Inese Dūka

Aliens in Latvia

Now please don’t be misled – this has nothing to do with unidentified flying objects. And everything to do with relationships among people. I can’t even say relationship between two nations because I am sure it is much wider than that. It’s not just Latvians against Russians and vice versa. It’s the Latvian-speaking population against Russian-speaking population.

Normally I don’t bother much about politics in Latvia. It has never interested me and I never have felt its direct impact on my life. Only when being somewhere abroad from time to time this topic is picked up. Why do you Latvians deprive Russians of their human rights?... One thing after countless hours of discussions I have understood – it’s almost no use discussing it because the Western world will never understand…

What brought out these thoughts were yesterday’s events. We celebrated the 15th anniversary of the signing of our Independence Declaration. This included many events throughout the city during the whole day. One of them was politicians laying flowers at the feet of the Freedom Monument. This event was interrupted by a clash between Russian-speaking demonstrators and Latvian-speaking on-lookers. I won’t go into all details of what happened as I wasn’t there and only read about it today on the internet. All I can say is that it made me very sad and I must agree with our Minister for the Interior Ēriks Jēkabsons who said that those people showed not only disrespect to the president and other officials, but also to the state, which they hate. I personally don’t think it speaks well for the people why try proving their point by ruining other people’s celebrations…

But nonetheless the rest of the evening turned out great. The only thing that was left desired for better was the weather – luckily it didn’t rain but it was so cold that scarf, hat, gloves and boots were very necessary. I went to the embankment where there was a choir concert with karaoke. This has proven to be a very well received practice that first surfaced when Riga was celebrating its 800th birthday. It is at moments like these that I still have a hope for the Latvian nation because there is seldom a thing more powerful than thousands of people singing together about their country. After one and a half hour of singing from the top of my lungs I was left barely able to whisper, tired but very happy. The only thing that was missing from complete happiness was my sweet friend Arta singing next to me… But it’s only 16 days more before she’ll be back! ;-))

P.S. Sorry if I didn’t make all that much sense as once again this was a purely emotional outburst… You know me!... ;-))