a religious poster “Life without God, Life without meaning” that has been put up in Riga. Asking for symmetric violation of free expression probably is not the best tactic for resolving this matter,

Back in the big city, Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs (Harmony Center/SC) has decided to file suit against the independent magazine Ir and its commentator Aivars Ozoliņš for libel for a commentary in which he referred to the Riga municipal government as a “kleptocracy”. Ušakovs joins a not so short list of thin-skinned Latvian politicians who have reacted to harsh criticism by taking an axe to freedom of speech. And they have picked the wrong guy. Ozoliņš has been sued by politicians before – successfully as far as the post-Soviet mentality Latvian courts go, but he won a free speech case in the European Court of Human Rights in 2007 (for a case back in the 1990s), getting a judgement for some EUR 10 000 plus court costs. So here we go again...

Finally, I don't know what to make of the Latvian President Andris Bērziņš initiative to amend Latvian laws to impose harsher punishments on “disrespecting” Latvia's coat of arms and the coats of arms of Latvia's traditional districts – Kurzeme, Vidzeme, Zemgale and Latgale. Bērzīņš has proposed that fines for “disrespecting” these symbols should be as high as LVL 500. However, part of the problem here could be murky journalism – reading the LETA agency report more closely, it seems that the President was not addressing the issue of using the coats of arms “disrespectfully” in political expression, but rather what he considers their misuse for commercial purposes. This may well be a different story of setting rules for the use of national heraldic symbols on T-shirts and coffee cups (assuming that the government holds some kind of copyright in these coats of arms). Then again, it is a gray area as to whether using Latvia's coat of arms in a protest T-shirt or poster could be considered a violation of these laws. Any laws aimed at protecting the national and regional coats of arms from ending up on cheap vodka bottles should be written very carefully to ensure that they cannot be abused or used to chill free expression.

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.

Will one outspoken teacher bring down a "loyalty police" on Latvian educators?

The worrisome case of a “disloyal” teacher of Russian language and literature, Vladislavs Rafalskis, has dominated some of the Latvian media in recent days. A teacher at a Riga school he made the “disloyal” statement on a radio show. Rafaļskis, a member of the For Human Rights In A United Latvia party (PCTVL), told a radio program recently: "I can honestly say that I am disloyal to this country. I simply despise this regime. It alienates my children too, and creates problems for them."

I am willing to believe that Rafalskis may be motived by some wacko ideas about the Latvian state and what he believes the government should have done for the Russian population etc. These may be heartfelt views, even if one could disagree with them or even strongly oppose them. In any case, Rafalskis has not expressed his disgust with Latvia as dramatically as some 300 000 people, who have left and are probably not coming back – aren’t they more “disloyal”?? And somehow I don’t believe that his political views affect his teaching, or that he will tell children that in Russian a dog is a frog or teach other wrong vocabulary. What disturbs me about this case is that it has started a push for some kind of loyalty policing at schools and other state-financed institutions. This will inevitably have a chilling effect on teachers who may want to provoke political debate among their (older) students by expressing “radical” views. Already, there are dozens of comments on news portals and social media demanding that Rafalskis be fired, deported, etc.

Any ideas of a formal or informal  “loyalty police” should be nipped in the bud in a democratic country, because full democracy and freedom of expression includes criticizing the state, even declaring one’s opposition to its legitimacy and existence. After all, didn’t most Latvians consider as heroes  the dissidents who rejected the legitimacy of the Soviet Union and did they not consider it unjust that people who didn’t join the Communist Party (another badge of loyalty) were denied career advancement? Was a Communist doctor better than a non-party member?

The other thing that is scary about “loyalty”, besides the fact that it is a relative, “rubber” concept, is that it elevates the state above the individual and creates an enforceable duty for free individuals to express respect and fealty for what is, in the final analysis, an abstraction and a social construct. It grants the state and parts of society (those calling for measures against “the disloyal”) the right to officially or unofficially punish a person’s convictions or attitude. That is hardly the same thing as punishing an act that may be motivated by “disloyalty” to a particular state or political system, but even acts of symbolic protest involving state property should be treated with the greatest care for the element of free expression and political protest that this may involve.

One should also somewhat of an uproar when some members of the National Alliance showed up at a day care center to teach Latvian patriotism by displaying German-made World II weapons.  Was this “good loyalty” as opposed to Rafaļskis “bad disloyalty” speaking to an adult audience on the radio (and speaking of the political regime, not the abstract nation-state). Teaching should follow guidelines for political debate at appropriate levels – the older the pupils and the closer to voting age, the more it should be encouraged. For older classes, political diversity among teachers must be supported and protected, because children, when they become young adults in the “real world”, will be confronted with different, sometimes harsh viewpoints no matter what their schools tried to teach. Above all, the schools should produce free, critical thinking individuals, not “loyal subjects”.