Valdas Adamkus

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Valdas Adamkus 2008

Valdas V. Adamkus ( listen ? / I ) (born November 3, 1926 in Kaunas ) was President of the Republic of Lithuania from 1998 to 2003 and from 2004 to 2009 . On July 12, 2009, at the age of 82, he handed over the presidency to his successor, former EU Budget Commissioner Dalia Grybauskaitė . Audio file / audio sample

family

Valdas Adamkus was born in 1926 under the name Voldemaras Adamkavičius. He was baptized in the official residence of the diplomat Stasys Lozoraitis (1898-1983) in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania . (Today the rectorate of the Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas is housed in the building .) His godfather was the Lithuanian statesman Augustinas Voldemaras .

His father Ignas Adamkavičius (1896–1987) was a volunteer in the Polish-Lithuanian War , one of the first directors of the Lithuanian Military Aviation School and later chief of the railway police in Kaunas . His parents divorced when Voldemaras was 2 years old.

His mother Genovaitė Adamkevičienė (1905-1980) married Stasys Karalius († 1960) and from then on bore the family name Karalienė. She worked in the Ministry of Transport of Lithuania , Stasys Karalius in the Kaunas city administration . Voldemaras' half-brother Česlovas Karalius died in a car accident.

Youth, flight to Germany and emigration to the USA

Valdas Adamkus attended the Jonas Jablonskis elementary school and then the Aušros high school in Kaunas . After the Soviet annexation of Lithuania in June 1940, Adamkus became an active member of the Lithuanian resistance movement against the occupiers. In July 1944, he and his parents fled to Germany from the advancing Red Army , but returned to Lithuania again and fought the Red Army in a Lithuanian unit near the village of Seda in October 1944. After the Red Army had succeeded in conquering almost all of Lithuania , Adamkus fled again to Germany, where he saw the end of the war.

In 1946 Adamkus passed his Abitur at the Lithuanian grammar school in Rebdorf monastery near Eichstätt. He got involved in the YMCA for displaced persons and began studying natural sciences at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In 1949 he emigrated to the USA . Since he spoke five languages, he found a job with the military secret service in 1950. In 1960 he received his engineering degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology .

Career with the EPA

Adamkus worked for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which was founded in 1970 . In 1981 he became the EPA's regional administrator for the Five Lakes Region . In 1985, President Ronald Reagan recognized him for his services with the Distinguished Executive Presidential Rank Award, the highest honor for a civil servant. Adamkus was a member of the Republican Party . In 1997 he retired.

During this time his commitment to the Lithuanian independence movement did not decrease. He was a co-organizer of protests and petitions against the Soviet occupation and campaigned for US aid for environmental issues in the Baltic states.

Lithuanian President

Valdas Adamkus with his wife Alma Adamkienė , 2009

Shortly after leaving the EPA, Adamkus returned to Lithuania. He was elected to the office of president in early 1998 with a wafer-thin margin (50.4% versus 49.6% votes for Artūras Paulauskas ). Although Adamkus had never belonged to a party, he was considered a man of the national-liberal camp, which found supporters above all in the bourgeoisie in the larger cities. In his first term of office, he gained recognition from all sides for his deliberate, balancing performance, but lost to Rolandas Paksas in the runoff election in January 2003 . The simple population in particular was impressed by the youthfulness and dynamism as well as the full-bodied promises of the outsider, while Adamkus was considered a man of the establishment who was blamed for a lack of proximity to the citizens. After the narrow defeat, he presented himself as a fair loser. At the end of 2003, the first allegations against Paksas "because of strange relationships with Russian sponsors" were loud. Adamkus then did not hold back with his criticism of President Paksas.

After Paksas' impeachment, Adamkus was re-elected president in a necessary early presidential election on June 13th and 27th, 2004 (in the runoff) and sworn in on July 12th . He won by 4.8 percentage points ahead of rival candidate Kazimiera Prunskienė (51.9% yes-votes with a turnout of 52.5%). In his second term in office he made a name for himself as a supporter of pro-Western political camps in former states of the Soviet Union . At the end of November / beginning of December 2004 he traveled three times to Kiev as a mediator in the Ukrainian crisis surrounding the presidential elections . He showed himself to be a supporter of the Orange Revolution and later President Viktor Yushchenko . Adamkus also flew the flag in the conflict over South Ossetia between Georgia and Russia and flew together with the presidents of Poland , Latvia , Estonia and the Ukraine to the Georgian capital Tbilisi in August 2008 to express his support for President Saakashvili there .

On November 27, 2007, Valdas Adamkus was named “European of the Year” by the weekly European Voice . In Adamkus' election as “European of the Year”, his extremely important role in the negotiations with the Polish President Lech Kaczynski on the EU reform in June 2007 in Brussels was probably one of the decisive factors. Without his direct intervention, the Brussels summit would probably have failed.

As early as 2007, seven years before Russia annexed Crimea , he warned that this would happen in the not distant future. Even after the end of his term as president, Valdas Adamkus' voice received international attention.

Valdas Adamkus has been married to Alma Nutautaitė (* 1927) since 1951 ; the couple is childless.

Honorary doctorates

Adamkus is also a member of the Club of Rome .

Award

Honors

Web links

Commons : Valdas Adamkus  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. Prezidento gill
  2. a b c Reinhard Veser : Valdas Adamkus 90 . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 3, 2016, p. 5.
  3. Valdas Adamkus in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  4. ^ Compromise in Kiev , sueddeutsche.de on December 1, 2004.
  5. ^ Adamkus as mediator in the conflict over the Ukrainian presidential elections 2004 , on delfi.lt on December 6, 2004 (Lithuanian).
  6. ^ Adamkus on solidarity visit to Tbilisi , on delfi.lt on August 13, 2008 (Lithuanian).
  7. ^ Solidarity visit of the fearful , sueddeutsche.de on August 12, 2008.
  8. ↑ An interview with the President of Lithuania: “Striving for the Empire” , sueddeutsche.de, accessed on November 12, 2016.