Estonian president, premier call for ethnic unity in monument row

May 2, 2007, 20:26 GMT

Tallinn - The Estonian president and prime minister both called for ethnic unity on Wednesday in the wake of the worst riots Estonia has seen in a century and an escalating row with Russia.

'I know that our country is rich in both wise Estonians as well as wise Russians, and I also know that neither of them are as stupid as to be affected by toothless hate-mongers,' President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said in an emotional appeal to the nation.

'All of us have to understand, realize and accept that we have people with different pasts living in our country. But we have a common future, right here, in our common state,' Prime Minister Andrus Ansip added in a speech to parliament.

Last Thursday, Estonia was rocked by the worst civil strife it has seen since the Russian Revolution as protests at a government decision to relocate a Red Army monument from a square in central Tallinn spilled over into violence.

Estonians see the monument as a reminder of their state's illegal occupation by the Soviet Union, while most ethnic Russians see it as a tribute to Russians' sacrifices in the war against Nazism.

In two nights of violence, an estimated 2,000 rioters - mainly ethnic-Russian youths - looted shops, smashed windows and hurled bottles and stones at police. Police responded with tear gas, flash bombs, water cannon and baton charges.

The riots appalled Estonia, which has long prided itself on the bloodless revolution with which it left the USSR in 1991.

And they raised uncomfortable questions about the progress which the Baltic state of 1.35 million people has made in integrating its 390,000 ethnic Slavs - most of whom moved there after World War II.

'Integration was working! People were coming together. Then Ansip split the country in half,' 45-year-old Russian Viktor Businski told journalists on the night after the riots.

As the violence died down, government figures tried to play down the idea that the riots could have widened the ethnic divide, stressing that the rioters were a tiny minority of the population.

'An honest look will tell us that most of our Russian-speaking compatriots have been on Estonia's side during the troubled nights and days of the past week. You were with all of us, on the side of order and public safety, and I thank you for that,' Ilves said.

'A few days ago, I found a webpage with several snapshots of Tallinn, set up by a young woman called Maria, under an extremely relevant heading - 'We are Russians, but our homeland is Estonia.' Thank you, Maria!' he added.

And Ansip laid the blame for the trouble on 'provocative' elements and misinformation, Baltic News Service BNS wrote.

'The next few days will be probably full of misleading information that aims at nothing else but inflating anger. I am sure there will be people behaving in a provocative manner,' he said.

But with many ethnic Russians genuinely outraged by what they see as the government's indifference to their wishes, it is likely to take far more than an appeal from Estonia's ethnic-Estonian leaders to heal the breach that the riots opened.