America's important
role for Lithuania

 
The ‘Lithuanian’ senator, Richard ‘Dick’ Durbin (67) with President Barack Obama.

Durbin is the senior United States Senator from Illinois and the Senate Majority Whip, the second highest position in the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate. Durbin was born in Illinois to an Irish-American father, William Durbin, and a Lithuanian-born mother, Ann Kutkin (Lithuanian: Ona Kutkaitė). Durbin has over many years done a truly great job not only for America but also for his motherland, Lithuania!

Text: Aage Myhre, Editor-in-Chief
aage.myhre@VilNews.com

During a visit to the U.S. some years ago I spoke with immigrants from various countries who now live in the United States. All with one thing in common; that they had abandoned their homelands. I met exiled Cubans. I saw Iranians who fled to USA after their Shah, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was overthrown from the Persian Peacock Throne in 1979. I talked to many Eastern Europeans who escaped Stalin's atrocities during and after World War II. I talked to Jews who were born in the U.S., but still feeling and having very close ties to Israel.

It strikes me that the U.S. has done much more for exiled nationalities than what our Western European nations have done.

It was probably not without reason that the majority of Eastern Europeans who managed to flee westwards towards the end of World War II preferred the U.S. over Western Europe. For in truth our Western European support to our eastern brothers and sisters was rather half-hearted during the post-war years.

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NOW IN CHICAGO!

National Lithuanian
American Hall of Fame

Bringing attention to Lithuania’s epic history and the global contributions of its people today in the arts, sciences, sports, politics, and economics.

Football greats Dick Butkus and Johnny Unitas, film director Robert Zemeckis, screen stars Charles Bronson, Ann Jillian, and Ruta Lee, musicians Benny Goodman and Bob Dylan, author J.D. Salinger, and Senator Dick Durbin are but a few famous individuals with roots in a nation that was once the largest and amongst the most powerful in Europe, Lithuania. Their achievements will now be commemorated by The National Lithuanian-American Hall of Fame (NLAHF).

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Members of 'The Lithuanian-American Community
protest outside the Capitol in Washington in 1990, against
Soviet President Gorbachev's policy regarding the
Baltic States. They played a real role by then.
Is there still a role for them to play?
Photo: UPI, Joe Mahoney.

Lithuanian Americans have always found themselves as defenders of the ideas and ideals of both Lithuania and their adopted country, the United States. During the years of Soviet occupation, Lithuanian Americans played a key role in keeping hope alive. Without the actions of Lithuanian Americans, there would not have been a non-recognition policy, and without the hard work of so many Lithuanian Americans past and present that policy would not have served as the beacon of hope it was for Lithuanians in Lithuania.

Not surprisingly, many Lithuanian Americans concluded at the time of the end of Soviet occupation that their job was completed. After all, what they had done for more than 50 years was little short of heroic. And there was the additional and for some extremely painful fact that many in Lithuania itself felt that the diaspora had made its contribution but that Lithuanian-Lithuanians must now take the lead in the future development of their country.

As a result, many Lithuanian Americans have ended or at least reduced their participation in public life. Now, this withdrawal from public life threatens to become a stampede. Lithuania has become a member of NATO, a step that many have seen as the final guarantee of its independence and security. And Lithuania has joined the European Union, another step toward the reintegration of Lithuania into the European world from which it was so brutally wrenched by the Soviet government in 1940.

But these events should not be the “end of history”, there are many serious challenges ahead both for Lithuania and for Lithuanian Americans, all of us who care about Lithuania may have to work harder than we ever did in the past.

The Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries continues to cast a shadow on the political calculations in Moscow and in the minds of many Lithuanians, and because this is so, Lithuanian Americans have a special role to play in dispelling both these shadows.

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that had there not been a Lithuanian diaspora, the Soviet government might have survived far longer than it did. Now, it is imperative that Lithuanian Americans again play the key role in making sure that Lithuania will not suffer because of such actions. And that includes not only telling the West but making sure that people in Lithuania understand what is at stake as well.

Lithuanian Americans have played a key role in fighting the hangover of the communist past, and we can all be proud of the role that Lithuanian Americans have played. I believe that Lithuanian Americans can make a significant contribution also to the future. But we need to recognize that the threats to that future are real and that Lithuanian Americans need to act as they have in the past.

Egle Dudenas

Egle Dudenas wrote this article in 2005, but her points are as good today as they were by then.  VilNews is hereby inviting our readers to comment on this important topic.

Click here if you wish to read this article on white background

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Straight-line 12-cylinder 1938 Lincoln Saloon

By KR Slade

Sunday was, as usual, the day for Father and me to go to Lithuanian Catholic mass; and, as usual, thereafter, to return to my familiar English-speaking world. Our Sunday masses were always at our Lithuanian church -- the only one between Massachusetts and Connecticut. I never had any idea what anyone at church was saying, because I did not understand any Lithuanian. In 1958, the mass was in Latin; however, the sermon, readings, singing, and announcements were in Lithuanian. I understood some Latin, although I was only ten years old. It was the ‘everything else’ -- before, during, and after church -- that I did not understand . . .

After mass, there was our weekly tradition: a couple of ‘dogs’ at the ‘New York System’ wiener-joint, just around the corner from the church, in the old inner-city Lithuanian neighbourhood; then a drive across town to the Italian bakery for a box of pastries to take to Mother’s parents’ house for an hour or two of ‘Sunday visit’.

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Lithuanian footprints
in the world sands

I think many will be astonished learning about the huge variety of distinctive Lithuanian footprints existing in the soils of almost every corner of our world.

Some of the footprints are centuries old and sometimes hard to spot after having been exposed to wind, weather and sometimes conscious or unconscious oblivion.  Others are clear, visible and significant also today. 

Common to all the prints is that they help to tell the story of a fascinating nation and a people that during the past millennium has been through so unbelievably much.  Though the Lithuanian people are really not just one people but a facetted range of peoples from many very different nations and cultures. 

Lithuania is a nation where only about 50% of the population lives in the very country, while the other half is scattered throughout all corners of the earth. But those who live outside the country are of course as much Lithuanians as the present residents, and it is perhaps time to combine the international and local Lithuania into a unique, powerful unification? Maybe is it now the right moment to start significant bridge-building, reconciliation and renewed cooperation? 

We hope VilNews can be of some help in identifying and describing some of the nation's worldwide footprints, and also in bridging some of the gaps between the motherland and its diasporas..

Below a few examples of significant Lithuanian footprints in different parts of the world. Please write us and share your story with our readers!

BARI, SOUTHERN ITALY 

Bona Sforza (1494-1557), Grand Duchess of Lithuania, Queen of Poland, Duchess of Bari and Princess of Rossano, left the Royal Palace in Vilnius after her husband Grand Duke Sigismund the Old died in 1548. She stayed eight years in Poland and then went to Bari in Southern Italy to claim a sizeable dept from King Philip II of Spain. But instead she was poisoned by her trusted officer, Gian Lorenzo Pappacoda, acting on behalf of King Philip.  She was buried in St. Nicholas' Basilica in Bari, where her daughter Anna had a beautiful tomb made in the current Renaissance style for her remains (above, left).

See also: https://vilnews.com/?p=1652

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

Dr. Mendel Kaplan (1936-2009), steel magnate, writer and philanthropist, whose family emigrated from the town Rietavas (near Klaipeda) in the 1920s was called "the father of the South African Jewish community," also very much involved in the establishment of the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town, a museum that appears more Lithuanian than Lithuania itself. Walking through the museum's cellar floor is like walking through Rietavas in year 1900.

Read more at: https://vilnews.com/?p=1703

DELHI, INDIA

Professor Lokesh Chandra (84), one of India's leading experts on Sanskrit and Buddhism, tells me this early morning in his New Delhi office: "The very mention of Lithuanian opens up an image, a vision that gives a people their identity through language. It shows how the darkness of dreams becomes the new embodied hope. My father was stimulated and strengthened in his work on the development of Hindi by the history of Lithuanian language. It has been the eternal continuity of these people; - it rustles something deep in their being. My father felt that we in India share with our distant Lithuanian brothers the silent geography of lost frontiers. Political freedom is inseparable from language."

And the professor continues his amazing story: "My father would relate how grandmas in the remote villages narrated folk-tales to eager grandchildren in their Lithuanian language which was despised by the Slavised nobility and punished by the Czarist regime. My father also told me how the Lithuanian daina (songs) were abandoned by the courts, but still continued to live on in the villages, faithfully preserved by the poorest people of Lithuania, guarded by the mothers of the families even during the darkest periods of Lithuania's history."

"Such was my first contact with Lithuania, in 1937, at an age of ten," smiles Professor Chandra this early Delhi morning.

Read more at: https://vilnews.com/?cat=18&paged=2

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA

Antanas Mockus (his full name is Aurelijus Rutenis Antanas Mockus Šivickas) was born 25 March 1952 in Bogotá, Colombia. His parents were Lithuanian immigrants. He is a mathematician, philosopher, and politician. He was mayor of Colombia's capital, Bogotá (population more than 7 millions), for two terms, during which he became known for springing surprising and humorous initiatives upon the city's inhabitants. These tended to involve grand gestures, including local artists or personal appearances by the mayor himself — taking a shower in a commercial about conserving water, or walking the streets dressed in spandex and a cape as Supercitizen. The impact of Mockus on the development of Bogotá is described in a documentary film released in October 2009 with the title CITIES ON SPEED - Bogotá Change.

ARCTIC & SPACE 

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911), Lithuania's national painter and composer,  has a mountain and an asteroid named after himself. In 1913 on an expedition through the Arctic ocean a painter N.Pinegin turned his attention to a plateau in the Franz Josef Land archipelago, which resembled M.K.Ciurlionis' painting "Stillness" (above). So he called it the Ciurlionis Mountain. In1975 the Crimean astrophysicist Nikolaj Cernych discovered a new 8 km diameter asteroid and called it the Ciurlionis asteroid. It orbits round the Sun in approximately four years (average distance from the Sun: 384 mln. km).

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A new campaign is born! The campaign is called ‘Invite Your Friend to Lithuania’, already receiving good support from service businesses all over the country and abroad. Those who invite friends to Lithuania can even win free flights to Vilnius, Kaunas or Palanga, visit various events free of charge, get souvenirs and receive discounts different places.

People are invited to join the initiative at www.invite2lithuania.com or at the initiative’s Facebook Page where we all are encouraged to invite our friends and acquaintances to Lithuania.

The campaign seeks to invite a record number of people to visit Lithuania in 2011-2012 through Lithuanians and friends of Lithuania all around the world. The Campaign is organized by ‘Global Lithuanian Leaders’ (GLL) - a network that unites talented professionals and leaders who associate themselves with Lithuania and contribute to the continued economic, political, social and cultural transformations currently underway in Lithuania.

Dalia Venslovaitė

Dalia Venslovaitė, Director at GLL tells that ‘This year Lithuania has already welcomed a record number of visitors. Our goal is that people who have already visited and enjoyed Lithuania would invite others through their social networks. Moreover, we focus much on Lithuanians living abroad. They are our best ambassadors in revealing why it is worthwhile visiting Lithuania‘.

According to the Lithuanian State Department of Tourism under the Ministry of Economy, during the first quarter of 2011 there was a 39.4 % increase in tourism in Lithuania comparing to the previous year. During the latest quarter Lithuania has welcomed 150 000 tourists while the total number of tourists last year was 107 000. One tourist spends around 1.040 LTL daily. Last year an average stay of one tourist in Lithuania was 4.3 nights. Hence, one tourist alone brings around 600 LTL directly into the state budget.…

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WORLD LITHUANIAN ECONOMIC FORUM
 VILNIUS, 4-5 JULY:

A successful event, but
will it create any ripple effects?

The  World Lithuanian Economic Forum (WLEF) is still in full swing as I write this. So I should be careful about drawing too many conclusions yet. What I have seen so far, is an event where some 400 people meet to discuss what more can be done to collect Lithuanians from all over the world to joint efforts for their fatherland. More investments, more engagement is being requested. The mood is good, the speeches and discussions as well. Yet I can not help but wonder why only about 100 of the 400 attendees are foreign-Lithuanians. Nearly half of all who call themselves Lithuanians live, after all, far from their country of origin, and they should constitute a very significant resource for further development of this nation.

It was also remarkably few business people represented, as a percentage of the number of participants, hence the business-to-business impact can hardly have been very large.

Yet it is my conviction that this is an event that has a future, and I hope to see WLEF in Vilnius also next summer. 

These are mythree suggestionson how tofurtherdevelop and enhance the event:

1. MORE BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS

The president, government, organizations and businesses should work together to make WLEF even more business-oriented, to invite and prepare for specific interaction activities between local and international companies. Local organizations and their sister organizations in other countries, like Rotary Clubs, should be integral parts of the event, planning well in advance for face-to-face meetings at the event.

2. A PERMANENT, YEAR-ROUND OPERATION

ICC, together with other organizations, should establish a permanent secretariat, with state support, for a year-round operation of the kind of activities that should appear in each year's WLEF summer event.


3. AN EVEN BROADER FORUM – FIRST WEEK OF JULY EVERY YEAR

The WLEF forum should become an annual tradition, going on for a whole week every summer, for example during the first week of July in connection with the celebration of King Mindaugas coronation on 6 July. The event should include several types of activities; within business, culture, festive gatherings, etc. I think this would make more foreign-Lithuanians and their families come to participate. The weaving of contacts would also be improved by more social interaction, and the many who live outside the home land will increasingly feel that they are appreciated and welcomed home!

Aage Myhre, Editor-in-Chief

The round-table debaters had some good points in yesterday's WLEF meeting.  The question they all would answer, was what they thought should be done to make Lithuania more progressive and competitive in the future.

EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION

"Education, education, education" was David Passig's formula, with reference to statistics showing that  there is a clear correlation between education level and economic growth in a country. 

Education Minister Steponavicius noted dryly that there still are too many students who are more concerned with getting a diploma than to acquire acquire real knowledge, concluding that the quality level of higher education in Lithuania must be raised. "20 years have given us the time we need to find our place in the context of 'global Lithuania. Now it is high time that we have developed an education reform that works," the Minister stated. 

MINISTRY OF TALENT – BRAIN CIRCULATION

Omnitel's President Antanas Zabulis, suggested that the Ministry of Education should perhaps change its name to 'Ministry of Talent' and also mentioned that Lithuania no longer should focus neither on brain drain nor on 

brain gain, but on brain circulation. 

By virtue of his position he also noted that broadband and other internet Internet solutions are highly essential for a good development of Lithuania. "It is no longer enough to have good ideas, speed is now just as important," he said.

ISM's President, Nerijus Pačėsa, meant that more private universities (as ISM is) would raise the education standard in this country, referring to the fact that the highest graded universities in the U.S. and Japan all are private. 

"Also, Lithuania should adopt financing of education through loans, as in Western countries, not leave it all state-financed as is today's situation," he added.

IMPROVED COLLABORATION GOVERNMENT – BUSINESS

Economy Minister Žylius expressed eagerness to improve opportunities for collaboration between government and business. He also said that the 

financial tools one now has access to through EU funds, etc. should be applied to the development of mechanisms that promote future developments within the fields of technology, industry, FDIs, etc.

"The government should not tell business what the future will look like, but be a predictable, good facilitator for the business community to see and discover future opportunities," said the Minister.

LET'S BUILD THE BALTIC STATES' LARGEST CONFERENCE CENTRE

Air Baltic's chief in Lithuania, Tadas Vizgirda, referred to some rather gloomy 

statistics about tourist traffic into Lithuania. The sad fact is that Latvia has around 5 million visitors per year, while Lithuania, a country with 50% more 

inhabitants, is visited by just 1.5 million annually." An enormous potential 

that our tourist authorities should no longer ignore, especially considering that every tourist will leave around LTL 600 in tax money," he said, adding that Lithuania would be able to obtain a solid position for professional

travelers if there was invested in building the Baltic States' largest conference centre right here over the next few years.

THE EVENING MUSIC

Zecharia Plavin,
a famous Israeli pianist, born in Lithuania, entertained the WLEF delegates
with superb interpetations of Ciurlionis, Liszt and Ravel.

Read more about Mr. Plavin...

ICC Lietuva is organizing the World
 Lithuanian Economic Forum (WLEF)

The goal of the World Lithuanian Economic Forum is to draw Lithuanian business people, economists, politicians and scientists from the entire world into Lithuania's economic life, to strengthen their relations with Lithuania, to encourage them to develop business here, to help attract investments to Lithuanian companies and to create a global network of Lithuanians from all the world.

The Forum is organized by the Lithuanian Business Confederation | ICC Lithuania in cooperation with governmental institutions as well as business companies.

The organizers are doing a great job that they deserve very much honour for!…

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My name is Andrius Užkalnis, I am 40 and later this month I am coming back to Lithuania after a long time in England.
Photo: Otto Kylmala.

By best-selling writer Andrius Užkalnis

In three weeks' time, I will become a resident of Vilnius – again, after almost 17 years.

I was asked to write this for VilNews – where not many people know me. My name is Andrius Užkalnis, I am 40 and later this month I am coming back to Lithuania after a long time in England.
I moved to UK as a very young man, back in 1995, to work for the BBC, where I spent over 16 years – initially as a linguist and then as a manager, working in various parts of the world.

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“Help me. I am a sex slave from Lithuania. Please call the police and protect me,” says a note which the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet got access to this week. It was a terrible view meeting the Danish police when they found the 19-year old Lithuanian girl in a lapidated Copenhagen apartment this week. The woman stayed in very miserable conditions.

“The kitchen was, in my opinion not suitable for people and there were cockroaches everywhere. Moreover, we found evidence that someone had managed to fit a padlock on the outside of the door into the woman's room,” says Trine Møller Andersen, head of the Copenhagen Police group against women trafficking.

The young Lithuanian woman lived in an inhuman nightmare in which she had been kept as a sex slave.

When she was not serving sex clients, who apparently could not feel the soggy conditions in the 'sex-nest', she lived in a spartan, unhygienic room with only a mattress on the floor and old, dirty bed linens full of cockroaches.

Outside the room the door was mounted a bracket made ready so it could put a padlock on - if the sex slave should get ideas about escaping.

But the woman had still succeeded in sending a cry for help to a friend in Lithuania over the Internet and asked her to contact the Lithuanian police to tell that she was incarcerated against her will.

And after the Copenhagen police on Monday received an official request from the Lithuanian police via Europol, they soon found the woman's 'prison'.

Help me
And it was a depressing sight that met them in the apartment where the woman lived and served men that her pimp brought to her.

The 19-year-old woman began to cry, but when she found out that it was the police, she gave a handwritten note to the female police officer who found her, which in English told that she was kept as a sex slave, that she wanted to contact the police and that she did not speak English. The woman's pimp, a Lithuanian 36-year old man, was also found on the site.

He was arrested and charged with violation of Penal Code provisions on trafficking. He was remanded in custody for four weeks in Copenhagen.

Miserable conditions
“The woman was in physically fine form. She had not been beaten. But she was shocked and scared and very influenced by the situation,” says Trine Møller Andersen, leader of the group against woman trafficking at the Copenhagen Police. She had never seen a similar case, since she started in the group in 2008.

The much older perpetrator had recruited the woman in Lithuania. Here he had got her drunk and had persuaded her to go to Denmark and work as a prostitute with the promise of good earnings as a pawn.

The man then transported her to Denmark and placed her in an apartment in a Copenhagen district, where she also served customers. The perpetrator found the customers, and the woman got only a very small payment. The woman had lived in Denmark for little over a week when the police found her.

The young woman from Lithuania is now at a women’s shelter. She will later return home to Lithuania in accordance with her own wish.

“It's the classic story of these women who do not have the longest school education and who are in desperate need of money, so they can be lured here,” tells Trine Møller Andersen to Ekstrabladet.

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