Lithuanian Martyr Mourned; Ukraine Party Asks Secession

Several thousand people turned out in Lithuania on Monday to mourn a man who became a martyr of the republic’s bid for independence by burning himself to death in a Moscow square last week.

Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis was among 5,000 people who filed through the center of the capital, Vilnius, behind the coffin of Stanislovas Zhamaitis, 52.

“This is one of the greatest sacrifices that could have been made for Lithuania,” Landsbergis said of Zhamaitis, who poured gasoline over himself outside the Bolshoi Theater on Thursday and died later the same day.

In a note to his wife and two children, Zhamaitis said he could not go on living in an occupied country. Moscow has sent troop reinforcements to Lithuania and imposed a partial economic blockade on the republic.

The fresh sign of popular support for Lithuania’s March 11 bid for independence coincides with conflicting signals over the possibility of a solution to the seven-week-old crisis between Vilnius and Moscow.

Deputy Prime Minister Romualdas Ozolas declared in a Danish newspaper interview published Monday that Lithuania is ready to freeze its declaration of independence to bring Moscow to the negotiating table.

However, at a news conference later in Vilnius, Ozolas appeared to contradict his earlier remarks, saying Lithuania is prepared only to suspend laws passed since the independence declaration.

In the Ukraine, meanwhile, hard-line dissidents decided to form the republic’s first major non-Communist political party with a program calling for secession from the Soviet Union.

A congress of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, founded as a human rights group in 1976, voted late Sunday to rename itself the Ukrainian Republican Party.

The congress adopted a program calling for “the creation of an independent Ukrainian state” as the new party’s first goal.

It also called for a market economy with both public and private property and the step-by-step closure of nuclear power stations.

In Latvia, leaders of the Latvian Popular Front blamed a local whiplash of fear over the Lithuanian criss for the nationalist group’s poor showing in key runoff elections.

“I think it’s a fear of Moscow and more economic sanctions,” Popular Front Vice President Ivars Godmanis said.