Select language:
Home > Database > Estonia > News & Events
News & Events
Estonia to probe Soviet-era abuses
01.02.2008
TALLINN, Feb 1, 2008 (AFP) - Estonia on Friday established a new national body that will painstakingly log human rights violations committed during the five decades under Soviet rule.
"The aim of the Memory Institute is to investigate the systematic violations of human rights in Estonia from 1944 to 1991," the Baltic state's President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said at a ceremony to launch the organisation.
"The research of the Memory Institute is needed to overcome the anger of the past and to cope better with present-day problems," he said.
"We do not wish the past to be used far into the future as a tool in domestic and foreign policy. The institute should avoid politicising history," Ilves cautioned.
Estonia, a country of just 1.34 million people, has been trying to come to terms with its communist-era history since winning back its independence from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991.
Moscow invaded the country in 1940, under a pact with Nazi Germany, only two decades after Estonia became independent following two centuries of Russian rule.
Tens of thousands of Estonians were deported to Siberia in 1940 and again after 1944, when the Red Army drove out the Nazis, who had invaded in 1941 as Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally Stalin.
Many more suffered day-to-day oppression at home over the ensuing decades of Soviet rule.
Moscow and Tallinn regularly trade barbs over their differing interpretations of the past -- notably because many in Russia see the Soviet takeover of Estonia as an act of liberation from the Nazis, rather than what for many Estonians was simply one dictatorship replacing another.
Ilves said the Memory Institute will continue the work of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, which was founded in 1998 by his late predecessor as head of state, Lennart Meri.
But while the commission probed broad human rights abuses, the aim of the institute is to log individual cases, Ilves said.
Several ex-communist countries have created special organisations to probe the crimes of the past, but Ilves also pointed to examples from beyond the ex-communist bloc.
He cited Spain, where investigations of abuses by the right-wing Franco dictatorship are under way more than 30 years after its demise, and South Africa, which has scrutinised the crimes of the white-minority apartheid regime which collapsed in the early 1990s.
Source: http://www.haaba.com/news/2008/02/01/7-84989/estonia-to-probe-sovietera-abuses.html
Facts
- August 6, 1940 - Estonia became a part of Soviet Union
- From June 1940 until August 1941, more than 7000 Estonian citizens were arrested
