The Mark of History
TIME talks with Vaira Vike-Freiberga, President of Latvia
BY JEFF CHU Davos
| JANUARY 27 |
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Who would have thought that less than a year after Vaira Vike-Freiberga
moved back to her native Latvia, she would be President of the country?
Vike-Freiberga had lived abroad for more than four decades, charting a
brilliant course through Canadian academia and traveling the world as a
lecturer to Latvians in exile. She returned home in the autumn of 1998 to
head the Latvian Institute, charged with raising the nation's profile
around the world. In June 1999, the Latvian Parliament tapped her as head
of state. She is the first woman to hold such a position in Central and
Eastern Europe.
President Vike-Freiberga spoke with TIME's Jeff Chu at the World Economic
Forum in Davos. Below, excerpts from the President's comments, on
everything from Latvian relations with Russia to meeting Oprah Winfrey.
On her personal life journey:
I was born in Latvia. I left three days before the Russian Army took Riga
in October 1944 with my parents, who fled the Communist occupation. They
witnessed the first Soviet occupation in 1940-41, with the destruction of
the Latvian structures ... My mother said they arrived with this
ideological framework, which said that everything the Latvians had done
before was wrong . Everything that independent Latvia had tried to do was
bourgeois and reactionary and fascist and wrong. The Russians were going
to come and orders were going to come from Moscow. They were going to
teach Latvians how to think, how to read, how to act, how to paint, how
to sing, what to sing and so on. My parents felt like they couldn't live
in this system and they left.
We had some fairly difficult times as refugees passing through Poland and
Germany. I started schooling in Latvian refugee camps in Germany . My
parents [then] went to French Morocco . [In 1954] we emigrated to Canada
because we happened to be in touch with some people we shared a room with
in the refugee camp. In the refugee camp, we were 20 people to a room in
double-tiered bunks. You get to know people very intimately, so that
friendships are kept up and they wrote to us saying, "Life is hard in
Canada. But if you work hard, you can get ahead. So why don't you come
here?"
I arrived in Canada at the age of 16 and basically got my higher
education there. I had a career as a university professor and a scholar,
but was involved in Latvian affairs throughout. I turned some of my
research to Latvian heritage. As a psycholinguist, I started analyzing
folklore and that allowed me to keep in touch not just with my family
back in Latvia but also with a lot of artists and intellectuals. I went
back [to Latvia] very early in 1969 because of academic contacts. At that
time, very few people were allowed [to go back]. Emigres were still on
the blacklist .
I also spent a number of years just traveling around the world not just
as a scholar and scientist but also as a public speaker to Latvian
communities . We used to have these camps for youth of Latvian origin .
We invited professors and artists and architects and so on-people with
careers in the West-with some knowledge of Latvian language, history and
culture to give lectures to these young people. So I lectured all across
North America, in South America, in Australia, in Europe.
[I]n 1998, I received an offer that I felt I couldn't refuse, and that
was to head a Latvian Institute, which was then being founded. [T]wo
things happened to coincide: this opportunity to close up my career as an
academic [by taking early retirement] and to take up the challenge of
creating the Latvian Institute, on the model of the Swedish Institute or
the Estonian Institute, which are the institutions to give information to
the world about the country.
On the importance of a forum like Davos and meeting famous people:
It's the contacts. It's the opportunity to meet so many people in one
location. It's rather like the Millennium Summit last fall in New York,
which I found tremendous for the opportunity it gave to meet such an
extraordinary number of heads of state and government in one place and in
such a short period of time . The contacts at, say, dinner or sitting in
a luncheon or meeting in a hallway or chatting over coffee-this daily
exchange is extraordinary in getting to know people . [Y]ou have an
extraordinary assemblage of people who are influential in economics and
finance but also personalities from the arts world. I mean, Paulo Coelho,
whom I had the pleasure of running into twice in the setting here-it's
marvelous to meet someone you admire, someone who's being translated into
Latvian and being very much loved and admired in Latvia as well. I met
Oprah Winfrey here, for heaven's sakes! I got a hug from Oprah Winfrey,
and it's not something I get every day! The day she wants to extend to
Eastern Europe, she'll see she already has her foot in the door!
On Riga's relations with Moscow:
We are in a state of suspended hope of improvement. We have been saying
for the last few months that there may be some hopeful signs that our
relations will improve shortly. I guess we've been saying that for a
little while, but I think that's still the state of affairs. We keep
getting signals that there's goodwill on the part of Russia to improve
relations, to engage in dialogue.
On the role of history in Latvian-Russian relations:
I think it will impact them as much as we wish them to do so. The history
is very grim. Latvia was occupied for 50 years. The Latvian people
suffered a great deal. They suffered a great deal of oppression. There
was a great influx of Russian-speaking population who were quite
obviously being treated as first-class citizens as opposed to the
colonized locals.
On the Russian minority in Latvia:
These people, now having lost their privileges, are bitter about it and
feel that by being asked to integrate as a minority in Latvia, their
rights are being infringed on. After all they were the master race, the
conquering race, the ones who came to bring truth to Latvia, to teach
them how to live, how to breathe, how to do everything. And now they're
being told, "You have to learn Latvian." . They're absolutely shocked
silly that they should be asked to learn this language spoken by such a
small number of people in the world, since they speak Russian . They used
to be in what was basically a colony of Russia. Now they're in a
sovereign state, an independent state, a Latvian state with Latvian as
the state language, with an orientation to the West, an orientation to
the European Union and an orientation to NATO.
Interestingly enough, the Russian-speaking community living in Latvia is
in favor of us joining NATO. The percentage of approval is over 50%
among them as well . [O]ur joining NATO will increase stability in the
region, will increase investor confidence and would be good for business.
Many of these people are active in business and they see that it would be
to their advantage to have that situation.
On Latvia's stance in the global community and opportunities in the
future:
[Latvia] stands for the desire of small nations to have their
independence so that they can live their lives by deciding, on their own,
how to structure their society by keeping their language, maintaining
their own culture, and preserving their heritage and identity. But we
want to do so by integrating with the European Union as a community of
nations, a defender of democratic values. That's the model we want to
follow. We want to follow the economic success of western Europe. We want
to join the modern world. We want to become high-tech-oriented. We
already have highly educated population, scientifically and
mathematically trained. We want to get onto the New Economy bandwagon
even as we keep developing and restructuring our old economy, on which,
of course, in the 10 years since independence, we have had to work very
hard. We now have a functioning free market economy in Latvia and we're
certainly hoping to keep improving it so that we can raise our standard
of living and be at the forefront of new developments in this new
century.
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