The EU And Ethnic Cleansing In Estonia
One of the EU’s many accomplishments in facilitating NATO expansion has been to ignore its own laws. Currently it is condoning a form of ethnic cleansing against Russian speakers in Estonia. Just as it turned a blind eye to punitive language laws in Latvia.
As Amnesty International explains, in EU Estonia today, every third person is a potential victim of discrimination.
The treatment of the ethnic Russian minority in Estonia is not only in contravention of UN laws, the European Council’s Human Rights Charter and the EU’s own Treaty of Amsterdam. It is also being effected in a manner reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
Estonia’s ‘Language Directorate’ operates as the new brownshirts, disbarring anyone with poor Estonian language skills from their jobs and rights. Ethnic Russians are the new ‘untermenschen’. Yet it’s a form of ethnic cleansing that the EU ‘warmly welcomed‘. This is really what is behind the current riots in Tallinn and why the ‘Bronze Soldier’ became a rallying point.
It would not be the first time ethnic cleansing has taken place in Estonia. In 1934, there were 4,381 Jews in Estonia, with most living in Tallinn, the capital city. By the end of 1942, there were no known Jews in Estonia.
During the war, an estimated 10,000 Jews were killed in Estonia after having been deported to camps from elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In 1944, The Red Army failed to liberate those who remained. The main concentration camps were evacuated by sea to Danzig. Any who missed the boat were killed a few hours before the Red Army arrived and fewer than 10 survived.
At this time, Estonia had its own SS fighting alongside the Nazis. Very effectively, too. The battle of Narva was particularly gruesome for Russians, losing 170,000 men. Certainly, the Red Army did not ‘liberate’ Estonia. Estonian guerillas - the Forest Brothers - were still harassing the Soviets until 1949. So, a monument to a Russian soldier was always inappropriate - rather like erecting an RAF monument in Dresden. Balts were largely Nazi sympathisers and many are still in holocaust denial. Though not all.
This is not the first soldier monument controversy. A monument to an Estonian SS soldier was erected in Parnu in 2002.
Whether Estonia would have fared better under Nazi occupation than Soviet Occupation is a tough one to call, to say the least. But it seems clear which one Estonians would have preferred. And to be fair, they experienced both.
So now it’s payback time for ethnic Russians and the methodology is Nazi style, with the novel variation of Russians being put in ‘no labour’ camps. The brownshirts from the ‘Language Inspectorate’ turn up, announced or unannounced, and recommend dismissal for anyone who isn’t an ethnic Estonian.
Here’s a typical mail to Amnesty International:
“I used to work as a taxi driver but lost my job thanks to the Language Inspectorate. They call you to the transport commission for the slightest infraction of the highway code where the Language Inspectorate is waiting for you.Everything is well planned. They call only the Russian speakers. They can sack you not because you are a bad worker, not because passengers have been complaining but because you don’t know Estonian well. I have three children, a mortgage and an alcoholic husband but nobody cares. I have to pay for language courses and they are not cheap — two or three monthly salaries. I don’t have a job and I cannot pay for the Estonian language courses. How am I going to live? Isn’t this discrimination?”
Since March, the Language Directorate has tightened the screws, making people who already have a language certificate re-sit a language exam and nullifying the language certificates of those who fail a re-sit - which of course, is guaranteed.
Amnesty International notes again:
People who were born and have lived all their lives in Estonia have not been able to gain Estonian citizenship. They are deprived of the possibility of working as state or municipal officials, meaning they are deprived of the opportunity to contribute to their communities according to their potential.
The stateless and jobless ethnic Russians will inevitably become homeless and be ‘disappeared’ like the Bronze Soldier. The Russians in the EU are the new ‘Jews’ and the EU continues to abandon basic human rights, in contravention of its own citizenship laws, as it has done with ‘extraordinary rendition’ and torture camps.
excellent article.
i understand the estonian distrust toward russians. decades of soviet repression can’t be erased from memory so easily. still, there is no justification for discrimination of ethnic russians living in estonia. the thing with the language is just an sophisticated way to sack russians from work and eventually to make them “go home”.
even the thing with the bronze solder statue is showing that. i would understand and even support removal if it was the statue of lenin, stalin or any other communist leader. but this is a statue to fallen solders of red army. if i remember correctly the basics and the soul of modern europe is the antifascist movement from ww2 and red army was a part of that movement. now, i wouldn’t even say a word if estonians weren’t making monuments to fallen nazi soldiers in last couple of years. of course those monuments are not officially recognized by government but there is a silent approval by some ministers and a part of public.
Katjusha, actually you grasp the truth very well.
Problem with language barrier is diffycult one, but to let suppress our language in favor of russian language, as russian was official language in Soviet “Republic” of Estonia would be as asking to give up our culture.
Language is keypoint, but what would be a good solution I can’t imagine right now.
About fascist monuments - estonians did and do not give a flying f*ck, if I may say so, neither about communism nor fascism/extreme nationalism. Estonia was almost like Finland, but it stood between two clashing giants (Stalins Russia and Hitlers Germany).
Now, people preferr to stay alive, even when they do not share political or demographic ideals with neither side.
Estonia didn’t choose Hitler nor Stalin, nazism nor stalinism. Country and it’s people choose to survive.
I really do not believe that statues, that show estonian in german WW2 uniform praise nazism or fascism, because Estonia did not share political ideals of neither side, but in a twisted way reminds that our own people were forced to fight on both sides.
And I do know only one statue, where there was an estonian fighter in german uniform. But as far as I know, it was demolished very soon after it was erected.
Personnaly I think it was really bad idea to erect such a statue in the first place, and so did our government.
There aren’t “nazi monuments” as fas as I know, there was only Lihula, and it stirred up quite a mess here.
And again - Is monument of a Soviet soldier praise to Stalinism/communism?
Fascism and nazism were evil I admit that. But here people do not praise nazis nor fascists, that was sick ideology. But Soviet Union showed almost as bad mannered political chauvinism when dealing with it’s minoritys as some fascist countries did.
Anyway, Estonia isn’t nazi or fascist nation, and hopefully never will be, so it would be nice if there wouldn’t be such slander around. I understand why, when looking from other point of view it might seem different, I really do, but this situation is just a bit more complicated, than bystander would think.
I wish you understood the pain of colonization that Estonian people had to endure before arguing for the rights of colonizer to use their own language in official documents. Learning the language of the country of residence is a sign of respect to that country, and Russians should be willing to show it, instead of calling Estonians Nazis and demanding Russia for intervention. Russians in Estonia are power hungry and some do not understand that they are being manipulated by nationalists in Russia. Sadly, those who call other people to kill all Estonians (search youtube for some clips) are yelling so loudly about “ethnic cleansing”. As if Stalin’s deportations were the greatest thing that ever happened in that region. It should be a norm that a person who lives as an ethnic minority speaks the language of the mainland. It is so in every normal Western nation-based democracy, and there is no reason to reinvent anything.
There are ethnic minorities who are , when oppressed too much, become Kosovo. Russians are not aliens to the land, you call ‘Estonia’. They lived there for centuries, sorry.
If you want your country to be divided - continue with ‘pain of colonisation’ and other stupid self-pitying performances.
Get a life, for goodness sake!
I think far too much is being made of the statue relocation. Yes, relocation, not removal. I honestly believe that the Estonian people have evry right to remove a statue they feel is a sad reminder of Soviet occupation….an occupation they never wanted, nor did they want German occupation. The only reason all those Russian people are there is due to the Soviet influx of Russian workers and military into Estonia. They began their own cleansing of Estonia in their time and now cry foul as the tables turn.
The Estonian people are free now. They should be left to determine their own way free from the influence of old Soviet-era sympathizers.
Surely two wrongs do not make a right in all of this, but the deal with the statue is merely bogus. I give the Estonian people credit for moving the statue/monument to the military cemetery, where it rightlfully belongs. It still afford Russian Estonians a place to revere their lost men (not Estonian lost men) and as such all this whining about it is worthless. Be thankful that Estonia did not remove it outright, as I believe they had every right to do.
Something real, everybody understands that only one who is mean and bullying others is Russia…
The Washington Post: A Soviet Memorial — and Mind-Set
In 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his Estonian counterpart, the polymath Lennart Meri, chummily drank together in a Kremlin chamber as their foreign ministers labored nearby to complete a historic treaty to withdraw all Russian troops from the tiny Baltic state, remembers Fred Hiatt in he`s article in The Washington Post.
“When it was time to celebrate the finished draft, Yeltsin mocked his own foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, for his weak drinking skills — “Bring the boy some ice cream,†he roared to an attendant — but approved the agreement.†That may have been the high-water mark of Russia’s willingness to face its imperialist history and allow its neighbors to live in peace, says Hiatt.
Reklaam
How far Russia has regressed since then became shockingly evident last week when Vladimir Putin’s Russia (population: 143 million) unleashed a barrage against neighboring Estonia (population: 1.34 million) that included Kremlin cyber-attacks on official Estonian Web sites, gangs of Kremlin-sponsored youths menacing Estonian diplomats in Moscow, Russian officials and government-controlled media spewing incendiary propaganda, Russian companies suspending contracts with Estonian firms and, in predictably Putinian fashion, Russian threats to cut off the tiny nation’s energy supplies. (Suddenly, the Russian railway announced, all its coal-carrying railcars were in desperate need of repair.) The onslaught illustrated the dangerous real-world consequences of mythologizing history — of Putin’s glorification of Stalinism — and the link between Russia’s atrophied democracy and its increasingly aggressive foreign policy.
Why such a fuss? To Russians, the removed statue of Bronze Soldier was a tribute to their overwhelming losses in World War II — which they know as the Great Patriotic War. To Estonians, it was a reminder of a half-century of Soviet occupation during which the Kremlin shot thousands of Balts; sent hundreds of thousands to Siberia; moved hundreds of thousands of Russians in to take their places; and tried to eradicate their culture, their language and any memory of independence.
The trouble is that Russia has never acknowledged this history, and under Putin it grows less and less willing to do so. The passing of the Soviet Union is mourned, the old KGB is celebrated — imagine if Germans continued to honor the Gestapo — and the current independence of former Soviet states is treated as a transitory error. Neither Putin nor even his foreign minister has deigned to pay a bilateral visit to independent Tallinn. Virtually every neighbor — Georgia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, even Finland — has been subjected to bullying.
Russian leaders dwell inordinately on the lack of respect paid them — but the more they stifle democracy at home, the less cause others have to show respect and the more the Kremlin ends up having to demand respect in a Soviet way, argues Hiatt.
Ave obviously wants another Ulster in Europe. Well, I have seen it - before Good Friday agreement. Not nice at all.
Human nature is the same everywhere and anytime: we will make the same mistake all over again and then scream in agony.
Ave, didn’t your Mum told you not to put your fingers into electrical plug?
2 SLH
maybe you will be a bit more careful when you give away too much credit to ‘Estonian people’ if you do a little research. First, not all ethnic Estonians supporting the removal of the Bronze Soldier. And not all Estonian Russians are defenders of this monument - I have met one once, who was supporting SS veterans and changed his Russian surname to Estonian surname.
Here are some links on the subject - I choose them because the info is neither Estonian or Russian.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6637895.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6630197.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2148732.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/593417.stm
Also Mr Ansip the Bonedigger who was behind the idea to remove ‘Soviet occupier’ from the city was a communist leader himself in the early years of his career. Brilliant - isn’t it? Have a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrus_Ansip
BTW, this is means: contacts with KGB inevitable. Not nice for a fighter for freedom and independence. And the other parts of his bio sounds rather suspicious.
As you can see - the world is not black and white. In your place I would give a credit for both communities. Remember - Serbia was bombed for oppression of minorities. If Albanian has rights in Kosovo - why Russian can’t have the same rights in Estonia? Or do you think Russians shouldn’t have rights at all?
“Ave, didn’t your Mum told you not to put your fingers into electrical plug?”
I don’t understand this one. I want to live in peace and I am tired about reading comments by people who know nothing about life here. Like you said… many Estonians didn’t support this and nor did I, but when it is done, it is done and even less than removing this monument, I repeat removing, I disapprove these thieves and crooks, who try to justify themselves by saying they did it for Russia or whatever. This is ridiculous.
I recently talked to some of my Russian friends and as I understood onlt thing they don’t like is that they don’t get as much money as people in Wetsern Europe, but this is same for Estonians. Estonians economy just isn’t as well yet..
As these riots are over and everything is calm again, I need no reason to visit this board anymore. You can think what you want, but truth will come out sooner or later. Just as it came out now, when western Europe understands that Russia occupied Estonia and you guys still see it as you want. This won’t change and I don’t think I need to waste time on that anymore. Best wishes, Goodbye.
Russians seem to have a talent to use well-defined words in their own twisted sense. They never understood “facsism” and now “ethnical cleansing”. I also like the wide-spread style this posting uses: first make a statement, then give a lot of information on the statement and not on the basis of the statement (i.e. ignore all facts), then jump to totally irrelevant point like mentioning 65 years back to make an association based on the readers emotions and in the end bring up one fact - amnesty report that was declared to be based on faulty facts and ono-objective even by local Amnesty International office. In the process slip in some additional lies like about language directorate who are, imho, just a silly bunch of cows incapable of any systemized discrimination… I recognize this style instantly: soviet time historybooks and news had quite the same format.
I just came across this photo in Wikipedia, of a bronze statue in Berlin honoring the Red Army…the statue is still standing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sowjetischer_Soldat_Sowjetisches_Ehrenmal_%28Berlin-Tiergarten%29.jpg#file