15min.lt

Lithuanian Conservative Party leader Gabrielius Landsbergis, grandson of honorable retired party leader Vytautas Landsbergis, has posted open letters to Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda and Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius opposing what he calls Šimašius’s unilateral decision to remove a controversial plaque honoring a Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator in central Vilnius, the website 15min.lt reported Monday.

In his press release/open letter, the younger Landsbergis heaped praise on the president’s call for a “moratorium” on historical debate of Lithuania’s Nazi past, in other words, a call for maintaining the status quo for the last 70 years. “We resolutely agree with your aspiration that ‘historical memory shouldn’t be an issue to be resolved by some city or municipality, but rather should be solved by a resolution adopted at the national level,'” Gabrielius Landsbergis quoted the newly-elected president and former head of a Swedish bank in Lithuania in his open letter. “We also take joy in your statement that ‘the President’s Office is prepared to be moderator in this process, bringing together institutions including expert groups and setting up conditions for holding forums and events.'”

(Apparently Lithuania’s new president thinks the facts of the Holocaust are open for negotiation by cherry-picked panels of experts, that there hasn’t been a moratorium on Holocaust research for the last 70 years and that mayor Šimašius really did act unilaterally in removing the Noreika shrine from the Lithuanian capital, despite years of public discussion including events hosted and advertised by the city of Vilnius on how best to address the adoration of Nazi war criminals by the modern Lithuanian state.)

“The Homeland Union/Lithuanian Conservative Party/Christian Democrats have decided not to take part in the provocation which has nothing in common with real and sincere healing of historical wounds,” Gabrielius Landsbergis claimed in an apparent self-contradiction in his press release issued in the name of his party.

Full story in Lithuanian here.