Participating in the hunger strike are 53-year-old anesthetist Viktor Dergunov, 36-year-old businessman Sergei Petrov, 39-year-old businessman Mikhail Tyasin and 40-year-old teacher and journalist Igor Vatolin.
All four are in the Latvian human rights committee headquarters and are on indefinite leave from work. They are supported by their families and friends, and also several parents of Russian schoolchildren in Riga, who have said they would also go on hunger strike, but continue to work.
The purpose of the strike is to attract the attention of the Latvian and international community to the problem of educating the Russian speaking population, and protest the Latvian government's decision to require ethnic minority schools to teach in the Latvian language.
In an interview with the Russian newspaper Vesti Segodnya published in Riga, Mr. Tyasin said, "we have to be tougher in our protests, because the authorities are pretending that nothing is happening ... For more than a year, our schoolchildren and parents have been organizing protests, pickets and other large-scale actions in Latvia and abroad."
"Our hunger strike is meant to show how serious we take the threat of worsening education for our children, caused by the authorities' reform," stressed Mr. Tyasin.
In Latvia, 60% of subjects in high school will be taught in Latvian beginning on September 1.
