Negotiating History for Reconciliation: A Comparative Evaluation of the Baltic Presidential Commissions

Abstract

This article discusses the presidential historical commissions of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that were established in 1998 to research the crimes of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes and to overcome interpretive disputes that had begun to overshadow the new democracies' politics. Conceptually framed as a state tool of historical conflict resolution and reconciliation, the Baltic commissions' structure, operative work and results all reveal many of the pitfalls, but also the opportunities of such official bodies of historical truth-seeking. The article concludes that even though all three commissions had a clear reconciliatory aim, their operative processes and final output differed remarkably. Their contribution to actual reconciliation was also very limited.

Notes

Support for this work came from two important research grants from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (Targeted Finance Project no SF0180128s08 and Institutional Research Grant no IUT20-39). I would also like to thank Maria Mälksoo, Vello Pettai and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

¹ An exception here are the two German Bundestag Commissions of the early 1990s that are increasingly recognised as measures of transitional justice in post-unification Germany (Beattie 2008).

² Interestingly, the Transitional Justice Database lists two of the three Baltic presidential commissions as ‘truth commissions’, thus placing them in the same analytical category as, for example, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1994 or the Argentinean National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons. See http://www.tjdbproject.com/, accessed 10 June 2015. This seems to highlight even more the need to clarify the distinction between these different types of ‘commissions’.

³ For a conceptual discussion of historical truth commissions as ‘mediators between history, memory and power’, see Pettai (2015, p. 237).

⁴ In March 1992 the Estonian parliament established the Estonian State Commission on Examination of the Policies of Repression (the so-called Vello Salo commission), which was originally planned for three years. Yet it concluded its work only in 2004 when it issued a ‘White Book’ (Salo 2005) that provided an estimation of the economic and human damage caused by the Soviet regime in Estonia (Pettai, V. 2013). Already in 1988, the Lithuanian independence movement Sąjūdis established a commission to collect the names of those deported during the 1940s which was turned into a research institute after independence was established. In 1997 this institute was merged into the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (Budryte 2013). In 1992, the Latvian parliament set up a commission tasked with creating a documentation centre for preserving and assessing the remaining NKVD/KGB files. This Centre for the Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism was established in 1995 as an independent state agency under the Ministry of Justice, including among its activities also research into human rights violations of the Soviet regime (Pettai, E. C. 2013). For a complete overview of truth-seeking measures in the Baltic states see Pettai and Pettai (2015).

⁵ ‘Mission Statement of the Commission Meeting’, Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Soviet and Nazi Regimes in Lithuania (TKNSORNLI), 17 November 1998, available at: http://www.komisija.lt/en, accessed 6 June 2014.

⁶ The ‘Research Works Database’ is available at: http://www.komisija.lt/en/body.php?&m = 1194863084, accessed 11 June 2012.

⁷ Interview with Nicholas Lane, representative of the American Jewish Committee on the International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (IKUERK), Tallinn, 9 June 2011; interview with Joachim Tauber, historian, director of the Nordost-Institute, and member of the Lithuanian commission since its inception, Lüneburg, 8 March 2010.

⁸ Interview with Joachim Tauber, historian, director of the Nordost-Institute, and member of the Lithuanian commission since its inception, Lüneburg, 8 March 2010.

⁹ See the full information about the published volumes on the Nazi period in Lithuania at: http://www.komisija.lt/en/naujiena.php?id = 1174385747, accessed 10 August 2012.

¹⁰ This was suggested also by one of the international commission members, Nicholas Lane, during an interview (personal correspondence with Nicholas Lane, representative of the American Jewish Committee on the International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (IKUERK), 31 May 2011). Dalia Kuodytė, who was the director of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre at the time, however, denied that the initiative came from the Centre and rather claimed that it was the state prosecutors who requested assistance from the researchers (interview with Dalia Kuodytė, Vilnius, 8 May 2013).

¹¹ In late 2012 the commission's research activities were resumed as President Dalia Grybauskaite re-established the commission by presidential decree (President of the Republic of Lithuania 2012). While the mandate and basic organisational structure remained the same, the composition of the international members changed considerably. Among the historians appointed to the commission are now also renowned US historians such as Norman Naimark and Timothy Snyder as well as several new representatives of Jewish organisations. What is also different from the previous commission is the fact that several of the international members now belong to the sub-unit of Soviet crimes. In late 2013 the first, and so far only meeting of the new commission took place in Vilnius. See, ‘International Commission for Nazi and Soviet Crimes to Hold its First Meeting in Lithuania’, The Lithuanian Tribune, 9 August 2013, available at: http://www.google.ee/url?sa = t&rct = j&q = &esrc = s&source = web&cd = 10&ved = 0CGcQFjAJ&url = http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lithuaniatribune.com%2F47100%2Finternational-commission-for-nazi-and-soviet-crimes-to-hold-its-first-meeting-in-lithuania-201347100%2F&ei = FC4VVeveMIfVywOk64LQCQ&usg = AFQjCNGDFsX2sYpYHDsNmQRMOkcQsfpGww&bvm = bv.89381419,d.bGQ, accessed 10 June 2015.

¹² Written correspondence with Nicholas Lane, representative of the American Jewish Committee on the International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (IKUERK), 2 June 2011.

¹³ Members of the IKUERK were: Finnish diplomat and minister Max Jakobson (chairman); the former Danish minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen; the former US policy analyst Paul Goble; the representative of the American Jewish Committee Nicholas Lane; the Russian human rights activist Arseny Roginski; the British political scientist Peter Reddaway; and the German MP Wolfgang von Stetten.

¹⁴ ‘Statement’, Estonian International Commission for Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, IKUERK, Tallinn, 27 January 1999, available at: http://www.mnemosyne.ee/hc.ee/pdf/statement.pdf, accessed 2 June 2013.

¹⁵ ‘Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’, available at: http://legal.un.org/icc/statute/romefra.htm, accessed 10 June 2015. The text of the document circulated as document A/CONF.183/9 since July 1998 and finally entered into force on 1 July 2002.

¹⁶ ‘Statement’, Estonian International Commission for Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, IKUERK, Tallinn, 27 January 1999, available at: http://www.mnemosyne.ee/hc.ee/pdf/statement.pdf, accessed 2 June 2013.

¹⁷ ‘Statement’, Estonian International Commission for Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, IKUERK, Tallinn, 27 January 1999, available at: http://www.mnemosyne.ee/hc.ee/pdf/statement.pdf, accessed 2 June 2013.

¹⁸ This reduction of responsibility on the Estonian side was one of the main reasons why the commission's investigations took much longer than originally envisioned. After Meri left office in 2001 activities markedly slowed down. With Hiio temporarily pursuing other duties and the new president, Arnold Rüütel, not counting the commission among his priorities, there was simply nobody else there who would continue to organise the research work on which the commission could continue its work (interview with Nicholas Lane, representative of the American Jewish Committee on the International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (IKUERK), Tallinn, 9 June 2011).

¹⁹ All three commission conclusions have been published in the beginning of the two volumes issued by the commission (Hiio et al.2006, 2009).

²⁰ See the commission's official website, available at: http://www.mnemosyne.ee/hc.ee/, accessed 2 July 2012.

²¹ Personal correspondence with Valters Nollendorfs, professor of German literature, chairman of the board of the Museum of Occupation of Latvia, Riga, and member of the Commission of the Historians of Latvia (LVK) since its inception, 16 September 2009.

²² The international members of the LVK changed quite a lot over time, with people dropping out or being simply replaced because of low activity. The local membership included almost all established contemporary historians of Latvia as well as the head of the Jewish museum and Holocaust survivor Marğers Vestermanis and émigré Latvian scholars. The international branch was chaired by German historian Erwin Oberländer and originally included historians from Russia, the UK, the USA as well as representatives of the Latvian–Jewish survivor organisation in the US as well as the Israeli Yad Vashem institute. See the official website of the Latvian Commission of Historians, available at: http://www.president.lv/pk/content/?cat_id = 7, accessed 2 June 2014.

²³ An exception here is perhaps the edited volume by Nollendorfs and Oberländer (2005, p. 10), that presents a ‘selection of the work supported by the Commission of the Historians of Latvia from 1998 to 2004’ and was published in English as vol. 14 within the commission's series.

²⁴ The commission publications are available as of volume 11 from the president's website, available at: http://www.president.lv/pk/content/?cat_id = 2766, accessed 10 June 2015.

²⁵ See the written comments by German commission member Erwin Oberländer (2009); also personal correspondence with Valters Nollendorfs, professor of German literature, chairman of the board of the Museum of Occupation of Latvia, Riga, and member of the Commission of the Historians of Latvia (LVK) since its inception, 16 September 2009.

²⁶ Interview with Nicholas Lane, representative of the American Jewish Committee on the International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (IKUERK), Tallinn, 9 June 2011.

²⁷ Some see the Baltic presidential commissions therefore as primarily Holocaust-related commissions in line with the dozens of similar commissions that emerged throughout Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain (Barkan 2009, p. 901). However, the fact that their investigative mandates include research into Stalin-era crimes adds a particular perspective that, indeed, marks them off from ‘pure’ Holocaust-centred commissions.

²⁸ See also Barkan (2005).

²⁹ See also Barkan (2009) and Pettai (2015).

³⁰ Personal correspondence with Nicholas Lane, representative of the American Jewish Committee on the International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (IKUERK), 2 June 2011.

³¹ First initiatives have been launched by both Lithuania and Latvia to set up bilateral commissions with Russian historians, however, none of these have yet shown any results.