NATO urged to learn lessons of history

Jun 21, 2001
Rokas M. Tracevskis

VILNIUS - June 14 is the Day of Mourning and Hope in Lithuania. On this day, 60 years ago, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians were rounded up and deported to gulags or summarily executed by the Soviets. Parliamentary Chairman Arturas Paulauskas used the occasion to again call for NATO expansion as a guarantee that such tragedies would never happen again.

Some 18,000 Lithuanian citizens were deported that day.

"Forty percent of them were children below 16 years old. More than half of the deported died quickly. Pregnant women and babies born in the cattle cars were the first victims – they died in the trains," Arvydas Anusauskas, director of the Genocide and Resistance Center, said at a special sitting of Parliament on June 14.

About 150,000 people were deported during the Soviet occupation. Many died of starvation and slavery in the Soviet Arctic and Central Asia.

Lithuania lost 1 million people to deportations, executions, incarceration, the murder of the political opposition, forced emigration and the consequent drop in the birth rate during the Soviet occupation, according to historians.

"Our government obeyed three foreign ultimatums before World War II. It was a shock to society," Paulauskas said during the Parliament's sitting.

In 1938, Poland issued an ultimatum demanding the establishment of diplomatic relations with Lithuania (there were no diplomatic relations because of the Polish occupation of Vilnius).

In case Vilnius refused, Poland threatened to occupy all of Lithuania. The Lithuanian government obeyed the ultimatum's demand.

In 1939, Germany issued an ultimatum to Lithuania demanding the German-speaking Klaipeda region. Otherwise, Adolf Hitler promised to occupy all of Lithuania. Lithuania obeyed and lost Klaipeda in 1939.

In 1940, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to Lithuania demanding Soviet troops be allowed into the country. Lithuania obeyed.

Paulauskas said the weakness of prewar Lithuania was its neutrality. He said that only NATO could guarantee that the June 14 tragedy is not repeated. "Nothing about us without us," Paulauskas said, repeating the popular slogan of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth when the countries divided at the end of the 18th century. He added that neutrality meant nothing other than distraction from important matters.

Former deportees and political prisoners were present at the Parliament. Many of them seemed to expect more drastic speeches.

"Why don't you all speak about the Communist Party as a criminal organization? Why does nobody persecute those responsible for the organization of the deportations?" shouted one elderly man following the official speeches.

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