ABOUT 1,000 people took part in a flower-laying ceremony in Riga yesterday to remember fallen comrades on what is the most-contested date in the Baltic political calendar, as hundreds of police kept ethnic Russian protesters at bay.
Participants in the ceremony, including 200 SS veterans, who are known as legionnaires, sang patriotic songs under rows of the Latvian national flag, while just 20 metres away, several dozen demonstrating ethnic Russians, whose relatives fought against Nazi Germany, shouted insults and waved posters depicting gruesome scenes from the Holocaust.
Police spokesman Aigars Berzins said the event passed off peacefully, though several people were detained. It was not immediately clear how many.
The remembrance ceremonies at Riga’s Freedom Monument and the Lutheran cathedral are hugely divisive because they pay tribute to those who fought alongside the Nazis in a vain attempt to halt the Red Army’s reconquest of the Baltic state in 1944.
While Russians accuse the Latvians of Nazi revivalism and Jewish leaders protest at attempts to “rewrite history” and belittle the Holocaust, the veterans, all pushing 90, and Latvian nationalists insist they are entitled to remember a famous 1944 battle in which the Latvian legion comprising two divisions conscripted into Hitler’s Waffen-SS linked up for the only time in the war to try to thwart Stalin.
The commemoration was banned by the Riga city council on security grounds, but the courts overruled the ban on Monday, raising fears of ugly scenes, with clashes predicted between Latvian and Russian youths who regularly hijack the event.
This year, the controversy has extended to Britain because Conservative party leader David Cameron has allied his party in the European parliament with the small Fatherland and Freedom party in Latvia, which supports the commemoration.
British foreign secretary David Miliband, who lost relatives in the Nazi Holocaust, called the event nauseating.
Organisers called for “a quiet and dignified” tribute to the tens of thousands of dead. Edgars Darznieks, a 24-year-old Latvian, said he wished to remember his grandfather’s two brothers who had been conscripted into the Waffen-SS.
“On my grandmother’s side, there are some who fought for the Germans and others for the Soviet Union,” he said. “History is complicated.”
But Jewish activists demanded the ban be upheld. “Ban the march, enforce the ban and explain to the people that maybe these people were thinking they were fighting for Latvia but the real beneficiary of their service and their bravery was Nazi Germany,” said Ephraim Zuroff, the Nazi-hunter and head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, who was in Riga for the parades.