DAUGAVPILS (Latvia), Nov 26: Despite potentially facing up to 15 years in prison, the 16-year-old girl who swatted Britain’s Prince Charles with a carnation earlier this month to protest the war in Afghanistan says she has no regrets.
“I’m not sorry,” Alina Lebedeva said as she made her daily check-in with police on a recent afternoon in this depressed industrial city in southeastern Latvia.
Prosecutors are due this week to decide whether to charge her with endangering the life and health of a senior official, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment for adults and juveniles alike.
During a visit to the Latvian capital Riga on November 8, Lebedeva whacked the Prince of Wales with the flower around the head as he mingled with schoolchildren waving the Union Jack.
“I am opposed to Latvia joining NATO and to Britain fighting in Afghanistan,” she shouted to journalists before being driven away in a police van. “Britain is the enemy of the world.”
Dubbed the “Flower Terrorist” by a local newspaper, Lebedeva has refocussed attention on the disgruntled Russian-speaking minority that accounts for over a third of Latvia’s 2.4 million people.
“I don’t think you can achieve anything in our country through legal means, although pickets and meetings have their role to play,” she recently told the Russian-language daily Chas.
There may be no inter-ethnic violence, but many Russians are still bitter about their place in Latvia.
Russians were not automatically given citizenship when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and until a couple of years ago most were ineligible to naturalize.
Some 550,000 people still have no citizenship whatsoever, many because they cannot pass the Latvian language exam.
“Latvia is my homeland. I don’t like a lot of things here — corruption, bribery, drugs. I understand that a blow with a flower won’t change anything, although one would really like it to,” said Lebedeva.
Yet she is no impulsive romantic revolutionary. Lebedeva admits she deliberately travelled 175 kms to swat Prince Charles with the flower.
Acquaintances describe her as strong-willed, and even the police admire her discipline in arriving on time for daily check-ins.—AFP
