The following blog entry has been republished here courtesy of Free Speech Emergency in Latvia.
The Latvian Security Police have questioned a blogger who regularly contributes to a blog site maintained by Kristaps Skultelis (nickname Krizdabz), one of Latvia’s better-known and popular bloggers.
Writing under the pseudonym Ierindas Pilsonis (Ordinary Citizen), the man(whose first name is Raitis) has harshly criticized the Latvian state and government as being little more than a rapacious mafia and has said in some posts that revolutionary violence against such a system would be justified.
The blogger, who is at least 50 years old (he mentions an encounter with the Soviet KGB in 1978, when, presumably, he was an adult) describes being questioned by a polite young Security Police officer at a dingy regional Security Police office in Rēzekne, in eastern Latvia (Krizdabz comes from that area).
He describes the office as poorly equipped and relates several bizarre incidents — such as the officer reading excerpts from his earlier blog posts that had been faxed to the regional office.
The officer also asked who prints “Ordinary Citizen’s” blogs as if totally clueless that blogs are electronic media and are not disseminated in printed form (except as smudged faxes inside the Security Police).
The blogger was also asked what political group or foreign country he was working for (as if his blog posts had been paid by someone).
He was also questioned about his relationship with Krizdabz. The whole post in Latvian can be read here. I don’t know how it would survive a translation with Google Language Tools, but worth a try.
The way things look — with the Strategic Analysis Commission of the Latvian President’s office saying that public trust in the institutions of government has collapsed — the state is increasingly paranoid about anyone expressing angry criticism and is sending chilling signals not only to the critics, but to anyone giving them a forum.
That does not change the fact that people in Latvia are increasingly frustrated and angry with what they see as a corrupt, incompetent (well, maybe not the current one) government that took the nation to the edge of bankruptcy and then brought on economic strictures (at least as applied by the government) that have devastated health care, education and pensions, with more devastation to come in the next round of budget cuts.
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