Max van der Stoel and Latvia

Abstract

Latvia was a very frequent stop in the busy travel schedule of Max van der Stoel during his tenure as the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) from 1993 to 2001. As the Director of the non-governmental Latvian Centre for Human Rights and Ethnic Studies from mid-1994 to the end of 2002, I met with the HCNM regularly over the years and had numerous telephone conversations with him and members of his staff to exchange information and coordinate strategy for pushing minority-related reforms. I came to have deep respect for his role in resolving some of the most sensitive political issues in post-independence Latvia. The political context in Latvia was extremely complicated in the early 1990s, and occasionally even dangerous. This required the utmost diplomatic skill from outside interlocutors, of which the HCNM was a key player. After regaining independence in August 1991 after 50 years of Soviet rule, Latvia had to contend with the presence of tens of thousands of disgruntled Soviet/Russian troops and a very large Russian-speaking minority. This minority was very dissatisfied with the ‘nationalizing’ policies of the Latvian government in the realms of citizenship, language, education and other policy fields. While Russia sought to link the troop withdrawal to changes in Latvian minority policy, the HCNM, together with other Western partners, succeeded in delinking the two, transforming a political (and potentially military) conflict into a legal dispute. For various reasons, the Russian government dragged its feet in withdrawing the troops — while most had left by August 1994, a small contingent remained in Latvia until 1998, when an early-warning radar station in the Western Latvian town of Skrunda was dismantled. In 1993 and early 1994, local newspapers were full of stories of Russian soldiers selling weapons and diesel on the black market and ignoring Latvian customs in exporting scrap metal and illegally felled timber. Many of these troops had joined forces with the local anti-independence movement during the latter years of perestroika. The Latvian political elite was impatient to negotiate the withdrawal of the troops, which were seen as a security threat and a hated symbol of the Soviet ‘occupation’. For his part, Yeltsin feared that a rapid withdrawal might lead to unrest, as there was