Saeima stops bill to make Russian official; issue heads to referendum

Andris Straumanis | 

Raivis Dzintars

Raivis Dzintars of the right-wing National Alliance speaks against proposed legislation that would make Russian an official language of Latvia. The Saeima on Dec. 22 blocked the bill and the issue now will be decided in a national referendum. (Photo by Ernests Dinka, Chancellery of the Saeima)

As expected, the Saeima has rejected a bill that would amend Latvia’s constitution to make Russian an official state language.

The Dec. 22 vote was a formality, because regardless of the parliament’s decision the issue must now be put to a national referendum. One of the paragraphs the bill would change establishes Latvian as the state language, and that constitutional provision may only be amended through a referendum.

In a special session, the Saeima killed the bill on its first reading. Sixty MPs voted against sending the bill to committee, no one voted in favor, and one MP abstained. MPs from the largely ethnic Russian political party Harmony Centre (Saskaņas centrs) walked out of the meeting before the vote.

The legislation would change five paragraphs of the constitution, giving the Russian language equal status to Latvian. The bill has been pushed by the pro-Russian group Dzimtā valoda (Native Language), led by the controversial Vladimirs Lindermans. A citizen initiative held in November garnered 187,378 signatures in favor of the constitutional amendments, forcing the question before the Saeima.

After the Central Election Commission on Dec. 19 certified the results of the signature campaign, President Andris Bērziņš on Dec. 20 submitted the legislation to the parliament.

However, in a letter to Saeima Speaker Solvita Āboltiņa, the president pointed out that making Russian an official language would mean renouncing the core ideas that led to the founding of the Latvian state.

He added that the proposed legislation would not help unify Latvian society.

In the Saeima, Jānis Ādamsons of the center-left Harmony Centre spoke in favor of the bill, but concluded by announcing that his party would not participate in the “farce” of the vote. The more than 180,000 people who signed on to the initiative did so not because they are against Latvians or the Latvian language, Ādamsons said, but because they are opposed to the politics of the right wing.

“We are our country’s patriots,” Ādamsons said of Harmony Centre, according to a translation of the meeting’s transcript. “And we are concerned about Latvia’s future, because this is the land where our children and grandchildren will live. In the past 20 years, the right has allowed tens of mistakes in the areas of economics, finance and social issues. It will soon become clear that they have also allowed tens of mistakes in national politics.”

Ādamsons and the other Harmony Centre MPs then left the chamber.

Raivis Dzintars of the right-wing National Alliance (Nacionālā apvienība “Visu Latvijai!” – “Tēvzemei un Brīvībai/LNNK”) spoke against the bill, telling the remaining MPs that the legislation is an attack on the foundation of the Latvian state.

“In fact this spits in the face of those Latvians who already experienced 50 years of bilingualism, but without the opportunity to vote ‘No.’ In fact, with an aggressive campaign financed from abroad, an active struggle against Latvian statehood has been declared,” Dzintars said.

The Central Election Commission must now prepare the national referendum. According to media reports, the referendum may be set for Feb. 18.

Andris Straumanis is a special correspondent for and a co-founder of Latvians Online. From 2000–2012 he was editor of the website.

Canada names new ambassador to Latvia

Latvians Online | 

Canada’s foreign minister has appointed a new ambassador to Latvia, the government has announced.

John Morrison, who most recently has been his country’s ambassador to Serbia, will replace Scott Heatherington, who has been stationed in Rīga since 2008.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird made the announcement on Dec. 19, according to a press release from Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).

Morrison holds a bachelor’s degree from McGill University and a master’s degree from Cambridge University. He joined Canada’s Department of External Affairs, now DFAIT, in 1985. Morrison’s diplomatic appointments have included service in Malaysia, China, Taiwan and Japan, as well as in the department’s headquarters in Ottawa.

From 2005-2008, Morrison was the deputy head of mission in Canada’s embassy in Moscow.

John Morrison

John Morrison is Canada’s new ambassador to Latvia. (Photo courtesy of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade)

Language referendum to be pointless, but potentially harmful to Latvia

Uldis Ozoliņš | 

Latvia will go to a referendum sometime in the new year to vote on whether Russian should become the second official state language in Latvia.

The outcome is entirely predictable: some 700,000 votes are needed—half the total Latvian electorate—to vote in favour to approve this significant constitutional change, and that will not happen. Such a number or more may indeed vote against the proposal.

The entire effort may seem to be a waste of money and time. But its purpose may nevertheless have been achieved—to drive a wedge between Latvians and Russians in Latvia, perhaps even to sour Latvia-Russia relations, to show the relentless way in which various Russian forces insist on dominating independent Latvia.

Paragraph 4 of the constitution stipulates Latvian as the sole official state language, and this is what proponents are attempting to change.

Citizens have the right to initiate policy or constitutional changes in Latvia. First, 10,000 notarised signatures are required to support such a proposal, whereupon the Central Election Commission organises a second round of signature gathering, where around 150,000 signatures are required. In this case more than 12,000 notarised signatures were originally gathered, and a further 180,000 were gathered in November in the second round to force the issue to the Saeima and, ultimately, to a referendum.

The issue of language has been prominent since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Reinstating Latvian as the sole official state language—the status it enjoyed in the inter-war period—was a centrepiece of Latvia’s moves to regain independence. The Russian language had not only been the main language of the Soviet Union, it had also been the language of the large numbers of Russians and others who were settled in the Baltic states during the Soviet period and who have stayed on since. These settlers largely remained monolingual Russian speakers, being catered for with their own schools, media and services. Balts were virtually forced to become bilingual in their own language as well as Russian, while the Russian speakers had little incentive to learn the Baltic national languages. In the 1989 census, the last in the Soviet Union, only around 22 percent of non-Latvians in Latvia claimed a command of Latvian.

It should be noted immediately that this “Russian-speaking” population is very diverse in its language behaviour, as the last 20 years have attested. In this time Latvian has been taught more systematically in schools, public notices and correspondence are all in Latvian, and a knowledge of Latvian is essential in most occupations. This has led to a marked improvement in Latvian competence among non-Latvians: in the 2000 census the figure for non-Latvians commanding Latvian had risen to 58 percent. Many Russian speakers are fluent in Latvian now, but for some this is not a situation they approve of.

Promoting Russian

The Russian-oriented Harmony Centre (Saskaņas centrs) political party has long tried to upgrade the status of Russian, arguing particularly for its greater use in local government and administration. Yet its party platform supports Latvian as the sole official state language, and its deputies in the Saeima, in taking their oath upon election, must swear to uphold the constitution and specifically to uphold the status of Latvian.

In this instance it was initiators from outside Harmony Centre who began the campaign. The main figure was the controversial Vladimirs Lindermans, who has been an unusually professional dissident now for the past three decades. He was a thorn in the side of the old Soviet Union, criticising the slow pace of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. For a while he even joined the Latvian People’s Front campaigning for an independent Latvia, but then veered sharply in his politics to his present nationalbolshevik sympathies, mixing communist politics with acute Russian chauvinism. He has been at serious odds with both Latvian and Russian governments for his extremism, and was sentenced to prison in Latvia for advocating the violent overthrow of the state and for possessing explosives. He also was incarcerated for shorter periods, as well as was denied citizenship, by the Russian government.

Ostensibly, he began this campaign to counter the unsuccessful move last year by nationalists in Latvia, led by All for Latvia! (Visu Latvijai!) political party, to have the state finance only schools that have Latvian as their language of instruction, thus threatening the still extensive Russian-language school system. The venture failed, but this was seen as an antagonistic anti-Russian move that angered many.

Yet it would be wrong to see this as only a tit for tat.

The activities of Lindermans has posed dilemmas for Harmony Centre. Officially, the party supports Latvian as the only official language. However, several party members have expressed support for Lindermans’ move, including the blustering parliamentary leader Jānis Urbanovičs, but most importantly Rīga’s Russian mayor, Nils Ušakovs, who dramatically added his signature in the second week of the campaign, igniting a flurry of interest and spectacularly increasing the rate at which signatures were then gathered.

Ušakovs has since tried to be all things to all parties, hypocritically making speeches arguing for the need to strengthen Latvian particularly in the work of local government, and protesting that adding his signature was not an attack on Latvian but merely an act of respect for Russian speakers.

Significantly, a number of other Harmony Centre deputies such as Igors Pimenovs opposed Lindermans’ campaign, arguing that the earlier provocation by Latvian nationalists should not be responded to by this Russian provocation in turn. But a small number of Saeima deputies have added their signatures, calling into question the oath of loyalty they give upon taking their places in the Saeima, though in the blasé world of Latvian politics keeping promises can rarely be enforced, and there are no sanctions stipulated for breaking the oath.

Interestingly, Latvian politicians have appeared to wake from a slumber over this issue. Language issues have usually not been high on the agenda of most Latvian politicians. Few Saeima deputies supported the move to have Latvian language schools only. But they have belatedly woken to the damage this referendum will do. President Andris Bērziņš, having been equivocal on language issues before, has now strongly defended Latvian and questioned Ušakovs’ competence. The Union of Greens and Farmers (Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība), a party that lost many seats in the recent elections and needs to restore its credibility with an electorate too mindful of its links with powerful oligarchs, is playing the national card and started a campaign to get a million votes against the Russian proposal.

The referendum will solidly vote against Russian as a second official language, but the damage has been done, highlighting supposed ethnic differences and ignoring of the Russian minority. Latvia has in fact experienced no ethnic tensions at the personal or community level, and people are far more concerned with the everyday issues such as the economy (painfully slowly recovering), and the recent collapse of yet another bank—Latvijas Krājbanka—under suspicious circumstances. Yet for some politicians, playing on ethnic allegiances is more important.