Russians angry at radio station shutdown

A sense of gloom hung over Bizness & Baltija's cramped studio at the top of a Riga high rise as the music station favored by Russian speakers faced shutdown at midnight on March 12.

Bizness & Baltija, a cousin to the newspaper of the same name, is part-owned by the Moscow-based Russkoye Radio network. Some of its broadcasts are produced in Russia and rebroadcast in Latvia.

It's the most popular radio station in the capital Riga, the majority of whose inhabitants are Russian speakers, with a 20 percent audience share.

At midnight on March 12 the station went dead as regulators switched off its transmission.

The decision not to renew the station's license is not, as regulators claim, due to music copyright violations, but to the part of its output which is in Russian, says Andrejs Hoteyevs, Bizness & Baltija's program director.

He insists the station's aim is not cultural imperialism but entertainment, and that ultimately it will bounce back.

"We won't be crying into the microphone tonight. We obey the laws of Latvia and if they switch us off, we appeal - we are not interested in politics, this is not Russia's NTV," said Hoteyevs.

In a written statement on March 7 the National Radio and Television Council said the decision not to renew the station's license was based on violations of music copyright laws.

But Dace Buceniece, of the National Radio and Television Council's commercial broadcasting department, acknowledged there was more to it than that. The council "bore in mind" violations of requirements that in any 24-hour period 75 percent of a private broadcaster's output must be in Latvian, said Buceniece.

Language violations by the station "have been regular and frequent and very serious," she said.

Since the end of Soviet rule in Latvia no radio station has had its license canceled on the basis of copyright violations, a fact which increases Hoteyevs' suspicion of this decision, which follows several run-ins with the law expressly for language violations.

The station is in any case willing to negotiate payment with the Latvian branch of the music industry's Copyright and Communication Consulting Agency, he says.

"Legal proceedings over copyright violations are not the responsibility of the National Radio and Television Council," said Hoteyevs.

Russian-language radio stations often fulfill Latvia's language requirements by playing Latvian songs and commercials in the early morning, but Hoteyevs points out that even in prime time some of Bizness & Baltija's news broadcasts are in Latvian. Boris Tsilevich, an ethnic-Russian member of Latvia's Parliament, advised the station to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

"This disgraceful decision and the broadcast law itself is a clear violation of freedom of expression, and if it gets to an international court, I've no doubt it will say so," he said.

In Europe such strict regulation of foreign language broadcasting by private outlets is almost unique. Only Ukraine and Moldova have similar restrictions, born out of fears of the native language being overwhelmed by Russian, which Moscow favored during its rule.

Latvia's highest court, the Constitutional Court, has previously refused to hear Bizness & Baltija's appeals against fines for violating language regulations.

Russian is the mother tongue of a third of Latvia's 2.4 million population, most of them Soviet era settlers.