Leonid Raihman, a minority rights campaigner, said the conference would have benefited from including a greater range of opinion from Latvia. By lunch several participants were privately voicing the same opinion. Dinner was at the Lido leisure center, a venue where delegates could get a feel for the real Latvia, according to Foreign Minister Indulis Berzins. As an illuminated windmill rotated outside and an electronic elk nodded inside, Anna Antonowicz, a doctoral student from the Catholic University in Lublin, Poland, gave her verdict on the event. A conference isn't only about selling ideas.
Ideas only change when there is a clash.
The message I got was that we in Europe are all doing a great job, which isn't true. Alongside contributions from as far afield as Cyprus, Ireland and Armenia, some of the Baltic states' marginalized languages did get a look in. Anna Verschik from Tartu University in Estonia talked about efforts to revive Yiddish, which, until the Holocaust, was a medium of education in all three Baltic states. Vilnius, as a capital of Jewish culture, once boasted eight daily Yiddish newspapers, she said. The bastions of Yiddish were destroyed by the Holocaust and Soviet rule.