News

Permanent Representation of Lithuania to the EU has joined a civic initiative “Memory is Alive through Testimony” to commemorate the 21st anniversary of a brutal Soviet crackdown.

On the night of January 13, 1991, Soviet paratroopers under the supreme command of the President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev occupied the television transmission tower and the radio and TV studios of the newly independent Lithuania in Vilnius, storming through a crowd of unarmed civilians. 14 civilians were killed and about 1000 wounded.

On the Freedom Defenders’ Day at 8 AM the candles were lit in the windows of the building of the Permanent Representation on one of the busiest streets of Brussels. Lithuanian schools and public institutions have joined the civic action for the fifth year.

The organizers of the event, The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, said: “Twenty-one years ago, the Lithuanian society passed the test of citizenship. The aim of this initiative is that the Lithuanian society of today would feel at least a part of that sense of unity when strong values and ideas helped to resist against the aggression.”

One of the accused leaders of the crackdown, KGB officer Mikhail Golovatov, was arrested in Austria last summer under the European arrest warrant but imediately released in unexplained circumstances, possibly after the Russian diplomatic pressure.

Permanent Representation of Lithuania to the EU