Over 80 witnesses for genocide trial of former Estonian communist

Aug 23, 2007, 10:16 GMT

Riga - More than 80 witnesses are to participate in the trial of a cousin of a former Estonian president charged with genocide last week, local media reported Thursday.

The accused, 88-year-old Arnold Meri, however has said he probably will not live long enough to see the trial.

'I'm practically blind and deaf,' the 88-year-old Arnold Meri said. 'Just measured my blood pressure - it's a little bit higher than 200. That should tell you about my health.'

Meri, a cousin of Lennart Meri, the president of Estonia from 1992 to 2001, has said the charge of genocide against him was unfair and an historical misunderstanding.

'I don't think I have more than two years left to live. It's possible this process could go on this long,' he told the local media.

If convicted, the former high official in the Communist Party during the years of Soviet occupation, who fought against the Nazis, could face life imprisonment.

The authorities accused Meri of organizing the deportation of 251 Estonian civilians, mostly women and children, from the island of Hiiumaa to the Novosibirsk region of Siberia. At least 44 of them died there or en route.

'We have sound evidence that Meri actively took part in preparations for the deportation and helped the security agencies carry it out as well,' prosecutor Sirje Hunt from the West Circuit Prosecutor's Office told Estonia's Postimees newspaper.

'As a commissioner from the party, he was one of the coordinators of the operation, who arrived in Hiiumaa to carry out the assignment already a week before March 25' when the deportations began, she said.

Meri says his role in the deportations has been publicly known for several years. He was sent to Hiiumaa as a commissioner from the Communist Party and his task was to make sure the security agencies treated people properly and gave them enough time to pack the belongings they were allowed to take with them.

'I cannot understand how you can call it genocide when one helps people who fell victim to genocide,' his lawyer, Sven Sillar told Kanal 2 television.

No date has yet been set for the trial, but the possibility of a public trial may further sour the already poor relations between Estonia and Russia.

The deportations are part of grim history of the Soviet occupation when in March 1949, 20,702 people were deported. In the first wave of deportations in June 1941, more than 9,200 people were deported to Siberia from Estonia by the Soviet authorities. So far, Estonian authorities have punished 10 people in connection with deportations.

Since the early 1990s, Estonia and Russia have argued over the interpretation of the post-war Soviet period. Moscow has tried to portray it as a liberation from Nazism, but for many Estonians it was a tragic period of occupation and subjugation.

Following its independence in 1991, Estonia joined NATO and the EU in 2004. This spring, Estonian authorities relocated a Soviet-era monument from a central square in the capital Tallinn to a military cemetery. The move caused riots and damaged further relations between the two neighbours.