 
|
|||||||||
              
|
Latvians deal uneasily with history, independence
Sunday, May 14, 2000 By Andres Martinez, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
RIGA, Latvia -- Gov. Ridge was not alone in crying out "not again" upon hearing that Richard S. Baumhammers had hunted down ethnic minorities on the afternoon of April 28. The people of Latvia did the same.
"This is really about crazy Americans and their guns, but Western reporters will still use it as an excuse to tell us we're a bunch of Nazis," said 19-year-old college student Valdis, standing before Riga's Freedom Monument late one recent night. He and hundreds of other revelers were exuberantly celebrating Latvia's upset against Russia in the hockey world championship. Valdis had seen reports of the Pittsburgh killing spree on local television.
For a society consumed by questions of ethnicity and nationality, news that a Latvian-American fond of spending time in Riga had killed total strangers on account of their race and painted swastikas on a synagogue could not have come at a worse time.
Latvia's reputation has taken quite a beating in recent years, unfairly in the eyes of locals and foreigners working here, and the last thing the nation needs is to be accused of poisoning the mind of an impressionable young man from Pittsburgh. It has not yet been reported in Latvia that Baumhammers was also a Latvian citizen.
"You have to understand that this does touch a nerve, as it comes on top of a lot of bad publicity for Latvia in the past year," explained Ojars Kalnins, director of the Institute of Latvia and former Latvian ambassador to the United States. "The fear in this case is that people will rush to make a causal link between the nature of the crime and Baumhammers' ethnicity. This is already how the incident is being reported by the Russian press."
"Immigrant, Immigrants' Wolf," was the playful headline to the Richard Baumhammers story in a local Russian-language newspaper, Chas ("Time").
Russian attitudes toward Latvia are particularly strained now because of Latvia's prosecution earlier this year of partisan guerrilla veteran Vasily Kononov, a decorated hero in Soviet times, for war crimes committed fighting the Nazis during World War II. Kononov was released last month by the Latvian Supreme Court pending a review of the evidence.
The case involves the death of civilians in a village that supported the Germans.
"I do not believe all Latvians are crazy killers, but they have paranoia on this nationality question, and the craziness only gets worse when they cross the ocean," said a retired Russian naval officer living in Riga, eyeing the hockey celebrations with a grimace from a nearby McDonald's.
The "nationality question" involves the cold demographic calculus of a people seeking to retain their identity against historical odds. For all its impassioned nationalism, Latvia has been independent only between 1918 and 1940 and since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Teutonic knights, Poles, Swedes, Romanovs, Nazis and Soviets have all occupied Latvia, and only the Swedes are remembered fondly. The cobble-stoned charm of the capital city of Riga belies the incessant brutality of the nation's past.
The horrific nature of the 20th century in this part of the world is illustrated by the fact that Latvia's current population of 2.4 million is roughly what it was in 1913, when its capital, Riga, was the fourth-largest city and most important port of the Russian empire.
Between 1939 and 1950, the country lost roughly a fourth of its population, as mind-numbing numbers of people were exiled to Siberia (and almost certain death), exterminated or forced to flee to the West. Latvia's entire Jewish population of 90,000 was virtually wiped out in the first six months of Hitler's rule, a fact that gets mentioned only in passing at Riga's Museum of the Occupation, which commemorates the horrors inflicted on the nation by both the Nazis and the Soviets.
Latvia and its neighboring Baltic republics of Lithuania and Estonia inspired the world in the late 1980s with their courageous yet peaceful defiance of Soviet power. Incredibly, right prevailed over might, and the future appeared bright for Latvians, whose nation -- roughly the size of West Virginia -- was romanticized in the West as one of the Davids who brought down Goliath.
But there was an immediate problem: the fate of the sizable Russian-speaking minority that suddenly found itself living in a foreign country upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It soon became the Achilles heel in Latvia's image as a thoroughly democratic nation indistinguishable from, say, Denmark.
Ethnic Latvians' share of the total population had diminished from more than 70 percent during the interwar period of independence to 52 percent in 1989 (it has since climbed closer to 60 percent), a margin too close for the country's comfort. Citizenship in the newly independent state was not offered to the vast majority of residents of non-Latvian origin, but only to those who could establish that they or their parents had been citizens prior to 1940.
This meant that Richard Baumhammers was suddenly entitled to a Latvian passport, though he had never set foot in the country and spoke not a word of Latvian. But a Riga-born 34-year-old son of dentists who moved from Moscow in 1950 would have found himself suddenly stateless, unable to have a say in the affairs of his lifelong homeland, along with almost 700,000 others living in Latvia.
"This was the great betrayal," said Boris Tsilevich, a Latvian parliamentarian of the leftist National Harmony Bloc. He is of Russian Jewish origin and lost 71 of 73 family members in the Holocaust. He says Latvia's independence movement was predicated on a vision of a multiethnic democracy, and it was on this basis that a significant number of ethnic Russians voted for independence in the 1991 referendum. "Promises were broken, and I feel personally responsible for this because as a member of the Popular Front, it was my job to sell the concept of independence to the Russian community.
The Latvian Institute's Kalnins calls citizenship "a privilege that must be earned." Latvia's independence, he notes, cannot be taken for granted, and it was an understandable concern that a bloc of non-Latvian voters could gain control of the government and undermine the nation's free-market, pro-Western orientation.
Tsilevich is not sympathetic with the Latvian concern about its shrinking share of the population during the Soviet period. "If you look at the breakdown of ethnic groups in Latvia today, it is not that different from what it was in 1914, before the massive Russian outflow during World War I," he said.
Latvia's governments -- and there have been nine in as many years -- have spent much of the past decade agonizing over the status of this disenfranchised populace. A 1998 referendum scrapped an earlier citizenship law containing tight annual quotas on naturalizations. That came only after badgering from European Union officials, who said the nation's treatment of its minority population could jeopardize its chances of being considered for membership in the union. Now, qualified non-Latvian residents can apply for citizenship at any time, but must pass a Latvian language and history test.
"International pressure has helped soften Latvia's radical nationalism," said Nils Muiznieks, the Latvian-American director of the Latvian Center for Human Rights and Ethnic Studies, "as we saw more recently with the language laws." Last year, President Vaira Vike-Freiberga -- a Canadian-Latvian who moved to the country to be Kalnins' predecessor as head of the Latvia Institute -- sent back to the parliament a law that would have the state enforcing the use of Latvian in the private realm as well as in public and official communications. A more moderate bill was produced, stipulating that government employees and private sector employees interacting with customers master Latvian.
Tsilevich said the new law still will discriminate against minorities, and the psychological damage of excluding so many hundreds of thousands of people from the political process for the first decade post-independence will be lasting. "Whatever the laws, non-Latvians will not be begging at the door. We have been forced to adapt, and we do not feel like criminals in need of forgiveness."
Muiznieks believes the more moderate citizenship and language legislation strikes a balance between Latvians'concerns and the rights of the minority community.
Muiznieks said the Baltics are not the Balkans. "People read the venom coming out of Moscow about how the Russians are treated here and expect to find a Sarajevo. But people tolerate each other here, intermarriage rates are high and the Russians do quite well in business."
It all amounts to a poignant historical legacy bequeathed to this hopeful nation aspiring to become a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. There is a consensus on all sides that the next generation will transcend ethnic politics and historical divisiveness. One sign of hope: Half the players on the Latvian hockey team that has so galvanized Latvian nationalism in recent weeks are ethnic Russians.
But for now, talk of an official language and of preserving one ethnic group's control of society still lingers, symptoms of a scarred past. Though some of the same concerns -- placed in an American context -- are present in the crude political manifesto Richard Baumhammers posted on the Internet last fall, it is impossible to ascertain the extent to which Latvia's domestic politics influenced his thinking. The Post-Gazette has found no evidence that he engaged in radical politics in Riga.
Having read Baumhammers' writings, Muiznieks, who monitors extremist groups, sees no Latvian influence: "Looks like pretty generic, all-American extremism to me."
Free-lance writer Nil Ushakov contributed to this report.
|
||||||||
