I feel some sympathy for Indulis Abelis, the Latvian Ambassador, who wrote recently to rebut some of the curious allegations against his country in an article by Seamus Martin, writes Kevin Myers.
One of these was that since it (finally) found freedom in 1991, Latvia had not tried any Nazi war criminals. Well, as the ambassador pointed out, after the Soviets arrived in 1945, there were war crimes trials aplenty of Nazi sympathisers, ending in death sentences and imprisonment, but to put himself on the side of the angels he added: "There can be no statutory limitations for crimes against humanity."
Rubbish. The truth is that there are indefinite limitations on crimes against humanity, provided the perpetrators were communists, as the Latvians, the Poles, the Estonians, the Lithuanians know all too well.
Soviet troops invaded Latvia in June 1940, while the attention of the rest of the world was on France, and the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, then rigged elections to "approve" the country's incorporation into the Soviet Union. Much the same occurred in Estonia.
Lithuania's fate was even worse and has largely been forgotten. It was invaded by Germany as early as March 1939, and the contested area of Memmeland seized. In October that year, its foreign minister, Yousas Urbshis, met Stalin, who told him that his country's future lay under the Soviet Union - which duly invaded in June 1940. One of the first men arrested was Yousas Urbshis. And again, fraudulent NKVD-run elections brought the country into the USSR.
For a year, all three Baltic states were the victims of a savage wave of Soviet terror, in which all native institutions were systematically destroyed. There were mass killings of nationalists by NKVD units, assisted by local communist quislings. In that brief period, 4 per cent of the Lithuanian population was sent to the Soviet gulag - the equivalent of 160,000 of the population of our Republic today. In Latvia and Estonia, 2 per cent of the populations were dispatched to Soviet prison camps, and usually to their deaths.
Now, is it surprising that the peoples of these Baltic states welcomed the arrival of German troops in 1941? Which is not to justify the catastrophic fate awaiting the native Jewish population, of Riga in particular. Thirty-five thousand Rigan Jews were taken to the woods of Rumbuli and slaughtered by machine gunfire, some by SS units formed from Latvian Germans. Local ethnic Letts, who blamed some local Jews for complicity with the Soviet regime, also assisted in these indiscriminate murders.
Put aside the confident knowledge of 20th-century history that we possess today. At this terrible time, the people of Latvia were caught in a vice between the two most evil totalitarian powers in European history. Many more Latvians had been deported by the Soviets than Jews had been killed by the Nazis - and unlike the deportations, the killings had been kept largely secret. That thousands of Latvians might have been prepared to assist the Third Reich in the war against their oppressors of 1940-41 might not be laudable, but it is understandable. No third way beckoned. The landing craft of no democracy stood off the Gulf of Riga, poised to bring freedom ashore.
In every regard, the war was an utter catastrophe for Latvia. Beaten back from Leningrad by the Soviets, the Third Reich's Army Group North in 1944 retreated to Latvia's Courland Peninsula, where fighting lasted into 1945. Imagine what it is to have the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany fighting titanic tank battles on your territory for an entire year.
Naturally, at the end of this abominable war, no one was prosecuted for the war crimes perpetrated by the Soviets and their local goons during 1940 and 1941, in any of the Baltic states. Nor was anyone ever prosecuted for the murders of 15,000 Polish officers in the woods of Katyn, which in morality and in method were no different from the roughly contemporaneous, and rightly deplored, massacre of Jews in the woods of Rumbuli. In February 1946, there was a series of two-hour trials, concluding with summary execution the same day, of Nazi war criminals in Riga. But the Communist war criminals of the Baltic states in 1940 went unpunished: indeed, some of them were soon back in government.
Latvia's ordeal continued after the war. Russians poured into the state, as conquerors do: a majority of the population of Riga is now ethnically Russian. So if some of our Latvian immigrants occasionally seem to have a limited understanding of how the rule of law works, that is perhaps because for Latvia, there was no law from 1940 onwards - only oppression, deportation, colonisation, and mass murder, exceeding anything that happened in this country since the 17th century.
So for the Latvians to be reprimanded by a finger-wagging Irish journalist for not having had even more war crimes trials of Nazi sympathisers must be more than a little irksome. For the greatest war-criminals of the 20th century were not Nazi, but Communist. Yousas Urbshis, for example, finally returned home to Lithuania in 1956, after sixteen years in the gulag. "I found I had lost my mother, my father, my older brother and other family members," he said in 1991. No one was punished for their murders.
And so it goes. The mass murderers of the USSR, of Red China, of Kampuchea, of the Baltic states, who killed tens of millions in the gulags, in their cultural revolutions, in their engineered famines and their great leaps forward - all have escaped justice. As Latvia knows too well, if you're a "left-wing" murderer, there are most definitely statutory limitations for crimes against humanity.