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News highlights from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

News Highlights from September 21—September 28, 1998

• Citizenship, and whether they should make it easier for their neighbors to get it, is the No. 1 issue on the minds of most Latvians as they head to polling stations this coming Saturday, October 3.
          In the third national election since Latvia broke free from the Soviet Union in 1991, the electorate will pick a new slate of deputies to the country’s 100-seat parliament, the Saeima.
          But it is a referendum being held simultaneously that has drawn the most attention in the lead-up to Saturday’s poll, and which has driven the election campaigns of most of the 21 participating parties and alliances. 
          The controversial referendum, if passed, would nullify legislative amendments adopted earlier this year liberalizing Latvia’s restrictive citizenship laws, which have kept 700,000 Russian-speakers from becoming Latvian citizens.  
          The issue also has implications for Latvia’s relations with both Russia and the West.
          A vote in favor could prompt calls in Moscow for an even harder line against Latvia, which has already been the target this year of repeated denunciations and sanction threats from the Kremlin. Western governments, too, have said they will be deeply disappointed if Latvian voters choose to throw out the legislative changes. When parliament approved the changes, Western leaders said it showed Latvians were willing to compromise. Right or wrong, a yes vote for the referendum is likely to be seen the other way around: as a signal of ingrained Latvian intransigence.   
          Some Western officials have warned that a yes vote could be a major set-back for Latvia, possibly slowing down its integration into the West, including membership in the European Union and NATO. Most Latvian politicians have called on voters to heed that warning. Five of the six parties in the current government coalition and all the major opposition parties have called on voters to vote no in the referendum and to allow the citizenship changes to stand.
          The right-wing Fatherland and Freedom, a key member of  the coalition government and the party of Latvian Prime Minister Guntars Krasts, is the only major party campaigning for a yes-vote in the referendum.
          Support for Fatherland and Freedom  had been on the wane earlier this year, but their crusade against changes to Latvia’s citizenship laws have tapped into popular sentiment, and their popularity has risen in recent months.
          As polling day approached, most observers said the final referendum result was still too close to call.
          On issues other than citizenship, there seems to be wide agreement. All the main parties are for European Union membership and for the bid to join NATO, and there is cross-party support for the free-market reforms implemented in the country with such success in recent years.
          The platforms of many of the major parties are difficult to distinguish from each other, and support for one or the other seems to hinge largely on the personalities of party leaders.
          The party that has showed up in first place in most pre-election polls with around 20 percent support is the opposition, center-right People’s Party, a new party set up by businessman and former prime minister Andris Skele.
          Other contending parties scoring between 10 and 15 percent in opinion surveys have been the right-wing Fatherland and Freedom, the centrist Latvian Way and the opposition leftist Social Democrats. The New Party, another new grouping led by flamboyant pop music composer Raimonds Pauls, has also been scoring above the five percent threshold required to win seats in parliament.
          Analysts say there will be no outright winner in Saturday’s poll and that any party picked by the country’s president to form a new government will have difficulty stitching together a workable coalition.
          Since it regained its independence, Latvia has had more than half a dozen different governments, almost all of them fragile coalitions relying on slim majority support in parliament.

• An anti-corruption watchdog recently found that Estonia was moderately corrupt and Latvia quite corrupt compared to 85 other countries around the world.
          Transparency International talked to business people, analysts and members of the general public in the nation’s surveyed to come up with their list. (Lithuania wasn’t included in the survey.) The focus was on perceptions of how corrupt countries are, not on actual incidents of corruption. “It seems to me that any country that has a score of 6.0 or 5.5 or lower clearly has a huge problem,” an analyst at Transparency International told Reuters. A ranking of 10 is regarded as highly clean and a ranking of 0 is considered highly corrupt.
          The following is an abridged version of the list—which begins with the least corrupt country and ends with the most corrupt:
  1. Denmark  10.0
  2. Finland  9.6
  3. Sweden  9.5
  4. New Zealand  9.4
  5. Iceland  9.3
  6. Canada  9.2
  7. Singapore  9.1
  8. Netherlands  9.0   
  9. Norway  9.0
  10. Switzerland  8.9
  11. Australia  8.7
  12. Britain 8.7
  13. Luxembourg  8.7
  14. Ireland  8.2
  15. Germany 7.9
  16. Hong Kong 7.8
  17. Austria  7.5
  18. United States  7.5
  19. Israel  7.1
  20. Chile 6.8
  21. France  6.7
  22. Portugal  6.5
  23. Spain  6.1
  25. Japan  5.8
  26. ESTONIA  5.7
  27. Costa Rica  5.6
  28. Belgium  5.4
  33. Hungary  5.0
  36. Greece  4.9
  37. Czech Republic  4.8
  39. Italy  4.6
  40. Poland  4.6
  43. South Korea   4.2
  46. Brazil   4.0
  47. Belarus  3.9
  52. China   3.5
  54. Turkey  3.4
  65. Romania  3.0
  66. Bulgaria  2.9
  67. Egypt  2.9
  68. India  2.9
  69. Bolivia  2.8
  70. Ukraine  2.8
  71. LATVIA  2.7
  72. Pakistan  2.7
  73. Uganda  2.6
  74. Kenya  2.5
  75. Vietnam  2.5
  76. Russia  2.4
  85. Cameroon  1.4

News Highlights from September 14—September 21, 1998

• Economic turmoil in Russia has led to a sharp drop in Latvian exports to Russia, Latvian Economics Minister Laimonis Strujevics said on September 16.
          Exports to Russia—Latvia’s largest single trading partner—fell by 21 percent, or 20 million dollars, in the second quarter of 1998, Strujevics told a news conference in Riga. He said the steepest decline was in machinery exports, which fell by 27 percent.
          Exports continued falling because cash-strapped Russian companies were unable to pay suppliers, Strujevics said.
          Until Russia’s economic crisis deepened, some 18 percent of Latvian exports went to Russia. Over 60 percent of Latvian exports go to western Europe.
          Latvia was looking to assist exporters by trying to open new markets in the West—and also in other ex-Soviet republics, the minister said. The government would also consider short-term financial aid to Latvian exporters.
          Estonia and Lithuania have also seen exports to Russia fall. Lithuania is considered the most exposed to the Russian market.
          But despite Russia’s economic woes, all three Baltic economies have so far remained fundamentally sound. Even with the collapsing Russian market, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia all say they anticipate healthy economic growth for 1998.

• Estonia’s border town of Narva sent food aid to the nearby Russian town of Ivangorod on September 17—the first official aid from Estonia since Russia’s economic crisis worsened.
          The three-ton consignment, which included sugar, flour, pasta and rice, was delivered to three Russian schools and a kindergarten in Ivangorod whose food supplies had run out in recent weeks.
          Officials in Ivangorod, a city of 12,000 just across a river from Narva, told the Baltic News Service they hoped they could replenish the schools' supplies within two weeks, but said they were thankful for the Estonian food shipments until then.
          Estonia and the other two Baltics have said they are ready to offer food aid to cash-strapped Russia. But they say they would like the European Union to take the lead in organizing it.

• Lithuanians who helped save Jews during the Nazi occupation were decorated on September 17 by Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus.
          In a ceremony at the presidential palace in Vilnius, President Adamkus praised the 31 Lithuanians, 21 of whom were decorated posthumously.
          "You served humanity rather than violence or calculation during the Nazi occupation in Lithuania," Adamkus said.
          During the 1941-44 German occupation over 90 percent of Lithuania’s 240,000 Jews were killed.
          The presentation of the special Life Saver Crosses Thursday came amid growing criticism abroad that Lithuania has moved too slowly to prosecute Nazi war criminals in the country.
          The high-profile trial of 91-year-old Lithuanian Aleksandras Lileikis, accused of sending scores of Jews to their deaths, has been repeatedly delayed. His trial was slated to start this month, but was postponed because the court said Lileikis may be too ill.
          During Thursday’s ceremony, President Adamkus also called for efforts to revitalize Jewish life in Lithuania, which was a center of Jewish learning and culture before the war. It is now home to just 6,000 Jews.
          "The duty of our state today is to create the best possible conditions for the Jewish community in Lithuania to survive, to grow and to expand its culture," he said.

• The remains of a pre-war Lithuanian prime minister who died in the United States over 20 years ago were reburied in Lithuania on September 18.
          In a solemn ceremony attended by Lithuanian officials, the ashes of Jonas Cernius and his wife Veronika were buried in a cemetery in Kaunas, 100 kilometers from the nation’s capital, Vilnius. The ashes were brought from the United States this week by their son.
          Cernius, like thousands of other Lithuanians, fled the country towards the end of World War II as the Soviet Union invaded. He later settled in Flint, Mich., where he worked as an engineer at General Motors. He died in Clarmonte, Calf., in 1977 at the age of 79.
          Cernius was Lithuanian prime minister for just seven months in 1939, when he led a moderate, broad-based coalition government. But Lithuania lost its independence when it was forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940.