Where Nazis are heroes (original) (raw)

War crimes trials of old Nazis, Bosnian butchers, Chilean dictators and African warlords are now a fixture of the international human rights agenda. But in January, the anti-Nazi partisan "hero" Vasily Kononov, 77, made legal history when he was sentenced to six years in prison in Latvia for war crimes committed in the cause of anti-fascism.

Riga court's guilty verdict against Kononov was the first time in the former Soviet Union, and perhaps anywhere in Europe, that a second world war combatant who fought on the winning side against the Nazis had been convicted for war crimes. "It's a unique case in Latvia, certainly, and perhaps not only here," admits Andris Gulans, head of Latvia's supreme court.

On May 27 1944, Kononov, then a 22-year-old former Red Army soldier who had been parachuted by the Russians behind German lines to command a unit of 18 guerrillas, moved with his men into the eastern village of Mazie Bati in the densely wooded countryside of Nazi- occupied Latvia.

It was a mild Saturday evening and the men of the village were relaxing over a customary drink after their weekly scrub in the communal bathhouse. Kononov and his men wore stolen German uniforms and fraternised with the locals, many of whom were familiar to the young anti-Nazi commander, who had been born in another hamlet nearby. Then the partisans, led by Kononov, unleashed their machine guns on several of the villagers. Six men and three women, one heavily pregnant, were killed.

A few months later the Russians displaced the Nazis as Latvia's occupying power. Kononov was on the winning side. A year after the incident, the second world war ended. Kononov went on to make a career in the police through the years of Soviet rule of Latvia.

Since 1945 there have been attempts to prosecute anti-fascist fighters for war crimes in Austria and Italy. But the attempts failed, says Winfried Garscha, a war crimes historian at Vienna's Wartime Resistance Documentation Centre. "I don't know of any cases like this one in Latvia," he adds.

The Latvian justice minister, Valdis Birkavs, bluntly insists it matters not a jot who won the war or who perpetrated the crimes. "War criminals have to be prosecuted. Innocent men and women were killed. Justice is justice."

But Villis Samsons, a historian and wartime commander of 3,000 Latvian partisans, is outraged at the Kononov verdict, which he sees as a deliberate attempt by the new Latvian state to rewrite history and "condemn and discredit the entire partisan movement that fought against Hitler. Why don't they do something about the real war criminals who organised the Holocaust in Latvia?"

Samsons is not alone in his outrage. Russia is incensed and is seeking international support against the verdict, demanding that the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe lean on the Latvians to release Kononov. But, says Birkavs, "the OSCE has no mandate to mediate in this."

Boris Yeltsin, Russia's former president, refused to accept Latvia's highest state award in protest at the Kononov verdict. The acting president, Vladimir Putin, offered Kononov and his family political asylum. The case, Putin warned, could herald "mass prosecution of fighters against fascism". Last week, the Latvian embassy in Moscow was daubed in paint and its windows smashed.

Latvia's troubled wartime past and its current dilemmas in dealing with that past suddenly leapt on to Britain's front pages at the beginning of this year when Konrad Kalejs, 88, a former Nazi collaborator and a member of Latvia's vicious Arajs militia - which butchered tens of thousands, mainly Jews - was discovered living in Britain, in a Midlands nursing home . Then last month, Kalejs, an Australian citizen, fled to Melbourne to avoid deportation from Britain. The home secretary, Jack Straw, had ruled that there was insufficient evidence against him to warrant prosecution in the UK. Latvia, too, says it is unable to mount a case against Kalejs.

The contrast between the Kononov and Kalejs cases is striking. "The Latvians have never asked for anyone's extradition for war crimes," says Efraim Zuroff, the Nazi war crimes researcher who heads the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem and who has been lobbying heavily in the Kalejs case. "Not once of their own volition have the Latvians prosecuted anyone for the murder of the Jews, in great contrast to the energy with which they are trying to bring communists to trial."

Three days after the Nazis arrived in Riga in July 1941, Latvian anti-semites torched Riga's main synagogue. Within six months, 60,000 of Latvia's pre-war Jewish community of 80,000, one of the most prosperous communities in eastern Europe, had been massacred. Latvians played a prominent role in the mass killings.

Kalejs's Arajs militia rounded up Jews, took them to the Rumbula forest and Salaspils concentration camp outside Riga and shot them. The Riga ghetto was emptied to accommodate Jews who had been deported by the Nazis from Germany and Austria.

The Holocaust historian Professor Raul Hilberg writes that "on a per capita basis, the Latvians were represented as heavily as any nation in the destruction of the Jews".

By 1943 there were two Latvian SS divisions and around 100,000 Latvians were in German uniform, either in auxiliary police units or in the SS legion. Unusually, the Nazis dispatched their Latvian collaborators way beyond their native territory, to Byelorussia, Ukraine and Warsaw.

The SS legionnaires are now feted in Latvia as freedom fighters. This Thursday, March 16, the SS veterans will march to the soaring art deco Freedom and Fatherland monument in central Riga as they have for the past seven years. Last year, the government decreed the day a national holiday. This year, however, because of international protest, it will be an unofficial holiday only.

Ausma Rubene, one of the prosecutors in the Kononov case, cites the Allies' charter for the postwar Nuremberg tribunal as one of the legal foundations for putting Kononov on trial, although the first words of the charter specify that the tribunal is to try "major war criminals of the European Axis".

"The Red partisans were stealing food and clothes and torching houses," says Mrs Rubene. "Kononov committed war crimes against peaceful civilians." When questioned further, she admits that the male villagers, in a region that was close to the frontline in 1944, were armed. "They had rifles, but they were not a fascist armed formation. They were given rifles to defend themselves and their homes."

Three months earlier, in the same village of Mazie Bati, there was a day-long battle between German troops and a Red Army reconnaissance unit in which 14 Russians were herded into the village bathhouse and burnt alive. That, at least, is the partisan version. The deaths aren't contested, but Rubene says the bathhouse was set ablaze accidentally by tracer fire.

"We know there were three women killed [on May 27]," says former partisan leader Samsons. "That was unfortunate, but there was a war on and it was very cruel. And the armed men in the village were auxiliary police for the German occupiers. They would round up deserters and turn them over to the Germans."

The bitterness triggered by the Kononov trial and Latvia's ambivalence towards its wartime past is fuelled by its hostility towards the Russians. "Latvia sees the war as two occupations, one bad, one good and the good one is the German," says a western observer in Riga.

It was Stalin, not Hitler, who ended Latvia's independence and occupied the Baltic state in 1940, ushering in a year-long reign of terror that saw tens of thousands of Latvians killed or sent to Siberia. When the Nazis drove out the Red Army in 1941, the Germans were seen by many as liberators.

"It's the Soviet occupiers who have to be blamed first for the Holocaust here," says Professor Aivars Stranga, a Riga historian heading a national commission on the war years. "Not every Latvian was a fascist and not every Latvian wanted to kill Jews. Stalin created the second world war when he divided Poland and Europe into spheres of influence." Kononov's crimes against civilians, he adds, "were terrible, the same level of barbarity as sending people to Auschwitz".

While Latvia has not sought to try Kalejs or mounted any other prosecutions of pro-Nazi war criminals, the authorities point out that the Soviet powers did a thorough job in the postwar years, putting more than 2,000 Latvians on trial for war crimes. "We want to put Nazis on trial but it was all done during Soviet times," says the justice minister, Birkavs. But rather than seeking to put ageing Nazis on trial, Latvia, says Zuroff, of the Wiesenthal Centre, is quietly rehabilitating dozens of convicted Nazi war criminals while prosecuting the likes of Kononov. Zuroff says 41 war criminals have been pardoned since Latvia achieved independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. That means they qualify for pensions and perks denied to old anti-Nazi fighters.

A week after Kononov got six years, president Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia told the Holocaust Remembrance conference in Stockholm that the "precise number" of Latvians who participated in the mass murder of Jews was "not known but was estimated to exceed 1,000".

Nazi-hunters and historians say that that figure is risibly low. But while Latvia is not preparing any Nazi war crimes trials, Aleksandrs Ogurcovs, Kononov's lawyer, says that he expects another six prosecutions of anti-Nazi fighters. "Only in Latvia," he says. "I've never heard of anyone who fought the Germans being jailed for war crimes."