RIGA (AFP)---Latvian veterans who fought on Nazi Germany's side against the Soviets in World War II paraded in the Baltic state's capital Friday, amid a heavy police presence and low-key counter-demonstrations.

Around 1,500 people took part in the controversial parade through Riga's Old Town, police said.

Just three arrests were made for aggressive behaviour and the display of "banned symbols" -- the Nazi swastika and Soviet hammer and sickle.

Waving Latvian flags, veterans and supporters filed from a church service to lay flowers at the national Freedom Monument.

They were flanked by a few dozen protesters, some with signs depicting Nazi atrocities, but in contrast to previous years there was little heckling.

"I want to lay flowers for my comrades who fell in battle. All old soldiers want to remember their comrades," veteran Janis Vasarietis, 90, told AFP.

He said he felt no animosity towards Latvia's veterans of the Soviet Red Army, who do the same on May 9 to mark Nazi Germany's defeat.

Riga city council had imposed a ban on the March 16 parade and counter-demonstration earlier this month, but a court overturned it on Thursday.

Since Soviet rule ended in Latvia in 1991, the past spills onto Riga's
streets every March 16, when Latvian Legion veterans mark a 1944 battle in their ultimately failed attempt to stem a Red Army advance.

Jewish groups, Moscow and Latvia's ethnic-Russian community see the parade as glorifying Nazism because the Legion, founded in 1943, was commanded by Germany's Waffen SS.

"It's tragic that they are turning people who fought for the Third Reich into heroes," Efraim Zuroff, director of Jerusalem's Simon Wiesenthal Center, told AFP in Riga.

"This whole thing is based on a myth. If Nazi Germany had won the war, there wouldn't be an independent Latvia today."

Veterans insist they were defending their small homeland against the Soviets.

Some 140,000 Latvians, mostly conscripts, fought in the Legion. Roughly a third died in combat or Soviet captivity.

Another 130,000 sided with the Soviets. Almost a quarter were killed, many in battles with Legion compatriots.

Moscow seized Latvia under a 1939 deal with Berlin carving up eastern Europe, and later deported 15,000 Latvians to Siberia.

Germany drove out the Red Army when it ripped up the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

Some Latvians hailed the Nazis as liberators. But they brought their own terror, killing 70,000 of the country's 85,000 Jews, aided by local collaborators.

The Soviets recaptured Riga in October 1944 and held onto the country until the communist bloc crumbled in 1991.

ejpress.org