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LITHUANIA
I. Baltic
Waves Radio project meets with mixed responses.
Lithuanian
Parliamentary Vice-Chairman Arvydas Vidziunas has
applauded the initiative of broadcasting to Belarus but
said the fate of Baltic Waves Radio depended on the
country’s institutions for foreign policy.
“We share good relations with Belarus in economic,
energy sale and foreign policy areas,” Vidziunas
told [the 4th February] news conference, “I do not
think current Belarusian democracy could be harmed by
broadcasting from Lithuania.”
Baltic Waves
Radio is coordinated by Conservative MP Rimantas Pleikys,
who stresses he acts as a private person. Pleikys
states that the currently being established
non-governmental non-profit institution would author
informative programmes for Belarusian and Russian
national communities in Lithuania, but will be heard [on]
shortwave in the Kaliningrad region, Belarus and all
three Baltic states.
Vidziunas,
monitor of the parliamentary Conservative faction, said
neither the party’s political council, nor its board
have yet considered the project, called Baltic
Waves. The parliamentary monitor said “the
further activity of Pleikys and our stance towards the
issue will depend on how we manage to coordinate it
foreign policy institutions.”
Media announced
earlier that broadcasting to Belarus had met with
unfavourable reaction in the Lithuanian Foreign Affairs
Ministry and the President’s Office.
Meanwhile, founders of Baltic Waves Radio announced
earlier this week they had received first financial
support of 30,000 pounds from Great Britain’s
Westminster Foundation for Democracy.
BNS news agency,
Tallinn, February 5, 1999
II.
Lithuania dissociates itself from Baltic Waves.
The Baltic Waves
Radio is a private initiative, the state of Lithuania
does not support it and has nothing in common with
it. Therefore, the Seimas [Lithuanian parliament]
can have no influence on the establishment of this radio
station.
This opinion was
voiced by the members of the Seimas Foreign Affairs
Committee, who discussed the initiative of MP Rimantas
Pleikys to establish a radio station broadcasting in
Russian and Belarusian.
The radio station
would aim to provide better information to the
Russian-speaking populations of the Baltic states as well
as Russia and Belarus in their native languages about
developments in these countries and around the world.
The plans to
establish Baltic Waves have outraged Belarus. The
chairman of the [Lithuanian] parliamentary Foreign
Affairs Committee, Vytautas Dudenas, admitted that
Belarus had been protesting against the establishment of
such a radio station in every possible way.
The Belarusian
ambassador to Lithuania, Uladzimir Harkun, has told some
Lithuanian MPs that such a radio station would interfere
in Belarus’s internal affairs and could therefore
cause good-neighbourly relations to deteriorate.
Belarusian
officials view the establishment of the radio station as
an official initiative. Dudenas is convinced that
they have been misled by the fact that the coordinator of
the radio project, MP Rimantas Pleikys, is a member of
the major conservative [Homeland Union—Lithuanian
Conservatives] faction of the Seimas.
The Belarusian
side has been assured that this is only a private
initiative financed from private funds, not state money.
The MPs suggested
that Pleikys himself meet the Belarusian ambassador and
brief him on Baltic Waves.
The initiators of
the Baltic Waves Radio have reportedly received financial
assistance from Great Britain.
Britain’s
Westminster Foundation for Democracy has allocated 30,000
pounds sterling for the Baltic Waves Radio project, the
Baltic News Service reported.
Pleikys says the
sum amounts to about half of the funding needed for daily
broadcasts of one hour. He hopes the Baltic Waves
Radio may go on air at the beginning of this summer.
‘Lietuvos
Rytas’ web site, Vilnius, February 4, 1999
III. Russian
radio and TV “disappear” from Lithuania.
Russian radio and
television broadcasting has almost disappeared in
Lithuania. Several broadcasts in the Russian
language have either disappeared from the state
television and radio broadcasting network or have been
shifted to inconvenient times.
If it were not
for the retransmission of Russian TV channels on cable
TV, and for Russian-language programmes on private TV
channels and radio stations, ethnic Russians in Lithuania
would be left without any broadcasts at all in their
native language.
The Russian
public’s timid attempts to protest ran up against
iron arguments about the need to know the Lithuanian
language. Konstantin Mozel, the Russian ambassador
in Vilnius, merely pointed out the problem of the
narrowing of the Russian-language information area, and
he came under some very harsh criticism.
Furthermore, the management of state TV and radio is
hatching plans to further reduce broadcasting networks in
the languages of ethnic minorities. The Jewish
community, concerned by the decision to shut down the
Menorah TV broadcast, accused the company’s
management of discrimination and of attempting
assimilation.
When they saw
that matters were beginning to take an undesired turn,
the parliamentary committee on human rights and ethnic
minorities asked the director of Lithuanian TV and Radio
to restore the broadcasts in ethnic-minority
languages. Lithuanian analysts suggest that this
question will become a bargaining chip between state TV
and radio, on the one hand, and the government on the
other, in hammering out budget allocations.
‘Izvestiya,’
Moscow, January 30, 1999
IV. Speaker
insists on radio broadcasts of parliament sessions.
The
leadership of the Lithuanian Seimas [parliament] will
look for 500,000 litas to finance the broadcasts of
parliamentary sittings over the national radio.
Janina Mateikiene reports from a news conference:
[Correspondent]
We
should understand that making parliamentary work public
is a precondition for democracy, the speaker of the
Lithuanian parliament, Vytautas Landsbergis, said at a
news conference [on 11th January]. He
criticized the decision by the management of the National
Radio and Television [NRTV] to get rid of mediumwave
transmitters and stop live broadcasts of Seimas
sittings. The NRTV made the decision after its
annual budget was cut by almost one-fifth this year,
Vytautas Landsbergis said.
[Landsbergis]
. . .The
Seimas is turned into some kind of a bad guy who is
elbowing his way into broadcasting, while pushing things
out of its way and introducing budget cutbacks.
This idea stems from insufficient interaction between our
state institutions. In this case, there has been no
communication from the public radio and television
company as an independent institution, which has become
all too autonomous and independent of the Seimas.
It has not even informed the Seimas about its decision
[to stop mediumwave broadcasts].
[Correspondent]
The
parliament speaker promised to work together with the
government to make funds available to retain the
mediumwave broadcasts of Seimas sittings.
Landsbergis also asked the media not to run reports that
the Seimas wants to interfere with [the NRTV schedule]
for its own benefit.
Lithuanian Radio,
Vilnius, January 11, 1999
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