Saturday, 6 November 1999

November 6, 1999

In the News
Latvian Link
Picture Album

Lat Chat and More! for November 7, 1999
Date: 11/6/99 10:32:03 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: Sturgalve
To: PetersJV
BCC: PairOfLats

File: 68232-30-domu-lauk-nite.jpg (62182 bytes)
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Sveiks!

Hopefully everyone happily survived Halloween and is having a wonderful start to November. The holidays are quickly approaching, but coming even faster is the deadline for the second unofficial AOL Lat chat contest!! The revised deadline is November 8, as we put in the last mailer, so there's still a little time left to get your entries in. We're really hoping to get more essays, as we know everyone will enjoy reading all the similarities they see in their own lives being Latvian and/or living with Latvians! As for the chat, we hopeto see many of you there this Sunday from approximately 9pm EST until the last chatter stops chatting. You can access the chat by clicking here: Town Square - Latvian chat

On to our features...

In the news this week:

• controversy over the fate of 3,000 to 4,000 Soviet-era “informer cards” still filed away in Latvia
• the three Baltic states urge acceleration of EU and NATO memberships for themselves
• Latvia fails to join most other states (including Estonia and Lithuania) in abstaining from nuclear anti-ballistic missile (ABM) votings at the U.N. as Russia engages in threatening posturing against the United States

This week's link from Gunars is the flags of Kurzeme (Courland).

This week's picture is from this October, the Domu Church square by night.

Ar visu labu,

In the News

Latvia Debates Putting Cards On The Table
By Benjamin Smith, Special to The Wall Street Journal Europe
RIGA, Latvia, November 1—Indulis Zalite is the guardian of the last, worst secrets of the former Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. As Manager of the Center for the Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism, the biochemist-turned-civil servant stands between the world and the barred closets that hold between 4,000 and 5,000 dusty, postcard-sized KGB “informer cards.”
Written in Russian, the cards contain information about Latvians who cooperated with the KGB over a 55-year-period, doing everything from monitoring corruption in the workplace to passing along details about friends expressing doubts about the communist system.
But the musty quiet of Mr. Zalite's brown-walled office may soon be shattered. The Fatherland and Freedom Party and the People's Party—two of the three parties making up Latvia's governing coalition—are urging the release of a list of all the registered informers. They've set off a rumble across the country as they've waged a campaign through the media.
Prime Minister Andris Skele of the People's Party has supported opening the files. The process of "lustration"—from the Latin word for "purification"—has helped pave a path from anger to reconciliation in Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, and the former German Democratic Republic. But in the three Baltic States that were USSR republics for half a century, those secrets have remained buried.
Estonia escaped the divisiveness that surrounds the task of asking the questions and dealing with difficult answers because a KGB officer absconded to Moscow with the archives. But Lithuania and Latvia have attempted to deal with the past by, among other things, barring government service to former KGB officers and people who continued to be Communist Party members after independence in 1991.
Because of this, part of Mr. Zalite's responsibilities include discreetly checking his cards and a list of full-time KGB operatives against the names of prospective members of parliament and candidates for other high government offices.
Despite the campaign, Mr. Zalite thinks the information will remain confidential for now. That's because there's quiet pressure from powerful quarters to keep the files secret.
“This would spoil a lot of people's lives,” says Juris Bojars, head of the Social Democratic Workers Party. He should know. Before independence, he was a KGB colonel. Now, Mr. Bojars is barred from seeking elective office. Mr. Zalite's office has found evidence to disqualify a few other political hopefuls as well.
Mr. Bojars dismisses the current discussions of lustration as a political ploy, a desperate stretch for a coalition reeling from public rejection of its attempts to liberalize the pension system.
As Mr. Bojars suggests, a major section of Latvia's political elite may fail to back the drive for lustration because they have much to fear from it. An estimated 2% of the country's population cooperated with the KGB. It was difficult not to. “The idea of informants is a gray area,” says Matthew Kott, an historian who curates Riga's Occupation Museum. “Everybody who lived under the communist regime is more or less compromised by the all-encompassing nature of the system.”
But the process does have some powerful supporters. Juris Sinka, a Fatherland and Freedom Party MP since Latvia's independent parliament was instituted in 1993, dismisses Mr. Bojars' concerns that lustration will open old wounds. Why, he asks, shouldn't Latvia follow postwar thought from Nuremberg to Gorbachev and Mandela and the conclusion that only openness can right old wrongs? “This is just to put a stop to speculation of all sorts,” Mr. Sinka says. “And it is much better for the conscience, for the soul, and better also for the younger generation.”
The Fatherland and Freedom Party—whose name reflects its nationalistic appeal—has yet to propose legislation. Mr. Sinka, who is eloquent on the principle of lustration, seems to lose interest in the practical details. “To pass a law or something? I suppose we'll have to,” he muses.
But while the politicians rail on, Mr. Zalite continues carefully to compare the names of prospective officials with his yellowing cards. He fears that openess will only a new round of accusations. Still, Mr. Zalite speaks with despair of the incompleteness of the files: The full records are in Moscow and unlikely to ever be released. And many of the most important informants—members of the party elite whose jobs required them to collaborate with the KGB—were never issued cards.
As for the little fish, the men and women who informed on their friends out of fear, need or ambition, Mr. Zalite says that they, and their country, have suffered enough.
“If we will publish these cards, we will punish these people twice,” he says as he, walks to the filing rooms, and carefully closes the gate behind him.
©1999 Dow Jones & Co., Inc.

STOCKHOLM, November 4 (Reuters)—The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania Thursday urged the enlargement of both the European Union and NATO be speeded up so that they can become members of both blocs as soon as possible.
Top officials from the three former Soviet bloc states made the plea in varying forms at a Baltic Sea security conference in Stockholm, saying that the Kosovo crisis showed that membership in both groups was vital to their security.
“The operational conclusion I drew from the Kosovo crisis is that EU and NATO enlargement needs to be accelerated,” Latvian Foreign Minister Indulius Berzins told several hundred delegates from Europe and the United States.
“At the same time, the enlargement must further strengthen, not weaken these organizations so that they are able to continue to play the same vital role in European security. ...In Latvia, we expect the enlarged EU to be a stronger EU,” he said.
The 15-nation EU is expected to make Lithuania and Latvia formal candidates for membership at a summit in Helsinki in December, along with Malta and three other former Communist bloc countries—Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania.
Estonia began formal talks in March 1998, along with Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and Cyprus.
©1999 Reuters Ltd.

By Anthony Goodman
UNITED NATIONS, November 5 (Reuters)—A resolution sponsored by Russia, China and Belarus aimed at pressing the United States not to proceed with building an anti-missile defence was adopted by a U.N. committee on Friday by a vote of 54 to four with 73 abstentions.
The resolution, which now goes to the General Assembly for endorsement, calls for continued efforts to strengthen and preserve the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty between the United States and the then-Soviet Union, which Washington wants to amend.
The treaty limits defence systems designed to shoot down enemy missiles, on the theory that such shields would only tempt the other side to build more missiles to overwhelm the defences.
The United States wants to amend the treaty to permit it to build a limited defence against any attack on the United States or U.S. troops stationed abroad by what it regards as “rogue states,” such as North Korea and Iran, with a growing capacity to launch weapons of mass destruction.
The U.N. resolution calls on the parties to the treaty “to refrain from the deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems for a defence of the territory of its country and not to provide a base for such a defence.”
The treaty parties are also called on not to transfer to other states, or to deploy outside their national territory, ABM systems or their components limited by the treaty.
Under the 1972 treaty, Russia has long had an ageing ABM defence to protect only Moscow. But neither country has a national missile defence such as the one the United States wants to deploy on a limited scale that would not be sufficient to neutralise Russia's large nuclear force.
As an apparent warning to Washington, Russia on Tuesday test fired one of its short-range anti-missile rockets for the first time in six years, and on Thursday it test-fired an old nuclear-capable tactical missile, to show its shelf-life had not expired.
On Tuesday Russian President Boris Yeltsin also sent U.S. President Bill Clinton a warning of “extremely dangerous consequences” if Washington went ahead with anti-missile plans.
Voting against the Russian-Chinese-Belarus resolution, together with the United States, were Israel, Latvia and Micronesia.
Thirteen of the 15 members of the European Union abstained while the other two, France and Ireland, voted for the resolution.
The large number of abstainers also included Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Korea as well as most East European nations such as Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine.
The resolution calls for “renewed efforts by each of the states parties to preserve and strengthen the ABM Treaty through full and strict compliance.”
It considers that any measure undermining the purposes and provisions of the ABM treaty “also undermines global strategic stability and world peace and the promotion of further strategic nuclear arms reduction.”
The resolution's sponsors say the ABM treaty is the cornerstone of global nuclear deterrence, which would be unravelled by the construction of an anti-missile defence.
Before the resolution was adopted, a French amendment urging support for efforts to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery was approved by 22 votes to one, with the unusually large number of 95 abstentions.
The United States cast the sole negative vote against the amendment, which appeared to be a bid to make the resolution more attractive to waverers. The sponsors of the resolution—Russia, China and Belarus—were among the abstainers.
©1999 Reuters Ltd.

Latvian Link

FLAGS OF COURLAND

This site is part of the excellent “Flags of the World” websites. It provides a short history of Courland (Kurzeme) and also some surprisingly un-Latvian looking flags from the past.—Gunars Zulis

Link: Courland (Latvia)
URL: http://www.skalman.nu/FOTW/flags/lv-cour.html

Picture Album

Peters had only one chance to wander around Riga one evening during our vacation last month—this week's picture is of Domu Baznica (church) in old Riga, by street light.

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