Estonia isn't in the news much, but after the government decided to implement a controversial law to move a Soviet memorial to soldiers who died fighting the Nazis, and unearth the bodies of several soldiers buried near the monument--which is referred to in the Estonian press simply as pronkssõdur, or bronze soldier--an international furor has ensued, with German, US, Russian and other governments weighing in.
In response, hundreds of--one assumes--members of Estonia's sizable Russian community have rioted in the streets, "clashed," as they say, with police, and looted stores and kiosks downtown.
The most important thing to know about the riots is... apparently, how hilarious some Estonians find them, even as the Estonian Ambassador is attacked by a Putin-backing "youth movement" in Moscow and their country is receiving more international coverage than it has in years.
And that leads to the second most important thing, which is that everyone in Estonia born before, say, 1982, remembers the Soviet occupation. More than likely, they have family members or at least know of people who were shipped off to Siberia or Russia and didn't come back. In a country of 1.5 million, 42,000 is a lot of people to have shipped off, especially with a 60 per cent survival rate. I won't make a list of the other forms of oppression and suppression, but suffice to say that such lists exist.
In my view, Estonians are, at least in principle, entirely justified in removing such a symbol from the downtown of their capital city.
What makes the situation more complicated is the situation of the Russian-speakers who were brought in during the Soviet Era, and more recent Russian-speaking immigrants. Many of them don't have citizenship, and from what I can tell, form the bulk of Estonia's underclass. While the country has become relatively economically successful, inequality is also on the rise, and thousands of people live in third world conditions, in squats and (literally) crumbling apartments...
FULL STORY + COMMENTS
Posted by Dru Oja Jay on May 3, 2007 in
| Games |
