National Unified leaders in Ridgeville fined for hanging cleats without permission

The Vilnius County Police considered the hanging of the plaque as self-government and on August 12 wrote an administrative violation protocol to the party leader and issued an administrative order imposing a fine of 30 euros.

“He was charged because he hung a plaque of Kazis Shkirpa on the Appeal Court building without receiving a decision from the Vilnius City Council,” Julia Samorokovskaja, a deputy to the Vilnius County Mayor, told Erta.

The national association disagrees with the police’s decision. Elta reporters were unable to contact V. Radžvilas, who is currently on vacation, and his deputy Vytautas Sinica said he would appeal the decision.

“We will not pay the fine, as far as I know, the principle is that it was allocated incorrectly and will be appealed. There is a clear decision to complain about it. It seems that a fine of 30 euros was imposed. We will complain because paying the fine is equivalent to recognizing the validity of the fine,” V. Sinica, vice president of the national association, told Elta.

The Administrative Misdemeanours Act provides for a fine of 16 to 60 euros for individuals and managers or other persons in charge of legal entities – 60 to 140 euros for the arbitrary exercise of the actual or alleged right of another person to file an objection, without following the procedure established by law and without causing substantial damage to the rights or legitimate interests of others.

V. Radžvilas, as representative of the legal entity, was fined 30 euros.

“The decision to hang (the board – ELTA) was made by a legal entity,” V. Sinica commented to Elta.

After reviewing the administrative case, the police draw up an agreement and an administrative order, the latter of which usually recommends that half of the fine stipulated in the sanction be paid within one month.

ELTA reminds that at the end of June, on the eve of the commemoration of the June Uprising of 1941, a memorial plaque in memory of Colonel K. Škirpa was hung on the Court of Appeal in the center of Vilnius. On the initiative of the National Reunification, it started from the side of Vasaris 16th Street.

A few days later, Grinda employees put up the blackboard, but they needed the help of the police. When dozens of protesters stood up to defend the monument to the colonel, the police had to forcibly pull them away from the monument. When the sign was hung, some people who gathered near the court did not listen to the police’s request, so several people were arrested.

The Vilnius City Council appealed to the police regarding the memorial plaque of Colonel K. Škirpa. It also demanded compensation for the damage caused by the plaque.

The Vilnius Historical Memory Committee has applied to the Lithuanian Center for Genocide and Resistance Studies (LGGRTC) for an evaluation of K. Škirpa.

In the position previously presented by the LGGRTC on K. Škirpa, his important contribution to the fight against the Soviet occupation regime was appreciated, but it was emphasized that his activities in 1940-1941 “also included manifestations of anti-Semitism.”

In the autumn of 1940, the Soviet repressive apparatus was housed in the building, on the facade of which hangs a memorial plaque to K. Shkirpa, and in the basement of the building there was a prison. More than twenty years ago, on the facade of this building were inscribed the names of more than a hundred Soviet victims, most of them young men, partisans of all ranks after the war.

Today, the building houses several institutions: the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Struggle, the Lithuanian Special Archives with documents from the former KGB archives, the Center for the Study of Genocide and Resistance of the Lithuanian Population, and courts – the Vilnius District Court and the Lithuanian Court of Appeal.

The building is known by many around the world as the former KGB Palace, and for the Lithuanian people it is a symbol of the Soviet occupation, it was used as a KGB prison, where Lithuanian freedom fighters were imprisoned and tortured.

Many participants in the resistance against the Soviet government, members of anti-Soviet organizations, and publishers and distributors of underground publications were imprisoned in KGB detention centers: Danutė Mušinskaitė (1960), Alvydas Šeduikis and Jonas Volungevičius (1966), Nijolė Sadūnaitė (1975), Balys Gajauskas and Viktoras Petkus (1978), Algirdas Statkevičius, Antanas Terleckas, Julius Sasnauskas, Povilas Pečeliūnas, Fathers Alfonsas Svarinskas and Sigitas Tamkevičius.

Pope Francis visited the former KGB prison during his visit in 2018. The pontiff visited the cells of many prominent Lithuanian residents, fighters, resisters, bishops, priests and lay people who were imprisoned during the Soviet repression and never left there alive.

According to the General Encyclopedia of Lithuania, K. Škirpa was born in Namajūnai (Pasvali District) in 1895 and in mid-1918 he was the first to join the Lithuanian Army as a volunteer and participated in the War of Independence against the Soviet Union, the Russian Army, the Belmontenian Army and the Polish Army.

As assistant to the military commander of Vilnius (in fact, he held the position of commander), he, together with other volunteers, raised the national flag on the tower of Gediminas Castle on January 1, 1919. In 1920-1921, he was a deputy to the Constituent Assembly, belonging to the Lithuanian Socialist People’s Democratic Party, and refused the mandate in 1921.

In 1922 he graduated from the Kaunas Senior Officers Course and in 1925 from the Belgian Military Academy.

He began to reorganize the army, develop a mobilization plan, oppose the December 17, 1926 coup, and served as a diplomat in Germany from 1927, and as a military attaché from 1928 to 1937. 1937-1938 Lithuanian representative to the League of Nations. Later, he served as Minister Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Poland and Germany.

In 1939, the Lithuanian government was forced to retake Vilnius and the Vilnius region by force.

After the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940, K. Skoppa and others organized the Lithuanian Activists Front in Berlin. In 1941, he was one of the organizers of the anti-Soviet June Uprising. After the activities began, the Lithuanian Activists Front announced him as the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Lithuania (the German authorities did not allow him to leave Berlin and put him under house arrest). In 1940-1941, K. Skoppa’s public speeches and activities showed anti-Semitism.

In 1944, in a memorandum to the German government, he proposed the transfer of administration of Lithuania to the Lithuanian government, as a result of which K. Škirpa was arrested and detained.

In 1946 he went to Ireland, and from 1949 he lived in the United States, working at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He was active in Lithuanian organizations, and in 1957-1958 he served as chairman of the Supreme Council for the Liberation of Lithuania.

K. Škirpa died in the United States in 1979 and was reburied in 1995 in the Petrašiūnai Cemetery in Kaunas.