The mayor of Riga harshly condemned the Seimas' plans to blow up a Soviet monument
The mayor of Riga, Dainis Turlais, from the “Honor to Serve Riga” party, harshly criticized the decision of the Latvian Seimas to begin considering a public initiative to demolish the monument to Soviet liberating soldiers in Riga, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Delfi writes about this.
According to the mayor, this monument is the subject of an interstate treaty between Latvia and the Russian Federation, therefore political responsibility for decisions taken on it should fall on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which deals with international treaties.
“When I hear words about the demolition of a monument, about burning books, and so on, I see such very gloomy pictures from the history that I studied at school. And I thought that in our time - back in the last century - such people had disappeared from the face of the earth, such savages simply did not exist. But it turns out that we can now see the philosophical fact that history repeats itself in reality,” Turlais said.
Earlier, the Seimas rejected the initiative of Latvian residents to protect the monument to the soldiers-liberators of Riga, submitted by the leader of the Russian Union of Latvia (RSL) Tatyana Zhdanok. This initiative on the Mana Balss portal received the required 10 signatures in three days, and in total collected more than 000 votes.
It is worth noting that not all deputies of the ruling parties are unanimous on the issue of the monument. MP Artuss Kaimins (KPV LV) believes that the decision to blow up the monument would be wrong, as it would lead to a split in society and a threat to security. “This is a super sensitive issue, so we need to act very wisely,” he emphasized. Kaimiņš proposes to rename the monument, which is also allowed by the agreement with Russia, and to call this place a memorial to the memory of the “Soviet occupation.”
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