18 April 2020
INTERNATIONAL CALL FOR ACTION AGAINST POLITICAL HARASSMENT BY THE LITHUANIAN GOVERNMENT
For the first time ever in the post-Soviet area, a person has been arrested and, since October 2018, been placed into solitary confinement without even being given a trial, simply for questioning one version of one historical event!
The authorities in Lithuania are politically persecuting journalist, human rights and anti-fascist activist and chair of the Socialist People’s Front, Algirdas Paleckis, for his opinion. As a consequence, freedom of speech is now at stake in Lithuania, a NATO and EU member state.
Paleckis has been imprisoned and falsely accused of gathering information for Russian secret services by “denying the aggression of the USSR in 1991” and, in turn, daring to question the official version of events on 13 January 1991 in Vilnius. Fourteen people were killed on that day, in very unclear circumstances not officially investigated until now. Signs of provocations were obvious.
Paleckis openly spoke about these provocations, basing his opinion on published material, interviews with witnesses and on the medical conclusions about the causes of deaths of victims.
However, the Lithuanian state, ruled by nationalistic politicians, imposes its own version of events on society. Questioning that version is forbidden under the Lithuanian Penal Code although the real perpetrators of the mentioned crime remain unidentified.
Paleckis is a co-founder of the international human rights movement “World Without Nazism” and is vice-chair of its Lithuanian chapter. He is one of very few in Lithuania to consistently denounce the Government’s subservience to the neo-nazis who, each year, are allowed to march in Lithuanian’s streets and proudly shout “Lithuania – for Lithuanians!” and “Juden raus!”
A Lithuanian court has decided that the swastika can be publicly displayed in Lithuania and that the slogan “Lithuania – for Lithuanians!” is “a democratic slogan”. All these neo-nazi tendencies are unofficially supported by the government of Lithuania.
Paleckis was found Not Guilty on 18 January, 2012, but the state appealed to higher courts. Since then the circus has continued and has now concluded with him being placed in solitary confinement, without a trial, for the past year and a half!
I disapprove of all that Paleckis has said about January 1991 but I join the fight to the finish for his right to say it and not be subject to trial in a member-state of the European Union, of NATO and of the OSCE. Freedom of speech is not “pick and mix”.
The anti-democratic law of 2010 law criminalising debate, under which Paleckis is being prosecuted is the same law that criminalises honest historic narrative of the Holocaust and World War II in Lithuania.
Any parties — including ourselves — who believe that the Nazi genocide was the twentieth century genocide in Lithuania and that Soviet crimes, no matter how cruel and horrific do not rise to genocide or symmetry or equivalence, are liable to bring prosecution upon themselves.
This is something that best-selling Lithuanian author Rūta Vanagaitė experienced in 2017, after daring to challenge the Lithuanian government’s narrative about Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust.
She challenged that narrative in a book titled ‘Our People’ a book she co-authored with Nazi hunter Dr Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Israel. From bestselling author in Lithuania she became overnight persona non grata, her books were removed and discontinued from all shops and she was made to be feel frightened for having, in the State’s opinion, desecrated the memory of Lithuanian “heroes”, one such being Jonas Noreika whose own granddaughter Silvia Foti has recently exposed him to be a Holocaust perpetrator and not a national hero! Today, Vanagaitė now lives in exile in Israel.
As others in Lithuania have pointed out, the Lithuanian government’s actual policy is to obfuscate the Holocaust by way of the “Double Genocide” theory and as part of the obfuscation, to try to prosecute Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance, while mounting state-sponsored exhibits that glorify the local Holocaust murderers.
For example, in 2011, a ‘year’ to honour local Holocaust murderers stood alongside a ‘separate 2011′ year, principally for foreigners and PR, to also commemorate the Holocaust. In October 2011, a single cellar room in the Genocide Museum was dedicated to the Holocaust, and it, too, sanitised and glorified local collaborators.
Paleckis has been one of the very few public figures to consistently and unambiguously oppose the whole gamut of pro-Nazi state-approved developments in recent years, including the legalisation of public swastikas ,the attempted prosecution of anti-Nazi partisan veterans, the permits for neo-nazi parades and their slogans, and the heroisation of the local Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) murderers who unleashed the Holocaust in Lithuania in dozens of locations before German forces even arrived, and whose pre-war leaflets show the clear genocidal intent that was subsequently carried out with such complete “success”.
Paleckis’ bold and courageous stand against obfuscation and distortion of the Holocaust and against the rise of a special kind of neo-fascism that takes cover under the new Double Genocide movement in the region, has made him a huge credit to Lithuania.
For future generations, he will be a Lithuanian hero who stood up and was ready to pay for the defence of free speech and for opposition to a shameful state-sponsored bogus history that would heroise the fascist killers of the country’s Jewish population during the Holocaust and then try to stifle free speech.
Disagreeing with Paleckis about January 1991, when the people of Lithuania non-violently rose up for freedom, independence and democracy – and were met with cruel and violent repression by Soviet forces in Vilnius – does not in any way mitigate the sense of betrayal of freedom now felt by putting him into solitary confinement, Soviet-style par excellence as irony would have it, for expressing an opinion on history, right here in the European Union.
One cannot help but wonder what unspoken role Paleckis’ bold and inspirational courage in speaking up on the truth of the Holocaust – and the local fascist role in it – has played in the authorities’ decision to prosecute him.
That almost nobody else in Lithuania, apart from Vanagaitė, is speaking up for the truth on the Holocaust speaks volumes in suggesting that the odious 2010 law criminalising the truth about the Holocaust is having a deadly effect on freedom of speech that it should ring alarm bells in the European Union, NATO, and the OSCE.
Anyone who loves freedom of speech, values the truth about the Holocaust and about the fascist perpetrators in this part of the world, and for that matter, anyone who loves Lithuania, will speak out loud and clear against the prosecution and persecution of Algirdas Paleckis. I trust that you will use your influence to support Algirdas Paleckis over this coming week.
With kind regards and thanks for your help in this matter.
Monica Lowenberg
For further details see:
http://defendinghistory.com/on-the-paleckis-trial-in-vilnius/14504;
https://www.algemeiner.com/2011/11/25/hannah-rosenthal-does-it-again/
http://defendinghistory.com/lithuanian-defense-ministrys-glorification-of-nazi-collaborator-elicits-protests-in-vilnius-and-us/101878.
And attached letter from his Algirdas Paleckis’ mother to Dovid Katz and letter from Paleckis himself.
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