Sveiki, all!

Well, vacation in Latvia was rewarding, wonderful, often poignant, and tiring! Peters' choir's concert was well received, we did some souvenir and used book shopping, visited relatives -- of course! -- including Peters' cousin visiting from Australia, and otherwise basked in the Latvian atmosphere. Well, baked a bit, too! Except for a couple of days of relief, it was uncommonly hot!

In reviewing the news, we were a bit distressed that the Dziesmu Svetki (Folk Song and Dance Festival) didn't make it into the news wires, nor did the rededication of the Brivibas Piemineklis (Freedom Monument). Oh well, eventually we'll make it into the mainstream!

In the news:

• Reuters historical calendar -- August 5 marked the (illegal) incorporation of Latvia into the Soviet Union; ironically, also the death of Fredrich Engels, co-founder of Marxism; also, the laying of the cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty
• Feature: Survivor looks back on Lithuanian border massacre -- Lithuanian Tomas Sernas recounts bloody border ambush ten years ago, surviving being shot through the head by Soviet soldiers
• Chirac backs Baltic NATO and EU bids -- Chirac says no one should stand in the way; also, compliments Vaire Vike-Freiberga on her French; and suggests France develop a presence in the Baltics worthy of her (meaning France!, not Vike-Freiberga)
• Hungary to back NATO membership for Baltic states -- Hungary continues to lobby strongly for the Baltics
• EU encourages Latvia, but much work remains -- The carrot is held out that Latvia may be ready for the EU as soon as 2002
• Russia-China pact echoes 1939 -- Analyst Martin Sieff suggests the U.S. might do better than yawn unconcernedly at the pact recently sealed between Russia and China
• Analysis: Putin calls for end to NATO -- Now that the Iron Curtain is no more, Putin complains of a NATO curtain moving east and suggests replacing NATO with an organization which would include Russia
• U.S. Immigration -- State Dept. Releases Green Card Lottery Rules -- While the article appears to point to a business site, there is good information on the upcoming lottery; we know of a number of Latvians on work permits (in the U.S.) who have inquires on how to enter the lottery

As always, you can read the detailed articles below.

We have a rather unusual link this week, it is to a history of the Duchy of Courland.

And we have a picture as well, from our wanderings about Vecriga last year.

As always, AOL'ers, Remember, mailer or not, Lat Chat spontaneously appears every Sunday on AOL starting around 9:00/9:30pm Eastern time, lasting until 11:00/11:30pm. AOL'ers can follow this link: Town Square - Latvian chat. And thanks to you participating on the Latvian message board as well: LATVIA (both on AOL only).

Ar visu labu,

The history of Courland to be found at this week's link is thorough, although not unusual in and of itself:

http://www.baltische-ritterschaften.de/Englische%20Version/Courland_History.htm

What is unusual and fascinating is that it is part of the "Association of Baltic Knightages" site (German with some English translations), a site dedicated to the preservation of the history of the Baltics and of the centuries-long contribution of the Germanic-descended nobility. (Just enter http://www.baltische-ritterschaften.de to access the home page, there's a link on the bottom for the page in English.) If you wondered where the old nobility went, they've gone and gotten themselves quite an informative web site!

Reuters historical calendar -- August 5

Reuters World Report Sunday, July 29, 2001 12:01:00 PM
Copyright 2001 Reuters Ltd.

    LONDON, July 29 (Reuters) -- Following are some of the major events to have occurred on August 5 in history [excerpts]:
    1884 -- The cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty was laid on Bedloe's Island in New York harbour.
    1895 -- Friedrich Engels, German socialist, political writer and co-founder with Karl Marx of modern communism, died in London.
    1940 -- Latvia was absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic.

FEATURE-Survivor looks back on Lithuanian border massacre

Reuters World Report Saturday, July 28, 2001 10:04:00 PM
Copyright 2001 Reuters Ltd.
By Burton Frierson

    VILNIUS, July 29 (Reuters) -- Tomas Sernas remembers the night 10 years ago when a Soviet militiaman shot him through the head in a massacre that shocked Lithuanians struggling for independence from Moscow and sentenced him to life in a wheelchair.
    In the early hours of July 31, 1991, Sernas, then 29, was working the late shift as a customs officer at Medininkai, a border checkpoint Lithuania had established near present-day Belarus.
    When he saw Russian-speaking soldiers approaching through the woods, Sernas thought he might be roughed up a little. He expected a black eye, bloody lip or some bruises, not a massacre in which seven colleagues would be shot, execution-style.
    "The next day was supposed to be my wedding. I remember the thought dawned on me that this would be something to tell during the party," Sernas told Reuters in an interview.
    What occurred was one of the bloodiest events of the independence movement which Lithuania had launched during the late 1980s amid Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost reforms that were meant to foster more openness.
    At the time, Lithuania was locked in a struggle to end a five-decade occupation under Moscow's rule, which had started when the Soviet Union invaded in 1940 and erased the country's borders. The West never recognised the occupation as legitimate.
    In an effort to regain sovereignty, Lithuania declared full independence on March 11, 1990.
    It also tried to restore the vestiges of an independent state -- adopting the pre-Soviet state flag and setting up its own border checkpoints -- even though it was still under de facto Soviet rule.
    Sernas had volunteered for work on the border, seeing it as a way to support the independence struggle.
    Although the independence drive of Lithuania and its neighbours Latvia and Estonia was designed to be peaceful, Moscow had already shown it would fight non-violence with violence.
    In January, Soviet troops killed 14 people when they opened fire and ran over civilians with tanks during a crackdown on the independence movement in the capital Vilnius.
    After the January Events, as that episode became known, many feared there could be much more in store from Moscow hardliners, who had failed to see the Vilnius attack through to the end and had left Lithuania's democratically elected parliament in place.
    "There was a feeling that it was getting worse," said Algimantas Cekuolis, one of the founders of the Sajudis independence movement.
    "I personally kept a knapsack in my bedroom with old but strong clothes for Siberia, medications and black bread dried in fat just to be prepared for deportation," he said.
    NO FEAR
    But as desperate as things seemed, Sernas and his friends on the border did not expect to be targeted.
    True, Soviet troops had been harassing border guards, but the guards had received nothing worse than a severe beating. The guards knew not to take up arms against the vastly superior Soviet forces, Sernas said.
    At about 4 a.m. on July 31, all this would change.
    "The first feeling of mine when I saw an armed person running from the side of the forest was surprise or even laughter since we were not afraid, because previously there were attacks when Lithuanian border guards would be beaten at worst, or the Lithuanian flag would be defaced," Sernas said.
    The group of Russian-speaking troops who emerged from the woods -- some wearing Lithuanian uniforms, others Soviet uniforms -- quickly disarmed the border police, he said.
    In the guardhouse, the Lithuanians, now unarmed, were ordered down on the floor and the lights turned off.
    Sernas slowly realised they weren't going to be beaten, they were being executed.
    "At first I did not understand shots were being fired since a silencer was being used," he said.
    "The attackers showed no emotions. They were not angry and were simply implementing what they were ordered to do in cold blood. I received a blow on my head with the handle of the gun first and then I was shot through the head."
    STUNNED
    News of the massacre horrified Lithuania, a country already on edge after several tense years of pushing against hardliners for independence.
    Medininkai showed Moscow would be ruthless to the end.
    Lithuania finally regained independence in September 1991 after hardliners failed in their attempt to take over the Kremlin and the Soviet Union split apart.
    As for the Medininkai attackers, Lithuanian prosecutors are still trying to track them down.
    Their suspects are five or six militiamen who, at the time of the massacre, were based in Riga and Vilnius with the OMON -- an elite Soviet police unit -- but have since moved to Russia.
    "Prosecutors even know their names and have applied to our counterparts in the Russian Federation to question them. But so far we have received no replies," Rolandas Stankevicius, a prosecutor working on the Medininkai case, told Reuters.
    He would not comment on whether prosecutors thought the men were acting on their own or under orders from Moscow officials.
    "FINGER OF GOD"
    Although shy, Sernas, now 39, is not bashful about his wound -- a bullet-sized indentation in the side of his head.
    "My head was shot through. You can touch it, there is no bone," he said.
    After Medininkai and the rebirth of Lithuanian sovereignty, Sernas started his own struggle for independence.
    First was the helplessness of lying paralysed in his hospital bed, but he went on to start a family -- he has a daughter who will be three this autumn -- and became a deacon in the Evangelical Reformist Church.
    For Sernas, surviving the attack was nothing short of a miracle.
    "It was the finger of God," he said, offering the only explanation he can find for surviving.

Chirac backs Baltic NATO and EU bids

AP WorldStream Saturday, July 28, 2001 8:04:00 AM
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press
By MICHAEL TARM
Associated Press Writer

    TALLINN, Estonia (AP) -- French President Jacques Chirac said Saturday near the end of a three-day tour of the ex-Soviet Baltic republics that his country should increase its economic role here.
    "France has always looked more to the south and hasn't been looking far enough north," Chirac told a new conference. "France has looked lower than the Baltic countries."
    Chirac is the first French president to visit the region since Francois Mitterand in 1992, a year after Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania broke with Moscow. During his stay, he also backed Baltic bids to join the European Union and NATO.
    He said he was impressed by the fluent French spoken by Estonian President Lennart Meri and his Latvian counterpart, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, saying it reflected good diplomatic relations with the pro-West, open-market Baltics.
    "But economically, things certainly aren't fine, and this is regrettable," he said. "The French business community should be involved in developing a position here worthy of France. These are great markets for the future."
    France ranks low on the list of Estonia's main economic partners, accounting for about two percent of the Baltic Sea coast nation's total trade.
    During his stay, Chirac disclosed that the dispute over the Baltic nations' pre-World War II embassies in Paris has been resolved.
    The Nazis seized them in 1940, then the keys were turned over to the Soviet Union, which annexed and occupied the Baltics until independence came a decade ago.
    Baltic officials claim the real estate is theirs, but Moscow refused to return it.
    France has been careful about possibly offending the Kremlin. Finally it agreed to pay compensation to the Baltic states, Chirac said Saturday.
    "The problem is now solved for all three Baltic countries," he said. "The interests of all parties were protected."
    Specific sums involved weren't mentioned by Chirac. But the French embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania's capital, said earlier that the compensation package for Lithuania would amount to about 23 million francs (dlrs 3 million).
    Estonia's President Meri, who attended primary school in Paris when his father was a diplomat there, said he was relieved. The embassy issue "was a problem that touched me in a sentimental way," he added.
    In Tallinn, Chirac repeated his support for Baltic entry in the European Union and NATO. "The French position is that each county has a sovereign right to choose the alliance of its choice, and no one can take that right away," he said.
    Chirac, traveling with a 120-strong delegation, was scheduled to leave Tallinn on Saturday evening.

Hungary to back NATO membership for Baltic states

AP WorldStream Monday, July 23, 2001 8:48:00 AM
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press

    BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) -- Hungary will be a strong supporter of the Baltic countries that are seeking NATO membership, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Monday.
    "I'd like Hungarian foreign policy to put special emphasis on the Baltic republics, especially Estonia," and their bids to join NATO, Orban told the annual meeting of Hungarian ambassadors on home leave.
    Estonia is already one of the front-runners to join the European Union when it takes in new members.
    Hungary, along with Poland and Czech Republic, were the first former Warsaw Pact members to join NATO when the military alliance expanded eastward in 1999.
    "We fail to see why Hungarian diplomacy should not support the Baltics' application to join NATO," Orban told the gathering, despite Russian opposition to an expanded military alliance.
    The ex-Soviet Baltic republics -- Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- are seeking to join both NATO and the EU and forge closer ties with the West after more than 50 years under Moscow's rule.
    Moscow opposes NATO taking in new members, especially the Baltic states, seeing it as a security threat because all three border Russia.

EU encourages Latvia, but much work remains

Reuters World Report Friday, July 20, 2001 10:55:00 AM
Copyright 2001 Reuters Ltd.

    RIGA, July 20 (Reuters) -- The European Union's top enlargement official said on Friday that Latvia was in a strong position to enter the EU in 2004, but still faced hard work to get there.
    "If Latvia continues to prepare for accession in a serious way as it has done in the past...I don't see a reason why we can't conclude (entry) negotiations in 2002," EU Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen told a news conference.
    The EU said in June that entry talks with leading applicants must be wrapped up by the end of next year to pave the way for their accession by 2004, in time for them to participate in European Parliamentary elections that year.
    Latvia, a former Soviet state, was left out of the EU's original fast-track group of candidates but started entry negotiations last year, vowing to catch up with the advanced countries.
    "Latvia is an important, convincing example that the principles of the present enlargement process work, especially the catch-up principle," Verheugen said.
    However, Latvia, which has settled 16 of the EU's 31 negotiation subjects, must still deal with some of the most difficult issues, such as environment and agriculture.
    Verheugen also said the country needed to make more progress in strengthening public administration and fighting corruption. Progress on integrating ethnic minorities is also needed, although he praised work done in this area so far.
    Latvia inherited a large Russian-speaking minority -- around one-third of its population -- from its five decades of Soviet occupation.
    Latvian Foreign Minister Indulis Berzins said his country knew there was work left to be done but was optimistic it would be completed in time.
    "There are...opportunities for Latvia to finish accession negotiations by the end of 2002," Berzins told the news conference.
    "And if anything goes wrong then it will be only our fault."

Russia-China pact echoes 1939

COMTEX Newswire Monday, July 16, 2001 9:54:00 PM
By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst
Copyright 2001 by United Press International

    WASHINGTON, Jul 16, 2001 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed their sensational pact in August 1939, the world trembled. But when Russia and China announced their new Friendship Treaty Monday, Americans only yawned.
    They might have done better to tremble.
    World War II -- a conflagration that cost 80 million lives -- began within days of Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop's bombshell visit to Moscow to sign the infamous pact.
    As a result, all of Central Europe descended into a dark night of totalitarian tyranny, genocide and lasting oppression from which it would not emerge for half a century.
    The hugs and smiles exchanged in Moscow Monday between Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Jiang Zemin of China will not have any such immediate melodramatic or apocalyptic results. But their long term results are likely to be as far lasting, and perhaps even as dire.
    As with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Russian-Chinese alliance that is emerging is an alignment of the two dominant powers in Eurasia. The 1939 pact was directed against the democratic nations of Western Europe, especially Britain, the dominant, but tired and overextended superpower, of the time.
    The Russian-Chinese alliance is ostensibly not aimed at the democratic nations of the European Union. Indeed, French, German, British and European Union officials in Brussels and the other European capitals are quite blase about it.
    But it is clearly and virtually openly aimed at rolling back U.S. influence worldwide, especially across Eurasia, what the great British geopolitical theorist Sir Hiram Mackinder a century ago called the "heartland" control of which decided who would dominate the world.
    The Nazi-Soviet Pact was the very opposite of being principled or ideologically consistent. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had cemented their foul tyrannies -- two of the most murderous and bloodthirsty regimes in human history -- over the past decade on the justification of building up strength against each other.
    But as British historian Paul Johnson noted in his classic work "Modern Times," there as a consistent ideological and (im)mortal one that bound Moscow and Berlin together. Nazis and Communists alike were gangster, "right-makes-right" regimes that mutually sneered at what they regarded as the naive, decadent and doomed democracies of North America and Western Europe.
    The 1939 Pact was in no way a military alliance. Neither is the 2001 Good Neighborly Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation. But the first cleared the way for the liquidation of independence of the many nations of Central and Eastern Europe between the two great totalitarian power blocs crushing them from east and west.
    Within 21 months of the Pact being signed, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria had all had their independence extinguished. They had all either been physically conquered by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, or been forced to become helpless puppets of them.
    The 2001 Treaty serves notice to the newly independent nations of Central Asia that they must accommodate Beijing and Moscow. Effectively, it will freeze out the influence of Japan, Turkey, South Korea and -- most of all -- the United States in Central Asia.
    The 1939 pact was not a military alliance. It did not have to be. Until Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler tore it up by invading the Soviet Union 22 months later in June 1941, it allowed him and Soviet leader Josef Stalin to coordinate their aggressions with the Western democracies strategically outflanked, over-stretched and helpless to do anything to stop them.
    Putin and Jiang have been at pains to point out that their Friendship Treaty is not a military alliance either. But its strategic and military impact will be profound.
    Russia is already selling China its state of the art military equipment such as Sovremenny class destroyers expressly designed to hunt and kill American nuclear aircraft carriers and hundreds of Siuukhoi-30 fighter-bombers, and the co-production rights and technologies for the Chinese to build them themselves.
    There has even been talk that Russia might sell China for billions of dollars a working Oscar II nuclear submarine -- the same class as the Kursk, which sank during exercises in the Arctic Ocean last year.
    Oscar II's are designed to hunt and annihilate entire U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups, such as China expects one day to engage in a showdown confrontation over Taiwan.
    And top Russian officials have openly warned that if the Untied States pushes ahead with developing its own Anti-Ballistic Missile defense system without reaching agreement with Moscow first, it might release to other parties -- such as China -- the technology to allow them to put Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicle, or MIRV, warheads on their own missiles to swamp the new U.S. ABM defenses.
    The shock announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was so dramatic and devastating that no-one, not even Neville Chamberlain, the monumentally vain, complacent and incompetent prime minister of Britain, could doubt that full-scale war in Europe would always immediately follow.
    Current U.S. President George W. Bush has been as insouciant and complacent about Russia and China getting together as Chamberlain was about the Nazis and Soviets reconciling their differences before the 1939 Pact.
    Chamberlain thought Nazi-Soviet cooperation was impossible. Bush and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice both knew Russia and China were coming together. They just did not think it mattered. They still don't.
    They are wrong.

ANALYSIS-Putin calls for end to NATO

COMTEX Newswire Wednesday, July 18, 2001 12:09:00 PM
By DERK KINNANE ROELOFSMA
Copyright 2001 by United Press International

    WASHINGTON, Jul 18, 2001 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Since the Iron Curtain first descended after World War II, Russian policy has been to try to separate Europe from the United States. The curtain collapsed a decade ago, but President Vladimir Putin demonstrated Monday that the policy continues.
    The Russian leader called for an end to NATO -- the most solid and important manifestation of a continuing American presence in Europe. In place of the Atlantic alliance, there should be a new, pan-European security body that would include Russia, Putin told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
    With one or more Baltic states, former provinces of the Soviet Union, being talked about for admission to NATO membership in the next few years, Putin blandly opined that expanding the defense treaty's membership eastward, that is, from Poland, merely prolongs Cold War divisions of Europe.
    Putin's remarks echoes an old Soviet theme that the security of Europe should be the concern of European states from the Atlantic to the Urals, and that the U.S. presence is an intrusion.
    "The problem should be simple. In the West, everyone says, 'We don't want new divisions in Europe, we don't want new Berlin walls.' Good. We completely agree," he said. "But when NATO enlarges, division doesn't disappear, it simply moves towards our borders."
    Divisions in Europe will continue until there is a sole security body for the continent, Putin said.
    Playing on European doubts about the handling of the Kosovo crisis, he attacked the U.S. led intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999 by NATO, saying it had used force to achieve political goals in Europe and ignored the United Nations Security Council.
    "NATO could be disbanded as was the Warsaw Pact, but that is not even taken into consideration," he added, implying an equivalence where there is none. The Warsaw Pact was a machine under the direct command of Moscow, employed to protect itself and to control the Communist states it created in central and eastern Europe at the end of World War II. It collapsed when the Soviet Union did. NATO, created to defend the independence of its member states, continues and, although under strong U.S. influence, is run on a system of consensus.
    Choosing to remain silent about the contempt and mistrust with which senior Russian officers have treated invitations in recent years from NATO to participate in its activities, Putin asserted Russia had been refused a role in its decision-making process. Observers saw this as playing to Western European political elites, notably in Italy, France and Germany, that are uncomfortable with U.S. emphasis on the maintenance of Europe's military capacity when European countries are reducing defense spending.
    In the words of Francois Bujon de l'Estang, the French ambassador in Washington, at a colloquium in the U.S. capital earlier this year:
    "The United States view is too much through the lens of defense and non-proliferation at the expense of the rest. This is a bit archaic. A focus on security and defense has the disadvantage of being out of sync with concerns of people on both sides of the Atlantic."
    With this attitude, the observers said, goes a desire among some members of the Western European political classes to ingratiate themselves with Russia. But NATO members in Eastern Europe, such as the Poles, think about NATO along Americans lines. They fear what a recrudescent Russia, that has retained its appetite for imperial ways, might one day do.
    Putin earlier this year suggested that one day Russia might join NATO. Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that at this time it was premature to even suggest Russia could be invited to joint the alliance.

U.S. Immigration-State Dept. Releases Green Card Lottery Rules

Business WireThursday, August 02, 2001 11:25:00 AM
Copyright 2001 Business Wire. All rights reserved.

    LOS ANGELES, Aug 2, 2001 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- ClearedForLanding.com has posted a copy of the State Department's rules on the new Green Card Lottery; it will be held between October 1 and noon of the 31st 2001.
    Fifty-five thousand people may be eligible for a green card through random selection. The green cards are for citizens of countries that have sent less than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the past 5 years.
    Applying to the lottery, one must be very careful; any errors will cause disqualification, which is why many people hire firms such as unitedstatesvisalottery.com in order to apply correctly. Entries submitted by express, priority, or overnight mail will be disqualified, as will entries sent by fax, messenger, or by hand. There are six different addresses for mailing the entries and they can be found at http://www.ClearedForLanding.com.
    The application involves a determining whether the applicant is a native of a qualifying country. If the applicant was not born in a qualifying country, but the spouse was, then the person may claim through that spouse, or even through a parent. Each applicant should have a high school education, the equivalent, or work experience. If the person enters through work experience, he or she must have two years experience in a position that requires two years training or experience. Photographs of the applicant and his or her dependents are now required.
    Some of the bigger winners in terms of countries last year included: Germany with 1902, the Ukraine with 5029, Egypt with 2383, Sierra Leone with 2240, Morocco with 5,000, Ethiopia with 5007, Bangladesh with 5003, Burma with 734, and Lithuania with 1200. Some of the countries with the lowest numbers include: Monaco, Suriname, Micronesia, Nauru, Lesotho, San Tope and Principe, Comoros, and Brunei with 0, as well as Oman with 3, Seychelles with 2, Malta with 4, Iceland with 9, Barbados with 4, Grenada with 3, and Chile with 9.
    ClearedForLanding.com explains immigration in 22 languages. The site offers free consultations to people in California and England seeking an attorney. Additionally, the site offers a free nationwide immigration lawyer search service, business plan creation, message boards, free e-mail, and vital links to government offices, immigration resources, free immigration forms, processing times, and even a virtual immigration law library.
    (CONTACT:
    ClearedForLanding.com
    Larry Bond, 310/276-9992
    LarryBclearedforlanding.com)

This week's picture resumes our wandering around Vecriga, this time, we're at Herdera Laukums where Palasta iela joins in, by the side of the Dom Church.