Lots of talk on refugees, no sign of progress

Parties should reach agreement and agree on a compromise by the beginning of October when the next meeting of the European Union's interior ministers will take place, Transport Minister and acting Prime Minister Anrijs Matiss (Unity) told reporters Monday with Prime Minister Laimdota Straujuma sidelined with illness.

However, she was back in action Tuesday chairing a cabinet meeting which heard a report from an Interior Ministry working group.

The working group has spent several weeks examining Latvia's readiness - or otherwise - to take in up to 776 refugees - but its finding stopped short of a concrete plan of action.

"People are waiting for solutions. They are dissatisfied that we can't find them, or we find it difficult to do so. They want to know when will a refugee arrive, where he will live, and where will he work," Straujuma said in a sometimes heated debate.

But despite her evident frustration the cabinet itself made little progress and the matter was kicked into touch until September 29.

Until then it seems likely Latvia will continue to have no official position on the major European issue of the day.

Meanwhile in Brussels EU Foreign Policy chief Federica Mogherini warned that failure to find a united position on refugees threatened "the existence of the European Union." 

However, not all politicians were finding the refugee crisis a source of tragedy, with Karlis Serzants, a Saeima deputy for the Greens and Farmers Union (ZZS) tweeting a joke based on the premise that Latvian schools will apparently soon be full of children with supposedly Arab-sounding names. 

"Tragi-comic, but funny nevertheless," quipped Serzants, a former presenter of a TV show about crime, of the joke which would probably result in immediate calls for his resignation in many countries.

Serzants sits on the Saeima's National Security Committee and the Defense, Interior and Corruption Committee.

He is also a member of the inter-parliamentary groups dealing with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Lebanon as well as leader of the Latvian delegation to the Meditteranean Union parliamentary assembly.