Posted on 03/27/2005 10:41:36 PM PST by jb6
In a park in the Latvian capital Riga, a small group of protesters gathers, all Russian, some wearing paper hats inscribed with the word "Alien". Latvian police carry out a small, bureaucratic piece of harassment. With a tape, and much officiousness, they measure the distance between the demonstrators and the nearest public building, a school on the other side of the road.
The protest is two metres too close, so the police move it a little further down the path.
The protesters don't mind. They are there to object to a much greater injustice.
More than 450,000 Russians and native Russian-speakers - out of a total Latvian population of 2.3m - are classed as "non-citizens" because they have failed (or refused) to take a test in Latvian language and history, which would allow them to have citizenship.
This was local election day, and they were protesting about the fact that as "aliens", despite having lived in Latvia all their lives, they had no right to take part in the elections - whereas citizens of other EU countries could vote if they had lived there for a mere six months.
"I was born here," said one young man. "I pay the same taxes as Latvians. Yet I'm not allowed to vote for the politicians who spend those taxes."
"I'm here to protest against the government's policy of dividing society along ethnic lines," said another.
The fate of the non-citizens - who account for 20% of the entire population of Latvia - is a complex one.
Soviet migrants
When Latvia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, it granted automatic citizenship to those who had lived in the first independent Latvian state - between 1918 and 1940 - but not to those who immigrated here after the war, when Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union.
Latvia suffered hugely under Soviet rule.
Thousands were arrested and sent to Siberian labour camps, or executed, during the Stalin years.
MEP Tatjana Zdanoka uses her position to highlight the issue Later, hundreds of thousands of Russians, Belarussians and Ukrainians flooded into the republic under a deliberate policy of Russification. The Latvian language was squeezed out of official use.
Latvians were resentful citizens of the USSR. By 1991, they comprised only half of the population of their own country, while in Riga only a third were Latvian.
Even today, Russian is heard as commonly as Latvian on the streets of Riga.
But the government is determined to revive the Latvian identity. It says its policy towards Russians who immigrated here during the Soviet period is aimed not at punishing them for the sins of the Soviet regime (as some suspect) but at ensuring that they learn Latvian and integrate fully into society.
In order to naturalise, Russians must take a test in Latvian, and pass an exam about Latvian history - in which they must "correctly" answer that the country was occupied and colonised, not liberated, by the Soviet Union in 1945.
Many of the Russians at the demonstration on election day said they found that psychologically difficult. They said they wanted to integrate (and many could speak Latvian), but they found the idea of applying for citizenship humiliating.
"I lived here - same as them - and I was a citizen of the USSR," said a middle-aged woman. "They deprived me of my citizenship, and now I must apply to become one! I just won't do it."
Separate, but together
Tatjana Zdanoka is Latvia's only Russian member of the European Parliament and uses her position to publicise the position of the Russian minority.
She says her mother, who has lived in Latvia for 60 years and worked here for 45 years as a schoolteacher, has no right to vote.
"She is 83 and has bad eyes. Of course she's not capable of taking any kind of exam."
Facts about Latvia Latvia was independent from 1918 to 1939 After World War II it was a part of the USSR It regained independence in 1991 700,000 Soviet-time migrants and their children became non-citizens By the time Latvia joined the EU in 2004, this figure had dropped to around 450,000 Latvia's total population is 2,3m (including non-citizens)
Igor Vatolin, a journalist on the newspaper Chas and a Russian rights activist, said the Latvian Popular Front, which led the fight for independence at the end of the 1980s, promised citizenship to everyone living in the republic.
"But they reneged on that - even though thousands of Russians voted with them in favour of independence in the referendum of 1991," he said.
There is no ethnic strife in the streets of Latvia. The two peoples live peacefully together. But politicians on both sides, and in Russia itself, stir things up.
Moscow rarely misses a chance to complain at international meetings of Latvia's "human rights abuses", while the head of the Latvian parliament's foreign affairs committee, Aleksandrs Kirsteins, has described the non-citizens as "civilian occupiers".
He called for an agreement with the Russian government under which all the unwanted foreigners would be herded on to trains and shipped back to their "ethnic homeland" - with a brass band playing on the platform to see them off.
Latvia's two communities deserve credit for by and large ignoring such provocative statements. Despite the bitterness and insecurity on both sides, they have succeeded in forging a peaceful co-existence - somewhat separate, but together.
Grzegorz 246 only sides with Brussels to whom he and his cohorts have sold out a Free, Democratic, Independent and Sovereign Poland for their bag of silver. Oh and he dispises Russians.
You do not seem to care much for the Poles of Wilno region.
My neighbor's a Cherokee Indian; he wants to know when you're deporting yourself.
When his nation grows some balls and deports me.
OK, so if Russia "grows some balls" and reinvades Latvia to assist ethnic Russians, you're OK with it? After all, if Latvia fails to "grow some balls" and fight off an invasion by a much larger and much more heavily armed neighbor, that's just their tough luck, isn't it?
If Russia thinks it belongs to them they should try to take it. If they want to act like victors in a war over conquered neighbors, then they should defeat them first.
They've done it once. They could very easily do it again.
What you're arguing is that might makes right. Actually, it doesn't.
These people in Latvia didn't ask to be there; they were born of Russians forcibly relocated there by Stalin, or the descendants of same. They didn't ask for their lot in life. Punishing them for the sins of their grandfathers' and great-grandfathers' rulers fits no definition of justice that I can comprehend.
If you think that denying them citizenship based solely on their ethnicity is a good thing, then you're arguing that rights are, in the end, completely alienable and subject to the whim of the majority.
I'd love to hear you argue that vision with the same intensity when you're in the minority.
You don't seem to want to acknowledge that the only one denying them citizenship is themselves, precisely because they refuse to take a test in Latvian language and history. That proves they don't consider themselves Latvians first. Like you they are offended at the idea that Stalin had no right to make them Latvian citizens, so they refuse to obey the law. If they choose Russian nationalist pride over law and order, then Latvia is better off without them.
They were in the Russian state for centuries and Russians let them be, not like Germans did with the native Prussians. Also many Russians lived in Baltic states longe before the Bolshevik Revolution and independence.
I have given eight years of my life to defending this country. My father gave twenty years of his life. I don't recall seeing you on the ramparts of freedom, sonny boy. Must've looked too much like work for your taste.
If this country suddenly demanded that my American-born daughter, based solely on an accident of her ancestry, take and pass a test in English and American history before being granted US citizenship, while certain favored foreigners are granted all benefits of American citizenship after residing here only six months without having to take any such test, I would advise her to leave this country I was dead, pausing only to destroy the house she grew up in and contaminate the land it sat on with something nasty, such as PCBs and arsenic--assuming I didn't decide to leave early and do the demolition and contamination myself.
proves they don't consider themselves Latvians first.
It does no such thing. It merely proves that they do not wish to take a test. They may not wish to take any such test because they find the notion insulting.
The USSR is no more. If these Russian transplants would like to become citizens of Latvia, they are welcome to, but they don't want that for some reason.
One more time, for possible penetration into your brain: they are not transplants. They are the grandchildren of those who were forcibly relocated there. It's not even the sins of the fathers being visited onto the sons. It's a matter of the sin's of people who hated the fathers being visited on the sons.
Meanwhile, of course, the Latvian government sponsors parades for Latvian veterans of the SS. Those are your kind of "good citizens," I guess.
Not every nation is required to extend citizenship to everyone born there. No nation can be expected to automatically naturalize aliens transplanted to their territory or born there during a period of occupation. It's ridiculous on the face of it.
When citizenship is denied to those born there, but extended to foreigners automatically after six months, then there's something fundamentally wrong.
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