All About Latvia

RIGA - Latvians will have a chance to reassume power in their country.

Starting Wednesday, any citizen can sign a petition to amend the Constitution to grant voters a right to dissolve the parliament through a referendum.

Under current legislation, that right is reserved to the president and has never been used in the country’s history since 1918.

Launched by the Latvian trade unions, the petition drive will continue until April 10, aiming to collect a bit more than 149,000 signatures. That’s how many are required to initiate a legislation in the Saeima.

However, Latvia is a long way away from the adoption of the proposed changes.

If the month-long process succeeds, the draft legislation will go to the Saeima. If the parliament rejects it in the untainted form, the legislation will go to a referendum, requiring an approval of the half registered voters in the country of 2.3 million.

In recent months, Latvians have grown weary of their government amidst corruption scandals and political cynicism. They protested twice last fall against the government of Aigars Kalvitis - the self-proclaimed guarantor of stability - who was forced to resign as the prime minister last December.

Politicians demeaned those who gave them a mandate to serve in the first place less than a year after the 2006 October elections. Last summer, MP Janis Lagzdins showed people what he thought of them immediately following the presidential elections in May. He later apologized.

The ruling clique, as local media often described the ruling coalition leaders plus a minigarch, met at a Riga Zoo to select the current president Valdis Zatlers underscoring the cynicism of the political elite toward democratic process.

Answering uncomfortable and direct questions, Kalvitis had resorted to a single phrase, “That is your interpritation.”

The prime minister had changed, but the ruling coalition basically remained the same.

As some people pointed out, the signature drive will put additional pressure on Latvian President trying to walking the tight rope between the parliament and the people.

Some also expressed fear that giving people the right to dissolve parliament will stall the political process in the country. However they probably know that the most efficient form of government in any country is the dictatorship. Democracies tend to be slow as it takes time to muster up a compromise among all parties. We’ve already had a dictatorship six years before the war and 50 years after the World War II. We don’t want to go back to that.

In the last 17 years, politicians stole public funds with impunity for their own benefit, or at least appear to do so in the public eye. It’s time to take back the power to the people. Which is why I’m going to sign the petition.

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RIGA – A few weeks ago, city fathers launched an advertising campaign to help put Latvia’s capital on the map. It was not aimed at improving education, or advocating another cause that would improve the quality of life for 900,000 people who live here.

Around 100 ubiquitous posters feature large white letters that read, Vote for Riga, or Balso par Rigu. The ad encourages residents to vote online for their city to become a square on the international edition of the Monopoly board game.

“Our purpose was to support the campaign to get the word RIGA on the new Monopoly game so that our city would be recognized in the world,” a city official said.

As a native of this great town, I’d be delighted to see my city become part of the Monopoly’s international edition. It’d be an honor. I doubt though many people visited Baltic Avenue, or Boardwalk simply because they represent squares on the traditional Monopoly board game. No guarantee that people would want to visit Riga simply because they played the Monopoly game.

Besides, spending taxpayers money on an advertising campaign that ultimately helps Hasbro sell more board games is a wasteful use of public resources.

Getting Riga on the Monopoly board may bring more tourists here, who are curious about this mysterious obscure place on the sea they’ve never heard of. They’d naturally want to visit and spend their hard-earned money here. And that is good.

But the campaign is all for an easy solution to a complicated problem. Long-term solution is to invest in developing a certain skill we are good at. It would mean spending more than half per cent of GDP on research and development, for example. It would mean finding out our skills and honing them in.

Public relations campaigns didn’t put smaller country like Estonia on the map, though they helped. It was creation of companies like Skype. Or first-ever electronic national parliamentary elections. Or standing up to Russia.

Riga’s placement on the monopoly board could bring some tourists in, but it won’t create a name for this small country struggling with its self-esteem.

The city spent 700 lats ($1,300), which seems like a pathetically small sum of money for the advertising campaign. Yet, the money should have been spent on developing industries, and honing skills and talents of people who would have voted for this town. Even if only in the Monopoly game.

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RIGA – I disagree with Juris Kaza about this week’s decision of the Riga court to sentence to 18 months Andris Jordans, a self-described neo-Nazi, for spewing a lot of hatred toward gypsies and Jews at a forum in Riga. A YouTube video showed him calling gypsies and Jews not human at all and acknowledging that he would destroy them if he had a chance.

The Russian-language press ripped up on the case, claiming that the Latvian government cares about inciting hatred only when it comes from a Russian person. They called it a discrimination and compared Jordans to another case of a fined Russian girl, who posted hating messages on Delfi, the Russian-language news site.

A couple of months ago, I argued on a site of the Shtab, the ultra-Russian Web site, that making a statement that Latvia ignores speech hatred was premature. Following the verdict, though, Russians on that same site couldn’t muster any praise for the Latvian justice system to give the man what he deserved. Because acknowledging the existence of a justice system from a marginalized group of Russian non-citizens would crush any opposition to the Latvian state.

But back to Kaza.

Regardless of what Jordans said, I believe that the state has no right to imprison him for his words alone. The government that punishes speech, even harsh and offensive speech, is more dangerous than any individual, deranged speaker.

Where is the line between a dangerous free speech and the exercise of a given right to free speech? If I were to advocate and prepare for the violent change in government, would that be considered a free speech? Would the government not have an inherent right to intervene? I’d say so. Any time the peace and national security is at stake the government ought to intervene.

Whether Jordan’s case was dangerous enough is another question, but Juris appears not to care much about the content of Jordan’s speech, but rather the fact that the speech occurred is sufficient to blame the government for infringing on rights to free speech.

That is all with more than a week to our bigger test of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly when Waffen SS veterans would proceed from the Dome Square to the Freedom Monument on March 16, commemorating the day when two divisions of the Latvian legion fought against the Soviets during the World War II. That is bound to attract the international attention. The city council already denied all but one request to march that Sunday morning and rightly so. Too many groups marching simultaneously for various causes can create a danger for peace and security of this tiny torn country. And that is what the government ought to protect.

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