FAMILIARITY doesn’t always breed contempt. Sometimes it creates absurd fascination.

Walking past the Orthodox cathedral in Riga, I always notice a particular poster on the side of a Narvesen kiosk. I’d probably walked past it a hundred times before I actually noticed it, but once I did notice it, it developed a life of its own.

At a glance it’s nothing special - just an ad to say that newspapers are on sale here. It is clearly generic and posed by models. But start to consider what is actually on display and it starts to get truly bizarre.

Look closely and you’ll see the chap at the front isn’t reading a newspaper at all. He’s reading a child’s comic book. Not only that, he is finding it hilarious, laughing all over his face. Yet he’s smartly dressed, as if he is a succesful young businessman or at the very least an up-and-coming bank manager.

So gut-bustingly amusing is his comic that he’s oblivious to the attractive woman standing directly behind him. She in turn wears an expression of exaggerated bemusement as she peers over his shoulder.

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HE HAD five months to write it and still managed to hand it in late, but at long last we can read the verdicts of Doudou Diene, who as ‘UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’ must surely be in possession of the world’s widest business cards.

On 19 March during the 7th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, Diène submitted reports on all three countries. The Senegalese bureaucrat visited the Baltic states from 16 to 28 September 2007, and has managed to produce well over 60 pages of problems, analysis and recommendations as a result. Admittedly though, large chunks of text are reproduced verbatim in the ‘individual’ reports about each country.

A line about each nation being “at a turning point in its history” seems to be a particular favourite, despite the fact that most people would have identified the turning point occuring perhaps 17 or 18 years ago.

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FOR a flashpoint with the potential for serious ill-will and violence, Legionnaire’s Day was a subdued affair.

Today was the day that Latvia - or at least part of Latvia - remembers some of its fallen soldiers. According to your point of view, these soldiers are referred to either as the Latvian Legion or as Latvian units of the Waffen SS, Hitler’s own ‘private’ army (as opposed to the regular army or Wehrmacht). As non-Germans, Latvians could not serve in the Wehrmacht. Of course, Baltic Germans could, but introducing them into the equation would make it even more complex.

I won’t go into the full claims and counter-claims made by each side as to the exact nature and actions of the Legion (which still spark furious argument), except to pose the question that I usually end up asking foreign friends who express an interest in the subject: “So which side would you have chosen - Stalin’s Communists or Hitler’s Nazis? And remember that not choosing is the one choice that is impossible to choose…”

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