Econo-riots hit Lithuania —and anti-Semitic threats
Days after violent protests in Latvia, riots broke out in neighboring Lithuania Jan. 16, with some 7,000 gathering in the capital Vilnius to protest planned economic austerity measures. Some began throwing eggs and stones through the windows of government buildings, and police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. (NYT, Jan. 17)
Meanwhile, Lithuanian Jewish leaders decried a graffiti attack over the weekend, in which the words "Palestine" and "Kill Jews" along with a swastika were painted on a Jewish community building in the Baltic port of Klaipeda. "How much longer will we allow provocateurs to pit the Lithuanian and Jewish people against one another?" asked Simonas Gurevicius, executive director of the Lithuanian Jewish Community. (AFP, Jan. 19)
See our last posts on the econocataclysm in the Baltics, the politics of anti-Semitism, and the Gaza backlash.
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Lithuania briefly
The rubber bullets hit few protesters' heads. Few journalists were hurt. People say robocops aimed at peoples' heads. Authorities boast about adequate reaction of the security forces.
Public discourse in Lithuania is a conspiracy theory so opaque that no-one is able to understand whether authorities really believe in what they're saying. The outside forces they're speaking about are Russia. In Lithuania it's much harder for them to speak about this because way less people seem to believe that. 'People' seem to know that there's enough mess inside the country and the 'outside forces' need not to intervene in order to bring discord to sovereign Lithuania. The inside forces they're speaking about are the following three: a Russian-speaking minority of Lithuania, a populist-leftoid Che Guevara T-Shirt admiring parliamentary party 'Frontas' ('Front'), a small milieu of anarchoid pissfarters (who are basically potent only in absurd theatrical 'actions' and endless copy-paste theorizing).
After all these are simple conspiracy theories from the authorities.
Another part of the conspiracy bag is from the leftoid front. Some say the riots were provoked by cops so that the government would be able to justify tenser repressions, higher police presence, etc. Might be. Some say that the riots started simply because one bet agency put a bet whether the riots were gonna break out. And so they did. And so someone won a whole lot of cash from this bet.
All in all I tend to think that the riots broke out simply because of the possibility of rioting after having heard about events in Latvia, Greece and other countries. Besides, the populace DOES seem to hate the government. There are many reasons for that.
Another thing is the nazi problem. Here it is a really sad fact that Lithuanian Jewish Community still believes that there are 'provocateurs to pit the Lithuanian and Jewish people against one another'. Unfortunately anti-semitism is not a provocation, it is a present problem. The nazis in Klaipeda, despite that fact that they are a bunch of alcoholic criminals with an idiocy soaked in vodka, are backed by the population which is highly anti-semitic, which has a secret sympathy for German nazis (some of them still label them 'liberators' in the face of red-fascist USSR).