RIGA – The Latvian journalist, Juris Kaža, has set up a blog devoted to the “Free Speech Emergency” in Latvia. Although I may not share Juris’ zeal, I think the situation with the freedom of speech is disheartening. It is as if the government has taken a page straight of the Kremlin rulebook. Moscow blames the crisis on the rest of the world and particularly on the Best Nation on Earth ™. It also wants to control how local media covers the crisis. It even bans the use of the word “crisis” on national TV.
So it’s no coincidence that the Russian business daily Kommersant on Saturday splashed across the front page a story about Latvian authorities trying to keep everyone’s mouth shut. With the subheading, “In Latvia, authorities started to send to jail for economic forecasts,” the article explains the story of one arrest and one criminal proceeding last week.
The newspaper, however, says “Latvia became the second country in the world that persecutes for dissemination of information about the possibility of the devaluation of a national currency and a threat of the failure of the financial system as a whole.”
The first country? Russia. Apparently, regional prosecutors are to monitor media and are not to allow publication of articles that may provoke a panic among the populace at the time of crisis. Thus, the ban on the c-word. One journalist, Pavel Verstov has already become a victim of the attack. He published a report about cases of suicide on one of the businesses of Magnitogorsk due to the economic crisis on his portal verstov.info (the site is currently down).
Sean’s Russia Blog has more:
In Sverdlovsk, the prosecutor began a check of their local media for disseminating information that might “destabilize the [economic] situation in the region.” Namely, according to Timma Bobina, the head assistant to the prosecutors office, “We were assigned to check information about media attacks via the Internet on credit organizations in Yekaterinburg. If we establish evidence that the law was broken, we can follow up with disciplinary measures, and even criminal punishment against the perpetrators.”
Sverdlovsk isn’t the only region going through such a “check.” Kommersant reports that all of Russia’s regions will look into how local media is reporting on local banks. According to prosecutors, customers in the Far East received an SMS saying that Dalkombank and Vladivostok banks were going bankrupt. In three days, clients withdrew $2.4 million rubles. In Yekaterinburg local media started a panic when it reported that Severnaya Bank, Bank 24.ru, and Ural Bank were to undergo “reconstruction and development.” Apparently the economic crisis has sent many Russians into a panic to withdrawal their savings from banks.
People running to withdraw money; government trying to control the situation; SMS sent out warning of economic collapse; it all sounds very familiar.
[...] of a bank during a concert.” More coverage of the situation – at All About Latvia. (From a Nov. 24 post: “It is as if the government has taken a page straight of the Kremlin rulebook.”) [...]