[lg policy] Latvian President Rejects Commission's Call to Stop Speaking Russian

[Harold Schiffman]

Latvian President Rejects Commission's Call to Stop Speaking Russian
© Sputnik/ Oksana Dzhadan
Europe <http://sputniknews.com/europe/>
17:56 20.07.2015(updated 22:30 20.07.2015) Get short URL
2 <http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150720/1024837759.html#comments>1867342
*Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis has rejected the State Language
Commission's demand that he stop speaking in Russian, a move which was
praised by the country's Russian minority.*
[image: Fish for sale in Riga]
© Flickr/ Stephen Bugno <https://flic.kr/p/cX6qob>
Latvia Hopes for Fish Exports to Russia After Health and Safety Improvement
<http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150718/1024787156.html>
Last week, State Language Commission head Andris Veisbergs strongly
recommended that the country's new president speak only in Latvian, saying
that he believed that "the opinion of the old commission and that of the
new one as well are the same: the president should communicate to Latvian
mass media only in Latvian."

Vejonis, who took office earlier this month after being elected to the
presidency by the country's parliament last month, vowed that he would
continue to speak to press in the language "in which he was addressed,
provided that [he knows] the language." Since then, the president has
continued to address Russian-speaking journalists in Russian, noting that
after being brought up on Pushkin's fairy tales, read to him by his
Russian-born mother, he considers the language to be his own.

Commenting on the president's position, Elena Matjakubova, the chairwoman
of the Latvian Society of Russian Culture, said that Vejonis has
demonstrated a humane position.

"The president has taken a humane and noble stance by saying that he would
not stop using the Russian language." Matjakubova stated, according
to Russia's RIA Novosti. "His mission is to educate society," she added.

Vejonis's position on the Russian language is potentially important because
despite the fact that it is the primary language of over a third of the
country's population, it continues to be classified a foreign language
under the country's laws. Language policy is one of the ways in which the
Latvian state discriminates against its Russian-language minority, which
includes Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians whose families came to the
region after 1940. About 12 percent of the country's population continues
to hold 'non-citizenship passports'. These people are unable to vote,
unable to hold certain positions in civil service and government, and
subjected to limited pension rights.
[image: Raimonds Vejonis]
© AFP 2015/ SAUL LOEB
Minority Report: Latvian President Admits Failures in Integrating Russians
<http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150710/1024458410.html>
In an interview for popular online news site Delfi.lv last week, Vejonis
stated that his country had "made many mistakes" in integrating the Russian
speaking minority over the past two decades. The president noted that as a
result, "two [separate] information flows have resulted –one in Latvian and
one in Russian." He added that he would take it upon himself to look
for sources of "common ground, shared by all inhabitants of Latvia."

Narrowly chosen to replace outgoing president Andris Berzins earlier this
month, Vejonis became the first Green Party president in the European
Union. An environmental engineer by training, he was first appointed
Environment Minister in 2002, and later elected to the country's
parliament, the Saeima, in 2006. Between January 2014 and June of this year
he served as defense minister in the government of Prime Minister Laimdota
Straujuma.

Read more:
http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150720/1024837759.html#ixzz3gXQ94qUw


http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150720/1024837759.html

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