President gets tough on draft

Latvian president Guntis Ulmanis has refused to sign the controversial national service law that sparked huge student protests last April because it does not go far enough.

But the decision is no reprieve for male graduates not proceeding to further study. They will still be liable for military service.

Mr Ulmanis believes every citizen should serve their country with no exemption. Under the bill, students who enrolled in additional military courses while at university would have been exempt from the draft.

Other proposed exemptions included medical graduates going to internships, graduates in theology awaiting ordination, graduates with a child under three or two children under seven, and sole breadwinners.

According to Andris Ligotnis, parliamentary secretary at the ministry of defence, so many exemptions were introduced under student pressure that there would be no "significant" increase in the number of students liable for military service.

But the rules plugged one loop-hole: the "perpetual student", who completes one bachelor degree course and then transfers to another without graduating, would have to complete military service at the end of the first course.

Student activists complained the law was reminiscent of the draft rules of Soviet times. But the whole concept of a conscript army is being questioned.

At a seminar last month, entitled "Conscription - Punishment or Honour", Herberts Linde, a battalion tactical training inspector with Latvia's national guard, said that the current conscription law simply meant "shutting up young men in barracks for eight or 12 months".

He proposed, as an alternative, a small professional regular army, supplemented by what he termed the "Nordic" model of the draft, with all young citizens, including women and some categories of disabled persons, doing one month's basic military training, and then being placed on the reserve for 30 years, liable to call-up in the case of national emergency.