Tomorrow Latvian Constitutional court will declare its decision on the holding of the referendum on Russian language status in the country. On the eve of this event the head of the Center for Legal Assistance for compatriots “Moscow-Russians”, Mikhail Ioffe gave a press conference to uncover the real deep rooted reasons that make such a referendum desired by the Russian-speaking population of Latvia. According to the layer, the members of all non-titular ethnic groups in Latvia have been subjected to civil, political and economic discrimination for the past 20 years.
According to Mr Ioffe, a great number of present Latvian citizens combated in the WWII on the side of the Nazi Germany, and that is why the revisionist trend is so popular there, even among the human right activists there. Latvian government is de facto ignoring the verdict of the Nuremberg tribunal that characterizes the SS organization as a criminal one. And it is this revisionism and admiration of Nazi Germany that leads to current discriminative policy of Latvian authorities.
Those people who want to vote for turning the Russian language into the second official language of Latvia are first of all expressing their protest against this wide civic discrimination: if they were given the opportunity to use their mother tongue freely, to give their children education in Russian, if they were not listed as “non-indigenous population”, there would have been no need for such a referendum.
The experts are sure that the referendum will not win 50% ‘for’ necessary to impart the Russian language the official status. Nevertheless, Latvian government doesn’t like the very thought of holding such a referendum. The president of Latvia even said that this referendum would undermine the country’s national unity. Mr Ioffe suggested that it is only natural that the government that promotes discrimination doesn’t want one of the so-called non-indigenous groups to break the discriminative frames put around it.
According to Mr Ioffe, the very notion ‘non-citizen’ derives from Nazi political dictionary and wasn’t invented by Latvian or Estonian governments. The status of ‘non-citizen’ is a de facto a form of legal incapacitation – the very thing that all civilized governments oppose. All ‘non-citizens’ in Latvia are declared to be “non- indigenous” to justify the absence of full civic rights, hoverer, almost all of them were born in Latvia and, according to the Declaration of Human Rights, should have full civic right there by the right of their birth.
Russians are not the only discriminated minority, others, for example, Jews, find themselves in similar position. According to Mr Ioffe, the Latvian government refuses to promulgate the results of the latest census as the figures are truly alarming: in 1991 some 2,900,000 people lived in Latvia, but after 20 years of discriminative policy Latvia lost more than 900,000 of its residents – much more than it lost in the WWII.
