Riga police prevent court sanctioned march honoring Nazi
occupation.
Riga police on Thursday evening prevented several dozen people from conducting
their planned march which was set to commemorate
the Nazi occupation of the Latvian capital
on July 1, 1941, following a year of Soviet
occupation, Latvian National News Agency
LETA reported.
The march had initially been denied a permit by the Riga Municipality, but on
Tuesday a district court ruled that a small
extreme-Right group may go ahead with its
procession. The Latvian prime minister and
foreign minister had criticized the ruling,
but could not legally prevent the march from
taking place.
It was the local Riga police that found what appears to be a creative way of
preventing the event, by detaining march
organizer Uldis Freimanis for questioning
on Thursday two hours before the parade's
onset, as reported by LETA. According to
local law, a march must be attended by its
organizer. It was unclear on which grounds
Freimanis was called in by police.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, historian, Nazi-hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center in Israel, who had in an earlier statement
praised the Latvian leaders' public criticism
of the possibility of such a celebration
of Nazi occupation, expressed on Thursday
night satisfaction over the ultimate prevention
of the march, while reiterating the larger
problems in Latvia paving the way to such
occurrences.
“There are only so many times you can intervene
on technical grounds to stop such events,”
he told The Jerusalem Post. “Latvia needs
for their law to be interpreted in such
a way to prevent Nazi glorification, or
at least to have legal recourse to stop
this kind of initiative.”
“The real problem,” Zuroff continued, “lies
in the deeply rooted issues concerning
the Latvians' failure to honestly confront
the scope and extent of Latvian participation
in the Holocaust,” evident in the country's
failure since independence to prosecute
Nazi war criminals and its attempts to
glorify the members of the Latvian SS battalions
who fought for a victory of the Nazi Germany.
“Unfortunately,”
Zuroff said in the statement, “there is far
too much local sympathy for Latvians who
committed the crimes of the Holocaust as
long as they fought against the Soviets.
The only way to eradicate this distorted
perception of Latvian history is to tell
the whole truth about the critical role played
by Latvians in the mass murder of Jews and
other victims of the Nazis, and to stop trying
to create false historical symmetries between
Nazism and Communism.”
“Legal
measures to stop the glorification of Nazi
Germany are important,” Zuroff concluded,
“but the best long-term solution is truth
in history education.”
jpost.com
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