Madam, - The article in The Irish Times on Latvia facing up its past ("World View", March 11th) has mixed together too many issues of Latvia's history. I would like to clarify only the issues connected with the second World War.
There were indeed Latvian war criminals that collaborated with the Nazis from the start of German occupation in 1941. They participated in the horrendous Nazi crimes including the Holocaust.
Those criminals were caught, tried for these crimes and sentenced to lengthy prison terms or death in Latvia as Soviet occupation was reinstated in 1945. So no wonder none of them has been tried in independent Latvia since 1991.
The "Latvian Waffen SS" units created in 1943 were not associated with the notorious Nazi SS organisation that was responsible for the Holocaust.
Most of the estimated 100,000 young Latvian men that made up the Latvian Legion were forcibly and illegally mobilised to fight on Germany's collapsing Eastern Front. Draft evasion was punishable by death. Hitler's mass extermination of Jews in Latvia had already ended in 1943, long before the Latvian Legion combat units were formed.
This was recognised by the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg, when the Latvian Legion and other conscripted non-German Waffen SS units were exempted from criminal charges associated with the Nazi Holocaust.
Not many surviving members of the Latvian Legion are left today in Latvia.
But each year the former soldiers caught in a vice between two totalitarian powers meet at the cemeteries to remember their fallen.
They are revolted by allegations of sympathies towards Nazis or extremists, and have publicly condemned crimes perpetrated by the Nazi and Communist regimes, including the Holocaust.
Latvia as a democratic state opposes any totalitarian ideology. There can be no statutory limitations for the crimes against humanity. We categorically denounce the Holocaust and genocide.
To learn from the painful pages of the past, the International Commission of Historians, organised under the auspices of the President of Latvia, is conducting extensive research on the Holocaust and other totalitarian crimes perpetrated in Latvia. Education about the Holocaust is an integral part of the secondary school curriculum. - Yours, etc,
INDULIS ABELIS, Ambassador, Embassy of the Republic of Latvia, Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2.