Riga - A court in the Latvian capital Riga on Tuesday granted permission for a controversial commemoration of Waffen-SS troops to go ahead.

Wednesday is 'Legionnaires' Day' in Latvia. Though not an official public holiday, hundreds of people take to the streets to remember the 140,000 men who fought on the German side in World War II.

The Riga city council had tried to ban an application by the nationalist Daugavas Vanagi organization to conduct a short march Wednesday from the Dome cathedral to the iconic Freedom Monument in the city's centre.

However, the municipality's ban was overturned by the Riga Administrative Court, which has also overturned municipal bans on counter-demonstrations by anti-fascist groups.

Defenders of the event argue that they are remembering war dead who were forced to wear the uniform of the Waffen-SS because as non-Germans they could not join the regular German army, or Wehrmacht.

Their critics decry the event as a glorification of Nazism. Whatever the historical truth, the unofficial holiday has cast a shadow on the international perception of Latvia, to the frustration of policymakers.

Last week, Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis told the Latvijas Avize newspaper Legionnaires' Day was mainly an excuse for extremists on both sides to confront each other.

'I personally don't think March 16 is a day of special significance,' he said.

But Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem says Latvia's leaders need to be much clearer in their condemnation of the event.

'It needs a brave Latvian leader who will say to his people: These should not be the heroes of a democratic member of the European Union,' Zuroff told the German Press Agency dpa.

'Not one Baltic Nazi collaborator has ever been punished in either Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania. This failure has a very heavy price because now we're seeing much more overt anti-Semitism,' he said.

monstersandcritics.com