The fourth speaker was Tatjana Zdanoka, Member of the European Parliament from the Russian Union of Latvia party. Her title was, “On Demonization of Russian Culture” in Latvia. Here are excerpts:
MEP Zdanoka described the increasing effort to suppress the language and civil rights of the large Russian-speaking minority in Latvia, which escalated after the start of the war in Ukraine.
She quoted Yehudi Menuhin: “Either Europe will become the Europe of cultures or Europe will die.”
One MEP colleague, Sandra Kalniete, wrote, “we should take advantage of the “window of opportunity” that has opened to solve issues important to “our people,” first of all, the elimination of education in Russian and the demolition of the Monuments to the Liberators of Latvia from the Nazi invaders.”
Ethnic Russians make up 25% of the population of Latvia, the Russian-speaking linguistic minority makes up 37% of the country’s population. “One of the members of National Parliament (Saeima) of the ruling coalition party openly called for ethnic cleansing, aimed at increasing the proportion of ethnic Latvians in the country’s population. The signatures are collected on a petition for the expulsion of “disloyal citizens” from the country and deprivation of their Latvian citizenship, as well as on a petition for a ban on my party, the Latvian Russian Union, standing for the protection of the rights of Russian-speaking minority.”
“The government has prepared a package of initiatives to destroy memorials dedicated to the soldiers of the Soviet army who liberated Latvia from Nazi occupation during World War II. About 150,000 Soviet soldiers died in the battles for the liberation of Latvia.” This includes a statue on land of her ancestors killed in the Holocaust, and a statue of Pushkin.
“Some of the elderly people are under risk to become illegals. The new retroactive norm provides annulment, in the case of bad knowledge of Latvian language, [of] the permanent residence permission for those who acquired the citizenship of Russia.…
