World War II veteran Vasily Kononov said Monday the 30,000 euros (1.102 million roubles. 47,252 USD. 23,687 UK pounds) the Strasbourg court ordered Latvia to pay him as compensation for being held in custody was “a mockery”. Mr Kononov had originally demanded 5 million euros (183.769 million roubles. 7.875 million USD. 3.948 million UK pounds) in compensation for being illegally held in custody by Latvia on charges of war crimes. “The sum to be compensated in moral damages is a mockery. Latvia was able, through its representative and the judge from Latvia, to move to its side the judges from Sweden and Iceland”, Mr Kononov told a press conference in Moscow. He said the sum should be at least several hundred thousand euros.
The European Court of Human Rights made the ruling in favour of Mr Kononov on 19 June, but, it was only announced in full last week. The court rejected Mr Kononov’s other demands, which included moral damages and compensation for the apartment and plot of land he had been forced to sell in order to pay court expenses and for medical treatment. Mr Kononov, who led a group of resistance fighters against Nazi Germany in the Baltic state during World War II, was convicted by Latvian authorities of ordering the killing of nine villagers in 1944, with some reports saying the dead included a pregnant woman. He admitted to the killings, but said the dead were Nazi collaborators who were caught in the crossfire. Latvia was under German occupation at the time of the incident.
A retired police colonel born in Latvia, Mr Kononov was arrested in 1998 and sentenced to six years in prison in 2000 on genocide charges. In 2004, after several years of litigation, his sentence was cut to 20 months and the charges changed to “war crimes”. Mr Kononov filed an appeal with the Strasbourg court the same year. Russia subsequently applied pressure on Latvian and European authorities over the case and, in April 2004, Mr Kononov was granted Russian citizenship by then-President Vladimir Putin.
In 2007, the European court dismissed all charges against Mr Kononov, and ruled he was not guilty. “This is my final victory, one I have been seeking for eight long years”, he said then. While Russia maintains that the Red Army liberated the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia from German invaders, many Latvians and Estonians put the two “occupations” on a par.
28 July 2008
RIA-Novosti
http://en.rian.ru/world/20080728/115096044.html
Editor’s Note:
This is obviously NOT a war crimes case. Mr Kononov was a partisan operating behind enemy lines. The killing of nine people in a single incident is hardly “genocide”. Well, there is a hidden message in all of this, and since Tyotya Vara has the Eastern European decoder ring (do look for the bright orange “Veeties” box with Yelena Isinbayeva pole-vaulting on the front), she will unravel it all for you.
It is obvious to all. Mr Kononov was a former colonel in the MVD and he was born in Latvia. Therefore, he spoke Latvian and Russian perfectly (as His Holiness Aleksei speaks Estonian and Russian perfectly, for he was born in inter-war Estonia). This meant that he was invaluable in tracking down the so-called “Forest Brothers”, who were ex-SS soldiers fighting the Soviets in the immediate post-war years. No doubt, quite a few of these banditos were caught due to his efforts. Their families resolved to get even, and the “war crimes” charges were trumped-up in an effort to “pay him back”.
You have a choice. You can support a man who fought for allied victory in World War II and was an honourable veteran, or you can support disgruntled families of ex-SS men. As General Sherman put it, “War is hell, unrefined”, so, nine collaborators shot in the course of a battle is no “crime”. I do daresay that General Le May killed more in a single “fire-storm” raid on Japan. Be careful when you get on the “moral high horse”, it might take you where you do not wish to go. My view is simple; don’t go to war unless you must, for innocents suffer on all sides at the hands of all combatants. That, I think, is the harsh reality of it all.
BMD
