Associated Press

July 7, 2005

The owner of a Lithuanian newspaper was fined 3,000 litas (US$1,000; [euro]870) on Thursday for publishing an anti-Jewish article.

The Vilnius district court found Vitas Tomkus, who owns the daily Respublika, guilty of instigating ethnic and religious enmity.

Tomkus wrote an article in the paper last year that included a crude caricature of a Jewish figure holding up a globe. He was flanked by a man identified as homosexual.

Under the headline "Who Rules the World?" Tomkus wrote that "we should be especially careful with Americans, because America is ruled by Jews."

Tomkus, who has not apologized to the Lithuanian Jewish community and did not attend the court hearing, said Thursday he would appeal the ruling.

The court also fined several employees of the daily for distributing the publication.

"This is the worst attack on the Jewish community since Lithuania broke from the Soviet Union," Simonas Alperavicius, a leader of Lithuania's 4,000-strong Jewish community, said in court Thursday. "Respublika is openly promoting anti-Semitic hysteria."

Jewish-Lithuanian relations have been strained for years over the role some Lithuanians played in killing Jews during the 1941-44 Nazi occupation.

The Holocaust claimed the lives of more than 200,000 Lithuanian Jews or 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population in this Baltic state.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization based in Los Angeles, has accused Lithuania of not being aggressive enough in pursuing surviving war criminals and putting them on trial.

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