14 June 2007

Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania

 

Your Excellency President of the Republic of Lithuania and Your Excellency Prime Minister,

Distinguished members of the Seimas and the Government,

Your Excellences Ambassadors, honourable diplomats,

Signatories of the Independence Act,

Participants of the solemn sitting, distinguished guests,

 

In June every year the words occupation and genocide arise in the minds of our people. We use the word genocide when referring to the arrests and extermination of Lithuanian people that started soon after the occupation of 1940 and the first wave of deportation carried out in June 1941.

 

Several dozens of thousands of Lithuanian citizens were deported from their homeland during those days; however, the dreadful plans of the Kremlin included several hundreds of thousands of victims. The regular post-war deportations involving hundreds of thousands of people witnessed reliability of such plans.

 

Today we commemorate the day of Mourning, however, we can also see a glint of hope on this day. Our deportees could see this glint during the hardest years in distant Siberia. We see this glint of hope today, and it is like a sign of fate that the black dates - June 14th and June 15th will never be repeated.

 

The events of the morning of 15 June 1941 and the night of 15 June were a national tragedy of our state and our nation; the state was erased from the map of the world, the gene pool of the nation was crippled and our country was pushed away from the European development road.

 

Let us honour all those who were condemned to exile by occupants and local collaborates, who suffered and died there only because they were Lithuanian citizens, gave birth to children for the future of Lithuania. And because they lived in their own land, loved and cherished it and were good masters of their own country.

 

Let us rise and honour...

 

We study the past today and we should now be able to give it an impartial evaluation, without the feeling of revenge, but with a hope to receive material, and, even more importantly, moral compensation for the grievances experienced by our deportees one day.

 

The deportations of Lithuanian people in cattle-trucks to the East that started in 1941 were a consequence of a political deal when the Nazist Reich and the Soviet Union divided the neighbouring countries. They believed that would never be changed.

 

However, the later history of Lithuania has shown that even under the most horrible conditions of the occupation that lasted for half a century the then leadership and its repression apparatus failed in turning its citizens into little obedient bolts of a totalitarian state who would know nothing about human freedom and rights, history of their nation and the values of the free world.

 

Participants of the struggle for freedom tried to stand up for the nation’s honour and dignity sacrificing their lives. They stood up to defend the values that had been nurtured and cherished for centuries. They tried to defend them from the enemy that was a hundred times more powerful and fell in an unequal post-war struggle in Lithuanian forests. They fought for their Homeland, for the state of Lithuania that saw the break of dawn only many centuries later.

 

After suppression of the armed resistance of the nation, in Khrushchev’s times, a new determined generation was formed in the country, and several dozens of years later it became the basis of Lithuania’s freedom herald – Sajūdis.

 

The restored independence rose from the arms of the brightest people of our nation, from the memories of the former independent state and from the same hope for freedom that was being trashed for half a century but never really strangled.

 

The bloodstained January 13th was approaching. Perhaps externally it had some resemblance to June 14th and 15th – the aggression of a powerful hostile force deciding the fate of the state and the nation. However, in spite of its tragic motives, the outcome of that fateful night was already different. Everyone got a sense of the nation’s victory over the unconquerable force, a sense of human strength against the steel of tanks.

 

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“The State of Lithuania shall be an independent democratic republic”, reads our Constitution. Consolidation of democracy is a long and complicated process related to democratic society relations. Development of civil society is the warrant of their nurturance and consolidation.

 

Its basic features are a strong feeling of national solidarity, concern over public interests, responsibility as well as political culture. It is obvious today that only an open society of active, initiative and free-standing people will be free and safe.

 

Let us protect and defend Lithuania. That is the plea of the deportees who never came back from Siberia, it is a prayer of those who stayed on duty on the night of January 13^th and that is a voice of all of us living today, a mandate to future generations of Lithuania. It is necessary to protect one’s own state not only with a weapon but also by applying the basic principle of democratic governance and by means of honourable representation of the nation. Only their expression will guarantee success of the decisions, development of country’s economy, social and cultural development and national security.

 

We feel that we have implemented aspirations of our deportees. However, hundreds of thousands of innocent Lithuanian citizens who lost their lives will always remind us of the price of the freedom of our state’s freedom. Let their names be always followed by respect of the nation and let the altar of hope lit by them shine with a light of Lithuania’s freedom.