The Lithuanian parliament, Seimas, has passed a resolution, saying that Lithuanian Communist Party was responsible for mass deportations in the wake of the country’s Soviet occupation.
The resolution was passed on Thursday in a vote of 97 to one with three abstentions.
The document was initiated by a group of MPs from the conservative Homeland Union-Lithuanian Christian Democrats (TS-LKD), the Farmers and Greens Union, and the Liberal Movement.
The resolution was adopted to mark the 75th anniversary of Operation Vesna (Spring), the largest deportation operation carried out in Lithuania by the Soviet occupying regime on May 22, 1948.
“The responsibility for the genocide of our people lies not only with the USSR authorities in Moscow, but also with the local Lithuanian Communist Party,” said conservative MP Audronius Ažubalis, one of the initiators of the resolution.
The document claims that the Lithuanian Communist Party “was responsible for the genocide-equivalent extermination of the Lithuanian population, the confiscation and appropriation of their property, and torture and deportations, which were planned in advance and deliberately carried out under its instructions by the occupying-repression structures in 1940-1963”.
The document calls on the country’s institutions and schools to raise awareness about the “history of Lithuania’s struggles and suffering”, the criminal activities of the Soviet occupation regime and the Lithuanian Communist Party, and to commemorate the deportations.
The resolution also compares the repressions of the 1940s with “the deportation, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Russia today against Ukrainians and their children”.
“We see the same today, when the occupying forces and their local collaborators, acting according to pre-conceived schemes and instructions, are deporting Ukrainians from their native lands, abducting their children en masse, and openly appropriating the homes and other property of the so-called disloyal local residents in the occupied territories,” said Ažubalis.
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