Free Speech Emergency in Latvia

Latvia gets another badge for banana republic repression

2012-01-25T11:51:00.000-08:00

Well, Latvia got what it was “working” for – a drop of 20 places to 50^th place in the world in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. It was in “good” company, just three places behind the 47^th place United States, which has disgraced its own benchmark First Amendment press freedom protections by arresting journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in several cities.

Latvia earned its sharp drop, according to Reporters Without Borders, for two incidents this year – a raid by anti-corruption police on the newspaper Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze (NRA) and the detention, for 48 hours, of the editor of a website in Latvian which exposed what it claimed was suspcious e-mail correspondence between Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs and the Russian Embassy.

Unfortunately, I missed the NRA incident in this blog, or perhaps I thought that an investigation by the anti-corruption police (KNAB) was justified, since the newspaper is effectively controlled by Ventspils mayor, oligarch and accused money-laundered and economic criminal Aivars Lembergs. I may have been wrong.

In any event, if you scroll back through what I have posted during 2011, there is plenty of reason to consider the freedom of expression (not just the rights of journalists) to have been dragged down to the level of a black humor banana republic by several actions of the authorities. So this ranking is well deserved, though I am more worried about the decline of press freedom in the country where I grew up – the United States. I frequently refer to the clear language of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law...”. That, for me, sets the standard for freedom of the press and speech, and it is very disturbing that the US cannot live up to its own standards. What can one expect of Latvia.

Nonetheless, respecting the rights of journalists and the freedom of expression is a low cost enterprise. Just let them be. And it has been proven possible in a country with much the same historical experience and “post-Soviet” political culture as Latvia – it's neighbor to the north, Estonia, ranked number three in the press freedom index after Finland and Norway. Another lesson not learned by a country that seems to want a downward spiral into cheap-ass (no concentration camps, just petty and stupid repression) banana republic status.

Another suspicious "hate speech" case in Latvia

2011-12-28T11:24:00.000-08:00

It looks like Latvia has another "hate speech" case, with one Ingus Graudiņš getting a suspended sentence for writing anti-Russian comments on an unnamed internet website. According to media reports, Graudiņš was involved in some kind of scuffle with Russians on the street, then went off and wrote some kind of rant or a series of anti-Russian rants. Apparently strong, perhaps racist language was used, though none of the matter-of-fact reports I have seen quote anything that the accused wrote.
As a defender of free speech, I am against any and all hate speech laws. Speech is speech - you may dislike it, hate it, be enraged by it, but you should not empower the government to imprison people simply for what they say or write, no matter who it enrages, insults, or offends. Civil libel and slander cases are another thing, but even here I would tread very carefully, especially if public figures are involved. If you choose the limelight, well, realize that sometimes it can be a targeting beacon for shit.
The case of Graudiņš, on the facts that I know, looks like a selective political prosecution in order to have a chilling effect on discussion of ethnic issues ahead of referendum on making Russian a second state language that will be held in early 2012. Depraved racist ravings are regular, daily occurances on Latvian internet portals and there should be a line of hundreds outside the courts if all these comments were to be prosecuted. I searched but couldn't find (portal content shifts) a series of comments I saw to some news story earlier today blaming "the Jews" for whatever it was that had happened. This is so commonplace, along with the lambasting of gays and advocating their imprisonment or extermination, that one regards it as part of the written background noise on the Latvian internet.
Certainly this does not reflect well on Latvian society, but ignorance, bigotry and folly can't be remedied by repressive police methods and the stifling of political debate, even if one or several of the many voice in the debate are raving and raging, rather than making arguments. Sad, but let's not fill prisons over it.
Another worrying thing is that we have had several outrages against free expression in this country, the latest being a police raid on an internet site kompromat.lv, but there has been absolutely no reaction, not even a two-sentence mention on the Index on Censorship website or its free speech blogs. We had police arrest spontaneous demonstrators, we had an internet medium's office raided, editor detained for 48 hours, servers seized, and now a rather suspicious hate speech case. I informed Index about all of these. May I kindly ask Index on Censorship- why the fuck are you completely ignoring this?

More on the Latvian police action against a journalist

2011-12-17T09:37:00.000-08:00

This is a chronology of events surrounding the arrest of Leonids Jakabsons, a journalist and editor of the investigative and whistle-blowing website kompromat.lv.

Jakabsons has been released after being held the maximum 48 hours before a suspect must be brought before a judge and a case presented for further detention (a formal criminal investigation must be started or charges brought). It is pretty clear that this detention is a deliberate application of the chilling effect, as was done when Ilze Nagla, a Latvian television journalist, had her home searched and laptop seized after reporting on the activities of "Neo", a cyberactivist who leaked anonymized salary data from government and municipal institutions that he obtained by exploiting a "hole" in the State Revenue Service database. Later, when arrested, "Neo" was discovered to be Ilmārs Poikāns, an artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Latvia faculty of mathematics and computer science.

THE CHRONOLOGY

November 16, 2011. kompromat.lv publishes Riga Mayor Nils Usakovs correspondence with Alexander Hapilov of the Russian Embassy, a person suspected of spying

November 18, 2011 Ceaseless cyberattacks start against kompromat.lv and continue to the present..

November 21, 2011 kompromat.lv complains to the Cybercrime unit of the Economic Police, the responsible detective Aleksandrs Bebris shows no interest in the complaint/

November 22, 2011 After news appears on news portals about the cyberattacks on kompromat.lv, the Latvian IT security incident response unit CERT.LV contacts kompromat.lv and offers its assistance. CERT.LV examines log files, identifies the attacker and is prepared to participate in the case as a witness.

December 3, 2011, Detective Aleksandr Bebris announced that the Cybercrime unit has more important cases to investigate and no further investigation would be undertaken, even though the evidence submitted was more than sufficient to arrest those responsible.

December 14, 2011, Detective Aleksandrs Bebris asks kompromat.lv systems administrator Edmunds Zalitis to give a witness statement with regard to the cyber attack on kompromat.lv. Detective Bebris was particularly interested in the technical specifications of kompromat.lv’ s servers and whether there were backup copies, The detective also wanted access password, which, for security reasons, were not disclosed.

December 15, 2011 at 12:30 Cybercrimes unit detective Aleksandrs Bebris and three masked policemena around at the Riga World Trade Center and, using a sledge hammer, break into the office of an internet club. After an hour and a half, the police leave, taking along the kompromat.lv server , a server labeled “Backup” and two optical labeled Norton Systemworks 2005 (as could be determined from a bad quality carbon copy). The search and seizure had been requested by detective Nauris Liepins of the National Police, the search warrant was approved by Judge Rinalds Silakalns. Aleksandrs Bebris and Peteris Reinfelds participated in the search.

At the same time, kompromat.lv journalist Leonid Jakabsons is arrested at his home and all data media found in his residence during a search are seized.

contact provided by the source

edmunds zalite
+371 29222919

THE LESSONS LEARNED: Journalists in Latvia are operating in a latent crypto-authoritarian system where their freedom to work and the security of their working materials (digital or otherwise) can be violated at any time. To build better defenses, it is best to use cloud services and store or back-up notes and other confidential material in countries such as Iceland, Sweden, perhaps the US. Certainly any website like kompromat.lv should be hosted outside Latvia. Critical data should be encrypted at the cost of losing any media or computer it is on, while the authorities struggle to try to break in.

Latvian website journalist jailed

2011-12-17T04:12:00.000-08:00

I am reposting this item, apparently written by Reporters without Frontiers (or Borders) in Latvia. I was out of town when this happened on December 15 and I had assumed www.kompromat.lv to be a Russian-language website, which I don't read because I don't speak Russian. This is not to say that repression against Russian-language media in Latvia should get the short shrift, just that I cannot examine the issues as precisely as if the reasons (or excuses) for the repression were in a language I read. So here it is.
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Reporters Without Borders strongly condemns yesterday’s arrest of Leonīds Jākobsons, a news website owner and editor who for the past month has been posting copies of a series of compromising emails that had been sent or received by Nils Ušakovs, mayor of Riga and a former member of the Latvian parliament. The organisation demands his immediate release.

The emails that Jākobsons began posting on his website Kompromat (www.kompromat.lv) on 17 November indicated that Ušakovs provided information to a member of the Russian embassy in Riga and engaged in a strange correspondence that has aroused suspicions about the nature of Ušakovs’ activities.

The winner of the National Journalism Prize in 2009 in the “Defence of Media Freedom” category, Jākobsons is reportedly also in the possession of other – so far unpublished – emails suggesting that illegal commissions were used to finance a political party’s election campaign illegally.

“We demand Jākobsons’ immediate release,” Reporters Without Borders said. “It is unacceptable that a journalist can be jailed for an alleged media offence in a European Union member country. “The confidentiality of journalists’ sources is being seriously threatened by the seizure of all of his computer equipment and by the pressure being put on him to reveal how he obtained the emails.

“The mayor of Riga can bring a legal action against Jākobsons if he thinks it is necessary, or he can take advantage of the right of reply if he thinks he has been defamed. But Jākobsons’ arrest and imprisonment and the confiscation of all of his equipment seem more like an act of revenge than the actions of an impartial judicial system.”

During a raid on Jākobsons’ apartment yesterday, police seized two computers and all the computer storage material and devices they could find. After completing their search, they arrested Jākobsons on suspicion of illegally acquiring electronic communication data. The police also went to the premises of an Internet Service provider and seized the three servers that hosted the Kompromat website, which can no longer be accessed.

The day after Jākobsons posted the first emails on Kompromat, the site began being the target of a major DDoS attack that lasted several days. On 21 November, a hacker succeeded in deleting all of the site’s archives (more than 10 years of content in Russian and Latvian). The site’s editors were able to restore all the content from a backup but the attacks continued.

The police had refused to accede to a request by Jakobsons for an investigation into the origin of the cyber-attacks on his site.

A well-known and widely-read site, Kompromat has done a lot of investigative coverage of corruption, organized crime, drug trafficking and other criminal activity. It has often been pressured and prosecuted, but none of its personnel had ever been attacked or arrested in the past.

Currently held at Čiekurkalns police station in Riga, Jākobsons is expected to be transferred to the city’s main prison shortly. Conditions in the jail are poor and Reporters Without Borders has been told he will probably have to share a cell with ordinary offenders.

Dumbass "censors" move against Russian language news in Latvia

2011-11-12T11:48:00.001-08:00

The National Electronic Media Council (Nacionāla elektronisko plašsaziņas līdzekļu padome/NEPLP) has brought charges against the mainly Russian-language television broadcaster TV5 for including, in a news item video, a clip of a person calling Latvia "a fascist state." According to media reports (I don't understand Russian and don't watch Russian-language broadcasts), the words, called "discrediting the Latvian state" were apparently uttered by a vox pop (one of several people-in-the-street interviewed to illustrate a news spot). Since the news item dealt with the somewhat emotionally charged subject of collecting signatures to make Russian a second state language in Latvia, it is no surprise that some Russians interviewed may have strong feelings on the matter and about Latvia in general. To show them in a news broadcast is to give an accurate, even if disturbing (both to Latvians and Russians) view of the range of feelings. In fact, I am sure most Russians, even most signing the petition, would not rationally call Latvia fascist, because if it was fascist, there would be no free and open petitioning.
What has taken Latvia a tiny step toward authoritarianism is precisely this kind of fuckwit reaction by the NEPLP. After 20 years as a free country, and seven years in the European Union, Latvian state institutions should not have to be tapped on the head with a blunt object to be reminded that only autoritarian states punish "discrediting the state". WTF??
Moreover, it was not the editorial view of TV5 that Latvia is fascist, but that of a person on the street as part of a legitimate news item. And even if TV5 were to claim, absurdly, that Latvia is fascist, it is entitled, as in any democracy that grants the right to free speech and expression, to even express moronic and crackpot views. That is what free speech is all about. Why does nobody fucking get it!? Time and energy are wasted and activities that in fact do discredit Latvia as a democratic country are undertaken against crackpots of all persuasions -- such as efforts by the Riga City Council to stop a march commemorating the "liberation" of Riga by the German army (running out the Red Army) on July 1, 1941. There are others who demand that the gathering by old Red Army geezers and their supporters on May 9 be banned. While I consider the commemoration of the Latvian Legion on March 16 neither historically nuanced (a huge waste of life and bad PR for the next 70 years) nor a crackpot undertaking (although it gathers some ultranationalist crackpots and foaming-at-the-mouth anti-fascists to have fun with each other), it should not be banned either. Why is is so hard to get the simple idea of free expression (and in this case, of news editorial independence) across to anyone with authority in Latvia? The smart thing for the NEPLP to do would be to drop its charges, apologize, and stay the fuck out of post-factum censoring the news.

Latvian police deliberately detain, intimidate peaceful protestors

2011-10-06T12:54:00.000-07:00

Three persons spontaneously protesting against the actions of a political party and three bystanders were detained by Latvian police in the capital Riga on October 5 and taken to a police station for "identification". There they had a sign written on a sheet and a t-shirt with a slogan on it confiscated. According to media reports, the police gave no reason for confiscating the items, one of which was a sheet with a slogan labeling former Latvian president Valdis Zatlers "a traitor" and the t-shirt with a handwritten slogan "Zatlers, have you no shame?" in Latvian.

So-called administrative charges have been filed against all six persons detained in connection with the protest and they face jail term of up to 15 days and fines of up to LVL 25 (around USD 50).

Following their release, the protestors told Latvian media they would probably not hold a spontaneous protest again, since some of them have small children and cannot risk being detained by police.
The protestors had gathered answering a call on Facebook and social networks to protest plans by the former president's recently founded political party, the Zatlers' Reform Party (ZRP) to form a coalition government with the Harmony Center party, seen by the protestors as pro-Russian and a potential threat to Latvia's national identity and independence. The ZRP was founded earlier this summer after Zatlers, then still president, set in motion a dismissal of Latvia's parliament, the Saeima, which was overwhelming approved by referendum in July. In subsequent elections on September 17, the ZRP came in second to the Harmony Center with 22 seats in the 100-seat Saeima and almost immediately made overtures to bring Harmony Center, with 31 seats, into government.
The party, supported mainly by Latvia's ethnic Russian voters, is seen as "pro-Russian" by many and has been accused of denying that Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1940 until independence was regained in 1991. For many Latvians, this interpretation of historical events is the local equivalent of "holocaust denial", and led to impassioned comments on internet portals once it became clear that the ZRP wants to include Harmony Center (Latvian abbreviation SC) in the new government almost at any cost.
While the protestors had not applied to demonstrate under Latvian law and local ordinances, they maintain they were not creating a disturbance or blocking traffic. Police have earlier stood aside when spontaneous protests have occured, including another gathering near the Saeima building to protest the ZRPs policies, which saw up to 20 people standing in a street in front of the Saeima. Police also did not intervene when several dozen protestors gathered in front of Latvia's "Government House", the Cabinet of Ministers building, last year to spontaneously protest the arrest of an internet activist who had obtained confidential data on government and municipal salaries in the wake of austerity policies. Those protestors used water-soluble chalk to write slogans on the sidewalk by the government building, actions which could technically be seen as petty vandalism.
The use of temporary detention against anyone protesting on the street clearly creates what under US legal precedent would be seen as a "chilling effect" on the right to protest and on free expression.
The behavior of the police is an outrage, no less than that of the New York Police Department in arresting hundreds of demonstrators in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations (so the US is no longer – and perhaps never really was – the benchmark for free expression and assembly). However, the US and European countries do set examples for public outrage and resistance to such attacks on free speech by the police, both by challenging such actions in the courts and by organizing and publicizing police abuse of free expression rights.

Police in most countries can use their discretion when there are technical violations of the law an/or municipal ordinances that cause no harm to third parties. By choosing to detain three demonstrators and three bystanders, the Latvian police must be presumed to have chosen to intimidate citizens who spontaneously choose to express a political viewpoint in public. This is a first small step toward authoritarianism.

Latvian talk show host booted after 16 years for calling politicians "whores"

2011-09-22T14:28:00.000-07:00

Kārlis Streips, a Latvian-American host for Skats no malas (A View from The Sidelines), a talk show featuring local journalists, has been fired for calling the Latvia's Green and Farmer's Union political party "whores" (maukas in Latvian). Streips made the remark in his first post-election Monday evening show. He has been hosting the show, featuring himself and three Latvian journalists (in rotating, different groups) for the past 16 years.
While Streips guests have represented different political views and included both Latvian and Latvian-speaking representatives of the local Russian media, the host (who worked for local TV in the US before moving to then Soviet Latvia in the late 1980s) often ended the program by talking directly to the camera and saying what he thought about the issues under discussion -- from politics to admonishing his viewers not to drive and drink (on the Midsummer holiday).
The management of Latvian Television accused Streips of violating rules against prime-time vulgarity and a breach of good taste. However, viewers now able to turn off the Latvian voice-over on interactive cable TV can hear a stream of obscenities when watching certain American ir British films. Also, Streips "vulgarity" was political speech, not his attempt to wrap up his Monday evening show with an Eddie-Murphy style tirade.
Comments on internet portals have been generally favorable to Streips and have accused Latvian TV of political censorship. On Twitter Latvians have created a hashtag #maukas. Some observers link his firing to the resignation of Ilze Nagla, the host and a reporter of De Facto, an investigative news program, and to the failure of LTV to renew its contract with Jānis Domburs, the host of a topical current events discussion program Kas notiek Latvijā? (What's Happening in Latvia). As one observer put it, LTV has been reduced to running just straight news programs, light entertainment and reruns from its past glory.
It is rumored that Streips may be quickly hired by the private, Swedish-owned channel TV3 where several frustrated LTV journalists have gone in recent years. The fact that Streips is controversial both for his opinions and the fact that he is one of a handful of openly gay public figures in Latvia (Streips is not an activist and generally low-key about his sexual orientation). He is seen as a workaholic who also runs a radio show and teaches journalist at the University of Latvia, as well as working as a translator and English language voice-over talent on some commercial and documentary films.

Liepaja municipal police harass Saeima candidate

2011-09-14T12:23:00.000-07:00

Municipal police in Liepāja, a port city in Western Latvia harassed and detained Ansis Dobelis, a candidate for the Latvian parliament, the Saeima, in the September 17 national elections because he was approaching people on the street. Dobelis, a candidate from the centrist Unity (Vienotība) party reported the incident in his Latvian-language blog http://dobelis.lv/2011/09/policejiska-liepaja/.
In the blog post, Dobelis writes that he decided to walk around in Liepāja and personally approach city dwellers to talk about his candidacy. This is exactly how candidates campaign -- "pressing flesh" (shaking hands) and talking one-on-one with citizens -- in free, civilized societies. Liepāja and, perhaps, Latvia as a whole, is apparently not, nor will soon be, a free and civilized society.
Dobelis was detained by the Liepāja municipal police, questioned, photographed and had some kind of document prepared, but not shown to him, concerning his actions. The police said he was violating a city ordinance about posting political bills and holding campaign meetings in the town center. While there can be considerations of esthetics (posting placards on municipal or third-party property) and public order -- holding large rallies, etc., this kind of ordinance, appears, on its face, to be a violation of fundamental rights of free speech and assembly. It is even more offensive when used to attack the basic democratic process of election campaigning.
Unfortunately, a climate of hostility toward public political displays is partially fed by public discussions of the alleged necessity of forbidding most, if not all paid political campaigning, of drastically restricting forms of expression by candidates and reducing the race for the national parliament to a 19th century level of meeting hall gatherings with no coverage by electronic media and draconian controls the print media. While no one has actually called for anything that extreme, certain imprecise formulations of the need to limit campaign spending and contributions can have a chilling effect on expression and media contacts by candidates, and "heating up" effect on those looking for any excuse to repress free expression.

Crusading Obscurantists attack a social studies textbook

2011-05-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

Obscurantism and theocratic tendencies, never far in the background in Latvia, are raising their heads again as a virulent debate rages over the inclusion of psychologist's views on homosexuality in a 9th grade social sciences textbook. The psychotherapist Jolanta Cihanoviča is quoted in a reprinted interview as saying that homosexuality is not an illness, that this has been acknowledged by medical and psychiatric organizations around the world, and that it is a “normal aspect” of human sexuality.

Religious organizations, including the archbishop of the Latvian Lutheran Church Jānis Vanags, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Latvia, Zbigņevs Stankevičs, representatives of Baptist and Seventh-Day Adventist congregations, signed a letter to the Latvian government demand that the textbook be withdrawn because of what they deemed unacceptable views on homosexuality. Interestingly, the letter was also signed by a nationalist member of the Latvian parliament, the Saeima, Imants Parādnieks, who, according to press reports and his own statements, maintains long-term, affectionate relationships with two women and has been called a “polygamist” by some media.

Latvia's Ministry of Education and Science has now caved in to the demands of the ultra-conservative religious factions (mainstream Lutheranism is tolerant of homosexuality, Latvia's church does not even ordain women) and hinted that the views of “the church” would be included in the next edition of the textbook. Presently, it looks like the “church” is considered to be only those religious leaders that vehemently denounce homosexuality as sin and depravity, and also reject the views of medical science and psychology that different sexual orientation is not an illness or disorder.

I wouldn't object to a social science textbook that illustrated contemporary trends by examining the debate in society and within world religions on sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. That could very well include quoting the condemnation of gays as depraved sinners by some Latvian religious leaders and the acceptance of gays and all other people by such ministers as Harvard-trained Juris Cālitis, who has held religious services ahead of Latvia's controversial “Gay Pride” events a few years ago.

However, the danger in the present turn of events is that the education authorities of a formally secular democracy are caving in to the demands of obscurantist religious movements and their political supporters. If they make gains on the “hot” issue of gays, other attacks on the secular teaching of science are not far behind. After all, as recent polls show, this is a country where 35% of the population believe that the sun revolves around the earth.

Media stories about the controversy, as always, generated hundreds of reader comments, most of them vehemently homophobic, supporting the censorship of the textbook, and referring to various conspiracy theories about why most medical and psychiatric organizations in the world, including the World Health Organizaition (WHO) do not see gays as Satan's agents sent to deprave the young and to destroy Latvia in particular.

Cihanoviča, an experienced psychotherapist who has been published internationally, was denounced in violent, hateful language in many of the comments, something that has almost become a norm in Latvian internet media. It yet again affirms my observation some time ago that Latvians hate free speech and love hate speech or something to that effect.

To be “fair”, or at least to explain why the endemic witches' kettle of ignorance, xenophobia, paranoia and twisted national inferiority complex was set a-boiling again, Cihanoviča used the word “normal” (normāls) in Latvian. It became a red flag to a herd of intellectually blind (or disabled) raging bulls, because to many Latvians, normāls is seen as meaning “this is what you MUST accept” or “this is what you MUST go out and do”. In other words, in the narrow, scared and information deprived mind-space of many Latvians, it mean that “we are turning your kids into gays and they better obey, because it is normāls.” In fact, normal simply means that it is something that is out there, that doesn't go away, that is part of nature, life and society. In Latvia, snow is normal, but I don't have to affirm that I love it or to run out and buy skis or a sled.

The whole issue is interesting, because it falls squarely across the themes of two of my blogs – one on free speech issues, because text book censorship by religious groups is a major free speech issue in many countries, It also addresses the issue of Latvia as a failed state of sorts, whose failure is partly rooted in the persistence of ignorance, xenophobia, authoritarianism and the populist appeak of crusading obscurantism or, as Latvians put it karojošā tumsonība. The warriors of intellectual darkness have made the education authorities blink, which is a very bad sign.

Morons as punishers, morons as the punished?

2011-03-26T04:46:00.000-07:00

Latvia is never lacking for examples of petty fuckwit authoritarian behavior by ape-brained primates who have found their way into public administration. The latest example, according to media reports, comes from Liepāja, where a pensioner was administratively fined LVL 25 (around 50 USD) for calling the light-haired wife of a municipal official "little blondie" (blondīnīte in Latvian).
The alleged name-calling occurred after Linards Ozols tried to deliver some heating briquettes to a friend but found the driveway to the courtyard of the friend's apartment house blocked by a car belonging to a blond-haired woman, who refused to move it, but finally moved the vehicle (apparently a jeep-like SUV) after Ozols addressed her as "little blondie", which she considered an insult.
To be fair, calling a woman "blond" in certain contexts in Latvia is a mildly sexist insult based on the assumption that women, generally, are not as "smart" as Latvian men (depressive, chain-smoking drunks in the grave by age 65 by another stereotype) and that blondes are the least smart of them all. But where there is boorish behavior, an exchange of insults follows, as Latvians would say, like amen! in church (kā āmen baznīcā). You cannot force people to be civil, least of all in a society where, with a number of factors working simultaneously, white trash behaviors are more and more commonplace. To punish minor incivility is a ridiculous violation of a person's right to speak freely.
What elevates this incident from the perniciously silly to the bizarre is the fact, according to media accounts, that Ozols, having delivered his briquettes, was unsuccessfully pursued by a Liepāja municipal police car, which only failed to overtake him because of oncoming traffic. However, Ozols was later identified and handed an adminstrative fine for calling the blond wife of municipal police official blond.
Police officials call the pensioner's story of an alleged pursuit a fantasy, but Ozols was eventually fined for insulting the wife of Gints Krēsla, the head of the Administrative section of the Liepāja municipal police.

Nazi crank back in the news
The other free speech issue recently raised in the Latvian media is a report that the American organization the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has taken notice of an anti-Semitic rant on a Latvian television channel by a crackpot extremist, Uldis Freimanis and asked, in a public statement, that he be "brought to justice." The ADL statement correctly notes that incitement to ethnic hatred is punishable under Latvian law, so the organization's demand is logically correct and consistent with its mission to expose and combat anti-Semitism and other kinds of bigotry. Fair enough.
However, as an American organization, the ADL should be aware that in the US, Freimanis' ravings would be protected speech under the First Amendment and were he punished on US territory, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) might well take up his case. The ACLU, which has a number of Jewish lawyers working for it, was behind legal actions in the 1970s to allow a march by neo-Nazis in Skokie, Illinois. a town populated at the time by a number of Holocaust suvivors. The Nazis won their case, helped by some Jewish lawyers who put free speech and free assembly (the right to non-violently express any message) above the deeply offensive content of the Nazis' message.
I fully agree with the ADL that Freimanis expressed offensive, depraved views about Jews, that he even urged their murder, but absent a very limited context of direct incitement (leading a mob with torches to a synagogue) I oppose the punishment of any speech, writing or other expression not involving the direct use of force. The organization Article 19, I believe, has a number of articles on its website opposing the application of so-called hate speech laws. There should be no hate speech laws in Latvia, hate, bigotry and ignorance cannot be legislated out of existence. Free speech, open debate and free expression are part of a process that may, over time, reduce the level of ignorance and xenophobia in this country,

March 16 - police, peaceful marchers and free expression

2011-03-16T22:30:00.000-07:00

The annual March 16 event to commemorate the Latvian Legion, forcibly conscripted by the German occupation authorities in 1943, passed peacefully after its almost ritual banning by the Riga City authorities and the lifting of the ban by a Latvian court. It almost looked like an effort by outgoing Minister of Interior Linda Mūrniece (caught briefly in the video) to show that there were still many police under her command. Toward the end of the video, when I say this may be one of the last few years when the event takes place, I mean that there will be very few actual veterans of the Legion left alive and fit to march. It will either fade or become a purely politicized event expressing differing interpretations of historical events that few people have living memory of.

Latvian court backs free speech and assembly, yet again

2011-03-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

An "antifascist" organization a few days ago and the Latvian veterans' organization "Daugavas vanagi" on March 15 won the right to assembly near the Freedom Monument on March 16 in appeals to a Latvian court. The court ruled, yet again, for the right to free assembly. Lame-duck Minister of Interior Linda Murniece (who has resigned, but will not go away until June) initially opposed the ban on public gatherings imposed by the fuckwit Riga City Council (the fuckwit part doesn't fade with a change in political compositon). Now she is promising a massive show of police force to make sure the rallies stay peaceful. Massive, at least, as far as the large majority of police who will not be out in the countryside staging armed robberies and gun battles, or driving around Riga shitfaced banging up cars, as another member of the elite Alfa unit did.
What happens now is that a small number of 80 and 90-somethings, former Latvian Legion members, accompanied, perhaps, by their middle aged children, will march to the Freedom Monument after a religious service. They will be met by a cordon of Latvian flags held by youth supporters of the Visu Latvijai (All for Latvia) a fervent, but moderate nationalist party. Various ultranationalist and neo-Nazi crackpots will also show up. Opposing them will be a mixture of geezers and younger folk denouncing the Legion veterans as fascists. There will, yet again, be almost universal distortion or ignorance of both history and "alternate history".
What I mean by that is that in 1943, when the Latvian legion was drafted in violation of international law by the Nazi occupation authorities, nobody was seen off with an honor guard of dozens of flags of the Latvian republic. Maybe I am wrong, but the red-white-red shoulder flashes that these conscript Waffen SS troops got was as far as officially allowed displays of nationalism went back then.
It is also undeniable that like the little spoon dipped in tar that gets used in a big honey pot, there were people in the Latvian Legion who had been with the Latvian Police Battalions formed prior to 1943. I don't think even any of these guys participated in the Holocaust, which was largely over in the Baltics by 1942, but some of them may have done some nasty things in Belarus.
That will not prevent some of the anti-fascists from acting as if everyone in the Latvian Legion personally took part in the shooting of Jews and then celebrated by having Hitler's face tattooed life-sized on their back with a hairpin taken from one of their victims. Nonsense, to be sure.
As for the "ignorance" of alternate history, consider this -- what if the side the Latvian Legion was fighting on had actually "won" in a limited sense. Say, Stalin dropped dead in late 1944 and the Red Army suffered some major calamity and whoever took charge of the Kremlin called an uneasy armistice. Then what?
I am pretty sure the Germans would have shifted much of their "best" troops to the West, to give the Allies a bloody nose, maybe doing a better in the Battle of the Bulge, or maybe a bit worse, because some Latvians decided to desert or surrender to the 101st Airborne? Then what? I could see reprisals in Latvia, mutiny, more Legionnaires and civilians killed by "loyal" German troops and maybe the Red Army moving in anyway to "restore order" (a mutiny or disorder on the Eastern Front could be a breach of the armistice, who knows).
The least likely scenario, whatever the 18 to 20-something patriotic draftee legionnaires were thinking at the time, was that Hitler would say -- thanks, kids, here is Latvia back! Not likely. At best, there would be even fewer surviving Legionnaires and brighter and stranger shades of grey about what they were up to in an alternate history end of World War II. The guys who happily surrendered after mauling an American tank company? Sorry about that. The guys who survived a battle with the regular SS and staggered out of a concentration camp dressed in the tatters of another kind of SS uniform? WTF or whatever they said in 1945? Guys who surrendered to Swedish police after landing on Gotland in the 1938 uniforms of the Latvian army, but armed with Schmeissers and captured Russian submachineguns? No, it would not have ended well, only differently. What happened in reality to the Legionnaires was one of many potential bloodsoaked clusterfucks waiting to happen under the political and military circumstances of World War II.
My late father was drafted and fought in the Legion, he was badly wounded. At the end of it, he took off his Latvian flag shoulder flash and said something like -- we did our best, but it got fucked up, and what happened did not really do honor to that flag. Kind of sums it up pretty well.

F**kwit Riga city administration just doesn't learn, suspends free speech again

2011-03-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

The fuckwit (yes, the term is appropriate, once is a mistake, more than twice, well...) acting Riga City manager Māris Kalve has yet again forbidden any and all requested public meetings relating to March 16, a day on which various groups have commemorated the World War II Latvian Legion and others have protested this commemoration. Needless to say, the Latvian Legion, formed during the German occupation of Latvia, was controversial. Most of the Legion was drafted, yet the soldiers predominantly fought in the belief that they were defending Latvia against the return of Soviet terror experienced in 1940-41. Some members of the Legion may have come from police battalions formed earlier and involved in surpression of anti-German partisans.
Prior to the formation of the Legion in 1943, the Holocaust took place in Latvia, and there are some members of contemporary Latvian society who believe (inaccurately, but they are nonetheless entitled to believe so) that the Latvian Legion can be equated with Nazism. These so-called anti-Fascist groups have also announced they would hold demonstrations on March 16. All of these intended manifestations of viewpoints, some of them extreme (young nationalists and ultranationalists are also "commemorating" the Legion), are part of the contentious, noisy public dialog of a free and democratic society. Kalve, using his office in a fuckwit manner, has attempted to stop this dialog. This is a direct threat to free speech, freedom of assembly and democracy in Latvia. Last year, a court annulled a similar ban. The Riga City administration has learned nothing. Last summer it allowed, then violated the free speech rights of people organizing by dispersing, a crackpot (in my opinion) commemoration of the "liberation" of Riga by German forces on July 1, 1941.
It is the duty of a democratic municipal government to respect the right of all citizens, regardless of their political views, to free speech and peaceful free assembly. This includes assembling sufficient police forces to keep opposing, hostile groups apart, something which the city has managed to do in the past (even when contending groups simply violated bans on marching and gathering). It should do the same on March 16 and rescind the ban on public meetings before the courts do so.
The ban, of course, has caused an understandable outcry among commentators on Latvian internet news portals, but it has also brought other democrats out of the woodwork. These people are calling on the authorities to ban celebrations on May 9, when mainly Russian war veterans, their families and supporters gather to mark the end of World War II as understood in Soviet times (the rest of the world commemorates May 8). I would agree the many of the old geezers, wittingly or unwittingly, are celebrating what, to most Latvians, was the beginning of another, longer and more devastating occupation than any that took place during the war. The commentators accused Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs, an ethnic Russian, of favoring the May 9 celebrants. While this may be true ro some extent, it is no reason to ban May 9 or any other peaceful public celebration. If mayor Ušakovs' attendance at May 9 events offends voters, they can try to throw him out of office at the next municipal election. That is also a democratic right.

For the record: From The Urban Dictionary
fuckwit:
Someone who despite constant failure, is unable to learn from these transgressions. Continues to do foolish and irritating things, which aggravate many people. They are not only a halfwit, but also significantly fucked in the head. Hence the term fuckwit.

Latvia proposes an internet kill-switch -- Mubarak on the Baltic?

2011-02-09T14:26:00.000-08:00

Latvia's new draft law on a “ A State of Emergency”, which was presented to the meeting of state secretaries (part of the process of introducing it to the parliament or Saeima) last September, was way ahead of Egypt's authoritarian ruler Hosni Mubarak by granting the government the right to throw a kill switch on the internet and all other electronic media. They can also censor the press and all correspondence, too.

The draft law also contains provisions for regulation the movement of citizens during an emergency, for overruling the decisions of local authorities, for searches and seizures in private homes and a number of other totalitarian measures. It also provides for emergency allocation of resources, goods and services and other steps that are at least superficially reasonable in case of a natural disaster, war or insurrection.

What is worrisome is that a state of emergency can be declared for political reasons, such as “a threat of civil disorder”, and that the provisions for regulating media and electronic communications, especially the internet, are dangerous and disproportionate. It is hard to see what benefit the population could gain from being shut off from domestic and outside media during a major global or regional disaster. As far as preventing people in Latvia from disseminating information over the internet and social media, it looks like the main purpose of such measures would be to keep the outside world from learning of repression or other violent and irrational actions by Latvia's own government and authorities.

Let us assume that a megastorm, a Cyclone Yasi or Hurricane Katrina type of storm was raging over Northern Europe and about to hit Latvia, where a state of emergency had been declared. Why should people be cut off from looking at the Weather Channel, the BBC, CNN or other news sources on the internet or on their mobile phones for a “second opinion” in addition to what the government was saying in official announcements?

I don't think the government would cut off the internet simply because a storm was coming, but such measures could be used if there were mass demonstrations that presented a “danger of civil disorder” to police and government bureaucrats advising those able to declare a state of emergency. In such a case, the reason for cutting off electronic communications, including the internet and the social media that live on it, would be to prevent information about state repression from getting out and to interfere with efforts by dissident groups and civil society to self-organize using the internet.

In short, this is a dangerous piece of draft legislation that leaves way too much leeway for the state to censor, repress, and prevent the dissemination of information about its own repression. This law must be stopped and/or drastically modified so that it is not a compilation of “rubber clauses” that can be stretched to attack inalienable human rights in times of social and political tension. There shall be no Latvian Mubarak, no internet kill switch.

A dialog of fools thrown to the thought police and more on the fashionista scandal

2010-11-19T03:20:00.000-08:00

www.pietiek.com, an interesting hybrid of a Latvian wiki-leaks and some borderline hatchet-job investigative journalism reports that the scandalous electronic correspondence of Latvia's new foreign minister Ģirts Valdis Kristovskis and Latvian-American physician Aivars Slucis is being turned over to Latvia's post-independence zombie of the KGB thought police, the Latvian Security Police (Drošības Policija).
Kristovskis, corresponding about a year ago with Slucis, a financial supporter of radical nationalist causes in Latvia, wrote that he broadly and in principle agreed with a screed in which the US-based Mayo Clinic doctor said he would be hard pressed to treat Latvians and Russians equally were he practicing medicine in Latvia. The e-mail also referred to the possibility of starting a medical facility in Latvia that would only treat ethnic Latvians.
There was, of course, a major uproar when this correspondence was disclosed even before the ink was dry on whatever document was signed nominating Kristovskis as foreign minister. A vote of no-confidence against him requested in the new Saeima (where the newly-elected legislators had barely learned how to operate the electronic voting system) failed, but the whole scandal set the tone for the generally shambolic way the new Dombrovskis government was put together. But that is another story.
The free speech issue at stake is that neither Dr. Slucis anti-Russian remarks, nor the reply by Kristovskis should be the subject of a police investigation. What both sides wrote, however deranged or offensive it may look, is and should be protected free expression. Period.
I will repeat again -- free expression is not something that protects only nice expression, rational expression, polite expression etc. Free expression protects all forms of thought and opinion, starting with the most extreme views. Once we let police power start examining "extreme" expression -- where will they go next?
The almost black humor crackpot part of Slucis' views is that as a physician, he would be bound to treat enemy combatants in a war. I don't know (I doubt it) if any injured Taliban have been flow to the US and "outsourced" for treatment to the Mayo Clinic, but I think that Slucis would have to take them as patients. Certainly that would be his duty were he a military doctor, or in the unlikely situation that foreign terrorists were wounded by police during an incident in Rochester, Minnesota and rushed to the Mayo Clinic as the nearest hospital.
However you analyze the complex tensions that sometimes exist between Latvians and Russians in Latvia, both ethnic groups are not engaged in armed conflict. Yet Slucis makes statements that would not apply even in an armed conflict (in World War II, American doctors treated Germans whose language they didn't understand and who had been killing Americans minutes earlier. They may not have liked it, but they treated them). Arguments, not police, should be used against crackpot opinions.

MORE ON THE FASHIONISTA SCANDAL
While on the subject of the bizarre, it is worth noting that my post on the expulsion of fashion blogger and magazine editor-in-chief Agnese Kleina from the Riga Fashion Week drew more than 2 000 hits in a single day to my blog. This was amazing, because to me this was a marginal matter, hardly a case of the government banning a public protest or arresting a journalist. It was actually my gut reaction to what seemed to me to be irrational mistreatment of a fellow journalist. But nothing I have ever written on this blog has ever gotten the same level of attention, especially considering that most Latvians may find my slang-ridden American English prose a bit difficult to understand. I had no idea that the fashion industry (of which I know nothing) had so many followers
Anyway, I got a couple of e-mails from Jeļena Stahova, the president of the Baltic Fashion Federation, who explained her reasons for banning Kleina.
She sent a longer e-mail in Latvian, but the salient points (here in an edited Google translation) were as follows:

The decision on refusal of accreditation for A. Kleina, by the Baltic fashion Federation and in particular by the Riga Fashion Week Autumn session was made this year In the spring, when I got to publications of Latvian Style and Fashion Awards ceremony. The reason for this was Kleina in her unethical comments in a blog, where she mocked thje event for members, leaders and everything that happened on the runway, in a way that is inconsistent with the word"Journalist" and which was inconsistent with any professional journalism general ethical standards.Her remarks on the RFW poster had nothing to do with this case.

My original post was a borderline rant, so I am glad that Jeļena didn't take offense, especially as I know about as much about the fashion business as a dog knows of the Catholic mass (translating, loosely, the Latvian expression ko suns zin no dievkalpojuma) . I don't know what Agnese Kleina wrote earlier to anger the Fashion Federation and Jeļena, but as far as ethics go, there is a difference between blogging and "straight" (no reference to sexual orientation) journalism. Blogs are there to express opinion, and the ethical standards are much looser. In writing news, it is unethical to distort facts, etc. so to say that 50 people watched XY's collection demonstration when there were clearly 200 people there, or to confuse colors, etc. would be bad journalism. But to express a strong opinion in a blog is another story. Perhaps it is foolish to offend members of a close-knit and sensitive community (the Latvian fashion scene) knowing that they may react strongly to being offended. But that is more a question of tact than journalistic ethics.
So I hope I have made an effort to be fair to the other side :). Do I get another 2000 page hits for this?

Boozehound (?) gets six month jail sentence for desecrating Latvian flag

2010-11-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

A 28-year old man has been sentenced to six months in jail for desecrating the Latvian flag by hanging from the flagpole of the Smiltene town hall while boozed up. The flagpole snapped and the flag was torn. This according to media reports.
Normally, this would be a case of public drunkeness and property damage or vandalism. What is disturbing is the harsh application of a law that, essentially, "sanctifies" symbols of the state and nation, giving them protection above and beyond other items of public or private property. The reason for this in Latvia as in other states is to create a disincentive for using national symbols (the flag, coat of arms, whatever) in certain forms of protest -- burning, defacement and the like.
While I doubt that our Smiltene boozehound was making any kind of political statement by doing pull-ups (maybe just one :) ) on the town hall flagpole, it is nonetheless both ominous and bizarre that he was sentences under a political law. It would be worse, still, had his actions actually been politically motivated. Is this a hidden warning not to deface the Latvian flag as a protest against, say, budget cuts or some other matter. If so, our Smiltene boozehound is actually a mineshaft canary warning of a latent but very real threat to the full freedom of expression in Latvia.
I don't favor burning flags as a form of protest either here or in the United States, where I grew up. But I do support the First Amendment cases that defend the right to burn one's own property as a form of protest even if that property happens to be a national flag.
As a final note, it may be that the dude in Smiltene got the harsh sentence because he had a previous shortened or suspended sentence for another crime. Even that does not justify harsher sentencing under a law designed to repress free expression. Had the charge been simple drunkeness and vandalism, fine. Repressive laws --no.

In Latvia, vindictive repression hits the "rag trade"

2010-11-07T08:59:00.001-08:00

Normally, Riga Fashion Week would be way beyond my sphere of interest -- babes on the edge of anorexia strutting down runways in far-out outfits you never see on the street or in offices (although Latvian women generally dress well). Good for them and on to the next subject...
But wait, it now seems that the organizers of Riga Fashion Week have expelled Agnese Kleina, a fashion blogger, journalist and editor of the magazine Deko (which is all about fashion, design, style and all that stuff). Agnese, it seems, criticized the poster for the event. I mean, that is what fashion/design/style journalists do, isn't it? They tell the rest of us why they think something is well designed or in good or bad taste, sort of like film critics write about movies and food critics about restaurants. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and seldom is there just one viewpoint. Take the film Amaya (a film shot in Hong Kong by a Latvian director who works in Lithuania). Some critics thought it was great. I saw it and I would give it five WTF?s (I found myself thinking those words at least five times, starting with when the camera panned down to actress Kristīne Nevarauska's legs so as not to show that she was not voicing the accented English lines she was supposed to be saying). So should I now be expelled from Latvian movie houses?
What makes the case of Agnese Kleina even stranger is that when she was declined accreditation by the organizers of the event, she went there as the personal guest of one of her favorite designers, just to see her show off her collection. Even so, she was escorted out of the event by security people. WTF? How about the right of a participant and exhibitor to invite whomever she wants?
While you could argue that private events do not have to follow rules and practices about the freedom of speech (this derives from the freedom of non-state actors to be total assholes if they so choose or are intellectually doomed to be just that), the fashion event did take place at Riga Airport, a public facility and with the moral support of the Riga City Council, a public authority whose reputation can be tainted by being dragged into, excuse the sexist terminology -- bitch fights.

Agnese writes about the incident in the English-language portion of her fashion blog:

Riga Fashion week? Been there, done that. Although with no press accreditation whatsoever as my official application was denied for the first time (I guess, some post on some poster is to be blamed), but still. Some birdie told me that similar ‘reasons’ have put TV fashion journalist Gundega Skudrina in the same list of persona non grata. Well, shit happens. I hope, it won’t go further down and doors won’t be showed to theatre reviewers, fallen in the disgrace of some theatre directors.

Oh well, this is Latvia, what else can one expect.... or am I wrong?

Latvian news agency LETA hit by denial of service attack

2010-09-30T13:55:00.000-07:00

The Latvian news agency LETA has been hit for several hours Thursday night by a denial of service (DOS) attack that blocked access to its main news website www.leta.lv. The business portal www.nozare.lv appeared to be working normally.
The attack came two days ahead of national elections October 2 to the Latvian parliament or Saeima. LETA will be a major source of election news and returns and a threat at this late date creates uncertainty as to whether LETA or its
LETA editor-in-chief Pēteris Zirnis, citing the news agency's IT administrators, confirmed that a denial of service attack had been going on and efforts were made to stop it. DOS attacks, also called distributed DOS (DDOS) involve a large number of computers sending huge numbers of connection requests or specially-designed data packets to a target server, with the aim of overwhelming its capacity to respond.
While DDOS attacks are often launched for purposes of criminal mischief or extortion, it cannot be rule out that someone is testing their ability to disrupt the flow of news during the coming elections or at other critical times. In that case, there is a severe and ongoing threat to the free flow of information in Latvia.
As of 23:50 Thursday night, the main service was still down.

UPDATE: LETA service appeared to be restored at around 24:00 (midnight)

Dmitrijs Smirnovs, arrested for published opinion, sues the Latvian Security Police

2010-09-20T14:11:00.000-07:00

Instead of writing, I have recorded this as a video. What do readers/viewers think?

Latvian police see no violation in campaigning by two political candidates

2010-09-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

The Latvian National Police see no violations of any laws in campaigning activities by two candidates of the Vienotība (Unity) alliance who had confrontations with security guards by the Riga Central Station and the Central Market, according to press reports.
Rasma Kārkliņa, a German born Latvian political scientist who worked extensively in the US, was told by security guards hired by the Norwegian-owned Linstow property management company to stop. Police were summoned after Kārkliņa objected and she went to a police station to make a statement.
Lolita Čigāne, another Vienotība candidate, was campaigning in the largely open-air Central Market where she got into a confrontation with security guards and firmly stood on her constitutional right to free speech,
A spokesperson for Linstow, which has stewardship over the public areas by the Central Station, where it manages the Origo shopping center, which is integrated with the train station, said that Kārkliņa should have obtained approval to campaign by signing an agreement with the company. However, such contracts apparently apply to semipermanent campaigning facilities, such as tents, sheds, or stand-alone signs (such as a large one erected to promote the candidacy of Ainars Šlesers, once associated with Linstow and Norwegian retailing interests). As Kārklinā said in an updated statement, she is "neither a tent nor a large banner". The law cited by the Linstow spokesperson also speaks of "public institutions", which means there should be no political campaigning in closed spaces, such as municipal offices, police stations, City Hall and the like.
A reasonable approach would be to treat peaceful, free speech and assembly as a nearly inviolable right in all areas that are functionally public spaces (that is, open to all and generally allowing both transit by the public and the peaceful presence of members of the public). This means that the stewardship the Linstow can exercise over this area by contract or other legal right should be limited to strictly technical matters (cleaning and safety issues) and, to some extent, the placement of semi-permanent structures in the area, as well as some scheduling issues (hard to have two public gatherings in the same place at once).
What Linstow has chosen to do, instead, is to aggressively assert what amount to maximum property rights(like those of a private home, office and, to some extent, the enclosed areas of the Origo shopping facility) and the ability to dictate limits on the speech and behavior of persons in an area that is for all intents and purposes.
It may be a bit far-fetched to say that Linstow is acting on behalf of Šlesers, who helped set them up in Riga when he was a private businessman in the 1990s, it can be claimed on indisputable fact that the company has acted as a defacto private political police. Personally, I don't blame this so much on the Norwegians, who have always been Scandinavian-style democrats, but on the local Latvian mentality, to forbid and intimidate first, then ask questions about free speech and political rights later, when forced by a public scandal to do so. Unfortunately, the authoritarian reflex and the authoritarian personality are very much alive in Latvian political and corporate culture. In Norway, the spirit of the authoritarian Vidkun Quisling is dead, but in Latvia, the mentality of the distant authoritarian past, and of the not-so-distant totalitarian times, is still with us.

Two Latvian parliamentary candidates expelled from public areas

2010-09-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

Two candidates in the upcoming Latvian parliamentary elections were prevented from campaigning in two public places -- the square by Riga's Central Station and the Central Market.
Rasma Kārkliņa, a candidate for the "Vienotiba" (Unity) alliance was told by Origo shopping center security guards to stop speaking to passers-by in front of the Central Railway Station, a place where campaigning has been conducted previously, where concerts and public gatherings have been held and where young people gather, loiter, talk and sometimes skateboard.
Kārkliņa, a political scientist who moved to Latvia from the US, was eventually taken to a police station to give an account of what happened. She says she was simply talking to bypassers, urging them to vote for Vienotības. She did not set up a table, stand, tent or other object that might have required permission from Norwegian-owned Linstow, the property management company that runs the Origo shopping center inside the Central Station and charged with maintenance and care of the public area near the station.
A spokesperson for Linstow in Latvia, responding to a discussion on Twitter, said that Karkliņa had been asked to officially coordinate her campaigning with Linstow, but had not done so. She said political parties who got approval could conduct campaign activities.
In a press release, Kārkliņa said she believed her expulsion from the Central Station Square had to do with political opponent Ainārs Šlesers former business ties to Linstow and other Norwegian business interests. Before going into politics, Šlesers played a key role in bringing the then Norwegian Rimi supermarkets, the Dressman and BikBok clothing stores and other Norwegian retailers and real estate managers into Latvia in the late 1990s. Šlesers spokespeople have denied these accusations.
Also challenged by private security guards at the Riga Central Market was Vienotiba candidate Lolita Čigāne, who was campaigning with two assistants. According to some reports, she aggressively verbally challenged those asking her to leave, citing her right as a citizen to free speech The Central Market management said they had a right to restrict Čigānes activities under a law forbidding election campaigning on property that is more than 50 % owned by a municipality. The Central Market is owned by the City of Riga, as is the Central Station.
The Central Station area and the Central Market are two areas of downtown Riga with very high pedestrian traffic with commuters going to trains or shoppers at Origo and the Central Market. They are natural areas for meeting large numbers of "ordinary" citizens.
There has been some discussion on Twitter (in Latvian) of holding a protest "Tweetmob" in the Central Station Square in the next few days to peacefully protest the violation of freedom of speech and assembly.

Latvia's "Wikileaks Lite" closed, investigate journalist flees country

2010-09-12T21:43:00.000-07:00

Lato Lapsa, a controversial Latvian investigative journalist with access to hundreds of pages of documents in a criminal investigation of politician and Ventspils mayor Aivars Lembergs, announced he was fleeing the country and shutting down his websites, including one that was a kind of Latvian "Wikileaks Lite".
Lapse told Latvian media that serious threats had been made against him and his sister and her chidren and he was leaving Latvia until at least October 3, the day after the national elections. He indicated he had been in touch with the Latvian Security Police (Drošības Policija/DP), but it was not clear whether the agency had advised him to close his websites.
The website www.rokasgramata.com published copies of what it claimed were bank statements, witness affidavits and other documents from the criminal investigation files concerning Lembergs, who Lapsa says skimmed some LVL 1 billion (almost USD 2 billion) that would otherwise have gone to the state treasury through various schemes, offshore companies and the abuse of political office and influence. The website has now been taken down.
Lembergs, who spent several months in investigative detention, has denied these charges and told a panel of journalists on Latvian television recently that he had sown the seeds of his large fortune (estimated at over LVL 100 million) by selling hunting rights for stags in Latvian forests to "wealthy Germans" during the last year of the Soviet occupation. After obtaining the local Soviet hunting trophy permits (Lembergs was a Communist Party official in Ventspils at the time), for a few tens of rubles (dollars), he sold them to the "millonaire" Germans for DM 10 000 (around USD 5 000 at the time) apiece. The politician, who has been in power in the port and, until several years ago, major petroleum transit city Ventspils since Latvia regained its independence.
Lapsa, often called a "notorious" investigative journalist with dubious methods of presenting his evidence, published, among other documents, the bank statements of Lemberg's adult children showing then spending large amounts on clothing and restaurants in Latvia and in European capitals, as well as handling deposits of millions of LVL. Lembergs says that, according to official income statements filed as a public official under Latvian law, he earned LVL 25 million in salaries, fees and dividends over the past three years, making him probably the most highly remunerated person in Latvia in any position, public or private (by contrast, the head of Lattelecom would have made less than LVL 1 million over the same three year period). Lembergs has denied all charges leveled against him and won a court case in which he was accused of wrongly and obstructively refusing to register a well-lnown public official because the man was not identified by personal code in a document from the Minister of Economics at the time.
Lapsa also shut down other websites, including those promoting his latest book on the politician Ainars Šlesers. Lapsa's methods in this and other "expose" books have been criticized. In the latest book on Šlesers, still being sold despite the website closure, he discloses that the politician's and former businessman's father was a mentally disturbed, abusive murderer who played only a short, traumatic role in Šleser's upbringing. He alsi claims that Šlesers, now the vice-mayor of Riga, evaded taxes on fish imported from Norway in the early and mid-1990s, events now beyond the statute of limitations for such violations.
Nonetheless, the silencing and temporary exile of "Latvia's most scandalous" journalist and the closing of his "Wikileaks Lite" websites by threatening the health or life of Lapsa's sister and her children has darkened the already strange and murky pre-election political and journalistic scene in Latvia. It strongly suggests that powerful, criminal interests are involved in the struggle for political power, setting Latvia apart from other Northern European countries where dirty politics, while hardly non-existent, never reach such an intensity.

Turning up the repression in many ways

2010-09-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

I haven't had the time or energy to post, although I should have. The country continues to ease toward a crypto police state. Just a few incidents as examples.
During Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov's visit to Riga, a number of deputies of the pro-Russian, left-leaning For Human Rights in a Unified Latvia (Latvian= PCTVL) picketed near the Riga City Council building, not against Luzhkov, but to demand that a street named after the deceased Chechen leader Dzhokar Dudajev be renamed. They were dispersed by the police, some taken home under compulsion.
You can have more than mixed feelings about the PCTVL, but they have a right to free speech and assembly like anyone else, and to use police force in a discretionary manner against a peaceful, "spontaneous" and technically "illegal" assembly just shows where the country is going.
Another sight, that would seem to have little to do with free speech, is the presence of joint police and Riga traffic wardens (the people who catch and fine fare jumpers) on the streets at night. These operations, to nab a few persons who have stolen 70 santims (or $ 1,40) worth of services look intimidating. The whole crew of burly police in bright green-yellow fluorescent vests and sometimes burly wardens standing around one or two people who have failed to pay or whose electronic tickets expired simply says " police state" to me and other passers-by. Is this the most serious kind of crime in Riga at the moment? With bike thieves rampaging and other petty crimes with real victims (not the revenues of the Riga transport organization Rīgas Satiksme), is this what the police should be doing?
I do see a similarity with the dispersal of the spontaneous PCTVL protest, because the sometimes brutal and unfair actions of the traffic wardens have and will trigger spontaneous protests by other passengers. Children have been thrown off public transport at night, tourists who misunderstood how to pay or use tickets have also been taken off the bus from the airport, their first contract with Latvia. There have been incidents of resistance -- verbal and otherwise -- to this behavior by some wardens. At the same time, there have been cases of unprovoked and disproportionate abusive behavior and even violence by fare jumpers, so there is sometimes reason to have the police nearby, but why these nightly shows of force and intimidation? Seems to me the message is -- if you see repression, brutality, unfairness - don't you dare protest, resist or rise up.
Finally, there was a case of two men running a professional marijuana farm in the countryside getting 12 and 8 year jail sentences. I decided to Twitter in Latvian that this was outrageous, because such sentences are disproportionate for what is essentially a victimless crime. I was assailed on another news site, along with those who expressed sympathy for my views, as being an advocate of drug use, which I am not. A few commentators suggested that even to debate such matters -- the scientific basis for calling marijuana growers "merchants of death" (a possible lethal dose starts at 10 kg of active ingredient THC in one sitting) and the folly of a hysteria-driven, repressive drug policy-- was something that should be repressed or punished.
Unfortunately, these commentators, as representatives of public sentiment, indicate that what a large part of the Latvian population wants is to be ignorant, scared, and to not only live in an increasingly repressive society, but to actually cheer it on.

Latvian right-wing extremist gets two year suspended sentence for hate speech

2010-08-18T13:29:00.000-07:00

Valdis Rošāns, a self-proclaimed Latvian right-wing extremist charged with hate-speech writings on the internet (including comments on a Latvian-language libertarian blog that I wrote), was given a two-year suspended sentence by a Latvian court on August 18.
Rošāns published remarks that were allegedly demeaning to Jews, gays and other minorities. He claims his internet comments were reported to the authorities by Dialogi.lv, an organization dedicated to tolerance and, among other things, to diminishing hate and abusive behavior on the internet.
While these are admirable aims, I believe Latvia and other European countries should adhere to the broadest possible interpretation of free expression. Repulsive as some of the tbings Rošāns has written may have been, they should not be grounds for imprisonment, suspended or otherwise.
Supporters of free speech such as Article 19 have argued against hate speech laws. They are counterproductive and dangerous, giving the power to chill or even censor free debate and expression. Repressing people like Rošāns not only violates his right to free expression, it also, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, violates my right to be exposed to all kinds of expression and allowing me, not the state, to decide what I will or will not listen to or read.

Did Sweden's Bonnier Group inadvertently pump cash into Latvian political faction's black war chest?

2010-08-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

I have written this as a "dream" on my Latvian language blog, but in fact it is credible version of what may have happened in the controversial divestment by Sweden's Bonnier Group of the Latvian media group AS Diena and the business newspaper Dienas bizness (my employer for 11 years up to 2006).
The version I have heard is as follows:

By early 2009, Bonnier realized that its newspapers in Latvia had been loss-making for some years and it had to decide how to stop the losses. There were a few options. First, to declare the newspapers bankrupt. This could be a dragged out process and perhaps would require a restructuring of the Diena group to separate out some profitable and potentially profitable parts. It would also cause some bad PR for Bonnier, who came into the Latvian market in the early 1990s under the banner of bringing a free, independent press to the post-Soviet country;

Another, similar alternative would be to close the newspapers. This (also probably the bankruptcy proceedings) would require dismissing the entire staff, paying severance pay, etc. There would also be bad PR.

The third possibility was to divest the newspapers. However, with at least Diena making serious losses (both papers lost a total of LVL 2.7 million in 2009), it was unlikely to get a buyer for any reasonable price. Also, it didn't look like the media market in Latvia would recover in the foreseeable future with the country in the midst of a very severe recession.

It was then, according to a version I have heard, that the Bonnier Group decided to use a means of divestment that may have been used when the Swedish Social Democratic media group A-Pressen fell apart in the early 1990s. Then, in order to divest unprofitable regional and small-town newspapers, A-Pressen made some deals in which the "buyer" was actually paid to take over the asset. In other words, there was reimbursement for at least the first year of predictable losses that the paper would make.

For the "buyer", this meant little or no cash out of pocket and vastly reduced risk, at least for a while. The method is said to have also been used in non-media related transactions, for instance, filling the cash on hand of a company, then "selling" it for a roughlt equivalent sum.

Of course, I may have some of this wrong, there is some huge Swedish government study of the A-Pressen case I have yet to read. But should this version be reasonably accurate, it means that the "buyers" of Diena and Dienas bizness were compensated with a pretty good sum, that the Bonnier Group could show as an expense, not further losses from its Latvian subsidiaries.

To make a long story short, after the initial "sale" of the newspapers to a company founded by former Diena executive Aleksandrs Tralmaks, it appears that ownership of the newspapers came into the hands of the British Rowland family, who had little or no previous contacts with Latvia and with investments in media. There is consensus among observers in Latvia that the Rowlands were probably a front for political interests in Latvia, most likely the party alliance between oligarchs Andris Šķele and Ainars Šlesers, with Ventspils mayor and accused money-launderer Aivars Lembergs also probably involved.

Once the reimbursement for taking the two newspapers off the Bonnier Group's hands passed through the Rowlands (with some fee deducted), it may have found its way into the black (underground) or grey (hidden influencers, support organizations) war chests of the oligarchs.

It now appears to have turned up again in the latest bizarre twist in the decline and fall of both formerly Swedish-owned newspapers. On August 5, the Diena group announced that 51 % of its shares had been purchased by Viesturs Koziols, a Latvian entrepreneur, friend and former business associate of Ainārs Šlesers. Koziols said he had bought the shares with his own money, but also said he had no vision of how to develop the media group and bring it back to profitability.

If there is a Mrs. Koziols or other significant other, I would imagine that Viesturs would face her wrath for blowing a significant part of the family fortune on a loss-making, seemingly hopeless investment (hopeless if you have no idea what to do with your "purchase"). Koziols is listed as a Latvian millionaire and he didn't get to be that by being a foolish investor.

This leads one to believe that perhaps Koziols is spending a part of the money paid " through" the Rowlands from the Bonnier Group. Which is not to say, by any means, that the Bonniers intended for any of this to happen, nor that they can be held responsible, anymore than I can be blamed for spending a 20 lat bill that passes through a number of people and is, say, spent to buy liquor for an underaged alcoholic.

Circumstances strongly suggest that Koziols investment in Diena is a "risk-free" project since it is money entrusted to him, with sole purpose of keeping the weakened and discredited media group alive and inactive politically until after the October 2 parliamentary elections. Then it may be allowed to go under by the New Year, just as another Koziols media project, Republika.lv, did before and after the 2006 elections (I have no content analysis, but others say it was a short-term, election year project).

Indeed, there may have been no actual transfer of funds, merely a shift of front men from 100 % Rowlands (with people still WTF'ing their presence) to 51 % for a local boy with at least some entrepreneurial credibility. One sign that no new money is coming into Diena is that journalists are not being paid their per-item honoria any more, just basic (as little as LVL 180) salaries. Since the Latvian media job market is very limited and depressed, this will not set off a stampede away from Diena, but will very seriously demoralize the already confused and demoralized reporting staff.

What does this have to do with freedom of expression in Latvia? It is not directly on point, there is no state authority repressing the media. However, there are political interests undermining the quality and independence of the press. These political forces, especially the First Party of Ainārs Šlesers, are homophobic and have a hidden authoritarian agenda. There will be less freedom of the press, a kind of Russia Lite, if these political forces win. So, ultimately, it is a freedom of expression issue.