Around 50 people took part in two pro-Palestine rallies in central Vilnius on Saturday to express their support for Palestine and protest against the Lithuanian government’s support for Israel.
As a BNS journalist reported from the rallies, which took place in Kudirkos Square and Daukanto Square, people were holding placards reading “Putinyahu to the Hague”, “Since when does Lithuania support an occupier”, “Stop genocide”, “Let Gaza live”, "Freedom for Palestine", “Our partisans were also terrorists to the Russians”.
Several protesters held Palestinian flags, there were Lebanese flags, people beat drums and chanted “stop the occupation”, “stop the genocide”.
Around 20 people rallied outside the Presidential Palace in Daukanto Square, holding placards reading “No to occupation”, “Silence = Violence”, “No to genocide”, “Free Palestine”, “Ministers, we don’t need a culture of genocide”, chanting slogans of liberation of Palestine and Ukraine.
Andrius Mažeika, the organiser of the rally and a co-founder of the palestina.lt website, told BNS that the aim of the rally was to “break the ear-splitting silence in Lithuania on the Gaza issue”, after Israel “killed over 600 people, including hundreds of children” over the last two days.
“The reality is that our country continues to have the best possible relations with Israel, regardless of what Israel is doing in Gaza, regardless of how Israel votes [in the UN] in relation to Ukraine, and regardless of what international law says, which is that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal wanted by the International Court of Justice, just like Vladimir Putin,” he added.
In Kudirkos Square, Goda Jurevičiūtė, a human rights worker who held a poster “Since when does Lithuania support an occupier?”, noted that Israel had illegally occupied Palestine, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank and “behaves in the same terrible way as an occupier”.
“My biggest wish would be that Israel is treated the same way we treat Russia, absolutely the same. If we have some kind of uniform standards and we say that international law is important, then international law should be important for us in relation to Israel as well,” she noted.
Ramunė Motiejūnaitė-Pekkinen, a public relations specialist of the Lithuanian Trade Unions Confederation who protested in Daukanto Square, said she came to rally because “Lithuania’s official stance on the issue of Palestine is the opposite of that of the Ukraine”.
“I would like the communication to be at least a little bit similar to the Ukrainian case, because now there is a complete disregard. [...] I would like to see some kind of uniformity because we now have double standards,” she said.
The Vilnius City Municipality told BNS that the organisers had applied for permission for 300 people to gather in Kudirkos Square but missed the deadline by submitting the application two working days in advance, not four as per the procedure, and did not receive the permit.
According to the Vilnius authorities, the organisers have already submitted a request for a 300-people rally in Kudirkos Square on March 29.
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