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Baltic states remember victims of Soviet mass deportations

15.06.2008

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania paid tribute Saturday to tens of thousands of their citizens who were deported to the Soviet Union during and after World War II.
The three countries, which regained their independence as the Soviet bloc finally crumbled in 1991, hold an annual day of mourning every June 14 in memory of the victims.
The date marks the day in 1941 that some 10,000 Estonians, more than 15,000 Latvians and between 16,000 and 18,000 Lithuanians were herded onto cattle trains and shipped out to the far eastern reaches of the Soviet Union, where many of them died.
"The perpetrators took no notice of the age, health or gender of the deportees," Estonia's President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Prime Minister Andrus Ansip and speaker of parliament Ene Ergma said in a joint statement.
"Words cannot express the despair felt by the people sent off towards an unknown destination, with nothing but ephemeral hope of surviving and returning to their homeland," they said.
"Let us not forget the price that the citizens of Estonia have paid for the freedom of our republic, and let us remember forever the sacrifices that our nation has had to make because of the freedom lost."
In neighbouring Latvia, President Valdis Zatlers laid flowers at the Freedom Monument in the centre of the capital Riga, and in a speech said the country must never forget the tragedy it had faced.
Similar mourning ceremonies were held in Lithuania.
In the summer of 1939, Moscow had cut a deal with Nazi Germany giving it a green light to take over the Baltic states and carve up Poland.
The mass deportations were meant to crush opposition -- both real and imagined -- to the rule of the Soviets, who had invaded the Baltic states on June 1940, 10 months after joining the Nazi attack on the Poles.
Moscow's deportation drive was cut short when the Nazis turned on their erstwhile allies on June 22, 1941, pushing the Red Army out of the Baltic states as they invaded the Soviet Union.
In 1944, however, the Soviets ended the Nazis' own bloody occupation, and began a new wave of deportations lasting until the early 1950s.
When it ruled the Baltic states, Moscow also sent in hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking settlers in an effort to tip the ethnic balance.
Since independence, relations have often been strained between Moscow and the Baltic states, which joined the European Union and NATO in 2004.
The disputes have been stoked by conflicting interpretations of the past, notably Moscow's refusal to recognise its five-decade rule as an occupation and the deportations as crimes against humanity.

 Source: http://www.einnews.com/centraleurope/newsfeed-central-europe-nato

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