Sunday, 29 August 1999

August 29, 1999

News
Picture

Subj: Latvian chat Sunday 8/29
Date: 8/29/99 1:22:24 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: Sturgalve

File: RIGA-A~1.JPG (63087 bytes)
DL Time (32000 bps): < 1 minute
Sveiki visi....
Just a quick note to remind everyone about Latvian chat here on AOL starting at approximately 9pm EST until the last chatter drops out. You can access the chat using the following link:
Town Square - Latvian chat Attached is a picture down the side streets of Riga, with Doma Baznica (The Dom Church) in the background, taken from Peters' trip in 1997. Following are 3 articles...
-on a bomb blast (!) last week in Riga--asssumed to be part of organized crime turf wars;
-more positively, the slowly improving "language" situation in Latvia;
-and commemoration of the Baltic Way, 10 years ago, where Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians linked hands from Tallin, to Riga, to Vilnius to demonstrate for independence.

Ar visu labu!
Silvija un Peters

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RIGA, Aug 24 (Reuters) - A bomb exploded in front of a store in the centre of the Latvian capital Riga on Tuesday, injuring three bystanders, a police official said.
A spokeswoman for the city's police said the bomb had exploded at a shop of the Baltic nation's largest fruit juice maker, Gutta, around 9:30 am (0630 GMT).
"Two women injured by flying glass have been hospitalised, one in serious condition," Ieva Zvidre, a Riga police department spokeswoman, told Reuters adding that a third person had suffered minor injuries.
Zvidre said the size of the device was yet not known and that no one had claimed responsibility for the blast. An investigation has been launched.
"This is the first incident in Riga this year where people were injured when explosives were involved," she added.
Though Riga is widely considered a safe city with little violent crime, there were 15 bomb blasts in the first half of 1999. Most of the explosions have been linked to turf battles among organised crime groups.

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Copyright 1999 Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved.
The following news report may not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, without the prior written consent of Reuters Ltd.

RIGA, Aug 25 (Reuters) - The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) urged members of Latvia's large Russian-speaking minority on Wednesday to take Latvian citizenship and learn the national language.
Since last August 15,000 to 18,000 of the approximately 650,000 Russian speakers applied to naturalise, OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities Max van der Stoel told a news conference.
He gave no comparative figures but said the number of applicants had increased "considerably."
"But I still express the hope that more Russian speakers here will follow the example of those 15,000 and will also...(start) the naturalisation process so that they will become full citizens of this country," van der Stoel said.
Van der Stoel encouraged more Russians to learn Latvian. "They don't have to abandon their own language but it will be more convenient...if they know the state language," he said.
The Russian-speaking minority has been a major source of friction in Riga's relations with Moscow, which accused the Baltic state of discrimination when it imposed restrictions on who could become citizens after it quit the Soviet Union in 1991.
In a referendum last year, voters overturned those limits, opening up naturalisation procedures to anyone able to pass the a test in the state's Latvian language.
Latvian law makers are to take up a draft state language law this autumn, which President Vaira Vike-Freiberga returned to parliament last month amid concerns its provisions for compulsory use of Latvian in business were too restrictive.
Van der Stoel said he hoped members of parliament would take into account the concerns of Freiberga, who had said the last version was "too directed at limiting, rather than educating Latvian society."
Latvia, which wants to become a member of the European Union and of NATO, says the language needs protection after more than five decades of Soviet occupation eroded its use.
But many Russian speakers saw the original draft of the language law as an attempt to push them out of economic and social life.

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Copyright 1999 Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Burton Frierson
RIGA, Aug 23 (Reuters) - The Baltic states on Monday looked back on the moment 10 years ago when they joined hands by the millions to demand an end to Soviet rule -- shocking the Kremlin and jarring the memory of a world that had forgotten them.
On August 23, 1989 -- the 50th anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet pact that placed them under Moscow's control -- some two million Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians locked hands in a human chain spanning 600 km (373 miles) from Tallinn in Estonia to Riga in Latvia, and Vilnius in Lithuania.
The Baltic Way, as the event was known, was organised by the pro-independence Popular Front movements that flourished under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost reforms.
But it went far beyond what Moscow's new reformist meant when he called for openness and was a first sign Gorbachev had lost control of a revolution he had hoped to harness.
"Of course popular fronts were allowed to be created by Soviet officials and Communist Party to help carry out the ideas of perestroika and to break the orthodox branch of the Communist Party," said MP Romualds Razhuks, a former Popular Front leader.
"But people's energy was freed and no one could put it back into the bottle," said Razhuks, a Baltic Way organiser.
The Baltic Way came on the heels of the Latvian Popular front's call for independence in May 1989 and was followed by Lithuania's declaration of full independence in 1990.
It was part of a chain of events leading to a failed 1991 crackdown that killed 14 in Vilnius and saw the Balts in all three countries stand firm in passive resistance to Soviet tanks.
But the Baltic Way was the breakthrough event in the independence movement.
"It was a non-violent protest action, which due to its scale and originality...attracted the attention of the world," Latvian President Vaira Vika-Freiberga told a conference marking the 10th anniversary on Monday.
"(It) stirred the minds of people in the West...and aided in the dismantling the naive belief in the Gorbachev phenomenon and prospects of reconstructing the Soviet Union, showing that the evil empire was unravelling itself," Vika-Freiberga added.
Although the West had never recognised the Soviet Union's 1940 annexation of the Baltic states, many had largely forgotten the three tiny nations.
But television images of the Baltic Way put Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania back on the map, at least in many people's minds.
"I think it was on every possible TV station in the world at that time. While...in New York I met diplomats who told me that was the first time they heard of the Baltic states," said Trivimi Velliste, Estonia's ambassador to the U.N. from 1994-98.
The Baltic states regained independence in September 1991, following a failed putsch by hardliners in Moscow that led to the breakup of the Soviet Union, and later launched the bloc's boldest market and democratic reforms.

Vecriga streets, Dom Church in the background
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