Irony: Jacques Chirac's meeting the Latvian president

Yesterday, French president Jacques Chirac met with Vaira Vike-Freiberga, his counterpart in Latvia.

From the Baltic Times:

President Vaira Vike-Freiberga met with her French counterpart, Jacques Chirac, in Paris on Monday. Though the purpose of her three-day visit was to take part in the opening of Latvian cultural days in France, it was overshadowed by the debilitating riots and vandalism sweeping across the country.

During their meeting the two presidents discussed topical issues for the European Union, including the next budget, the Constitutional Treaty and the bloc's continuing expansion to the East.

Vaira Vike-Freiberga told reporters afterward that the two leaders' opinions coincided on all the major issues.

Not surprisingly, the president's visit, coming in the middle of increasingly dangerous riots throughout France, provided tremendous exposure to the Baltic country, since it was Vike-Freiberga's relay of Chirac's words that were carried by news services across the world.

While speaking to reporters, the Latvian president said Chirac "deplored the fact that in these neighborhoods there is a ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin." The French president acknowledged the "incapacity of French society to fully accept them," Vike-Freiberga said

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Here's the irony: According to the biography of Vike-Freiberga, In the Name of Freedom, in 2003, Latvia and the other Vilnius 10 counties, those former east-bloc nations that aspired for NATO membership, were told by Chirac, that they "did not take advantage of an excellent opportunity to keep quiet."

Keeping quiet is what Jacques Chirac has been doing. He waited 10 days to publicly comment on the French riots. And yesterday, his "public" comments came through the Latvian president.

Perhaps Chirac asked Vike-Freigerga for advice in handling the crisis. He could do worse in finding counsel: The Latvian president lived in French-ruled Morocco for five years as a teen, leaving with her family when the Moroccan independence movement opened a new front: murdering Europeans.

Today a tactic like that is called terrorism.

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