RIGA, March 5 (RIA Novosti's Yuri Guralnik) - Close on seven hundred rallied today in Riga, Latvian capital, against a secondary educational reform going on. Russian speakers-school students and their parents-gathered in the Janis Rainis Park for one of regular protest actions. They aimed to show that the school reform was doomed in performances under the motto, "Against the reform, with humor", reports the action HQ.
School kids staged amateur cameo plays, cracked jokes, and sang comic songs. Heavy police forces that were guarding the site said there was not a slightest breach of order.
Launched by the Education Ministry, the school reform envisages Russian gradually ousted by Lett as tuition language, even though Russian is the mother tongue of close on a million Latvian residents.
Ethnic Russians are staging mass protest rallies, demonstrations and pickets. The largest action, of May 1, 2004, gathered more than eighty thousand at the Riga liberator soldiers' monument.
