Businessman Valtis Dalbinis published a claim in November that young people had bragged to a teacher he knew that they had received €300 for taking part in a picket in support of the Istanbul Convention.
It received widespread attention among social media users and these allegations were republished by the “LA.lv” portal and were widely reported. A month later, on 9 December, the portal supplemented this claim with a story by the anonymous teacher, in which he tells the portal the same story again, reiterating the allegations that the payer might be the leading coalition party “The New Unity” (JV).
Apart from the anonymous person’s statement, “LA.lv” does not provide any other substantiation for these allegations. Both “Centrs MARTA” and JV stress that these are lies.
The original LA.lv article published what Valtis Dalbinis wrote and quoted comments from social network users, and this article has spread further on various other channels of denunciators of the Convention.
In order to verify the veracity of this allegation, the portal “Delfi” tried to contact Dalbinis in November. In a Facebook correspondence, he said that the teacher he had mentioned had refused to give his contact details, while Dalbiņš did not reply to Delfi’s request to forward questions about who had addressed the young people, how they had been paid and which protest they were actually going to – for or against the ratification of the Istanbul Convention.
Linda Tunte, editor-in-chief of the LA.lv portal, said in November that a member of the portal’s staff had managed to contact the teacher mentioned by Dalbins and that a publication was expected soon.
A month after the protest, on 9 December, the portal published the teacher’s alleged account, in which he claimed that the youths were from the Aizkraukle town, and justified the assumption that “traces could lead” to the JV: “He [the teacher] found this out from other classmates who discovered that the youth in question had friends in social networks from the Unity youth organisation.”
The article also recounts the anonymous teacher’s opinion that “this rally was organised. It was not spontaneous. If it was organised, it was also financially arranged. 30%, 40% will come from the street, but the rest of the mass had to be organised”.
However, this time the portal stressed that “this is a story of experience, not officially confirmed information”. There is also an invitation to get in touch if anyone knows of similar experiences or additional information.
“MARTA Centre stresses that the stories published by LA.lv are not true. The cost of organising the event – lights, sound, stage, generators, security, ambulance crew, posters – was €8350, most of which (more than €5000) was donated, while the remaining costs were covered by a total of 14 NGOs that took part in the event. The organisation also publicised these costs on social media platforms.
No payment has been offered to anyone for organising or participating in the protest. Given that the State Police estimate that more than 10 000 people took part in the protest, the organisers would need around €3 million to pay €300 each.
Kremlin standard practices
Edmunds Jurēvics, a member of the JV board and chairman of the Saeima faction, stresses that the members of the JV youth organisation themselves actively participated in the protest and invited people to attend it, and that the claims of payouts are “fabrications and slanders in the best traditions of the Kremlin”.
“This is typical Kremlin style – certain anonymous and semi-anonymous Facebook accounts in different countries often accuse civil activists and people willing to take to the streets to defend democratic values of being paid. It does not surprise me that it is still a source of pain to various figures who want to pull Latvia eastwards that 10 000 people, regardless of their political beliefs, gathered in Dome Square and in front of the Saeima in opposition to the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention.” – Jurēvics said.
He noted: “Dozens of JV members and representatives of the youth organisation took part in the rally, but it is the deepest delusions, fabrications, lies and deliberate misinformation that we paid anyone.
“Given that these slanders are gaining ground, we in the party will be assessing whether to take legal action against people who have deliberately misinformed against young people,” he added.
Tunte told Delfi: “I don’t want to reveal the details of the production of this and future articles on this topic, because it is up to our editorial staff how we gather information and how we compile and publish it. Also, whether a story is anonymous or with a mentioned authors name is an editorial choice that I don’t think I have to explain to a competing media outlet.”
“However, I would like to point out that these articles were not classified as analytical content, they were not labelled as investigative articles, but they were published according to the experiential approach, which was clearly indicated in the text. It should also be noted that the research on the topic is ongoing, so there will most likely be articles on this topic later, as LA.LV has taken the approach of creating a series of articles on different topics, thus keeping the readers’ interest for longer.” – Tunte added.
