Ilves returns from Russia

Jul 01, 2008
Mike Collier in association with BNS

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Ilves went to Moscow - will Medvedev come to Tallinn? (Photo: Mike Collier)

TALLINN - Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves is back home after successfully completing a potentially tricky visit to Russia. While the itinerary included only a brief meeting with his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, the trip served an important role in showing that Estonia intends to normalise relations with its neighbour, even in the face of continued criticism.

The tensest moment of the trip came when Ilves walked out of the 5th World Congress of Finno-Ugric Peoples because of an offensive speech directed at him.

Ilves left the hall in Khanty-Mansiysk on June 28, along with the rest of the Estonian delegation after being harangued by Konstantin Kossachev, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian State Duma.

Kossachev's inflammatory response accused Ilves of "politicising" Finno-Ugric relations in his own speech and predictably bemoaned the abominable treatment Estonia supposedly metes out to ethnic Russians. Kossachev said his speech dealt with "the need to depoliticize any actions linked to the Finno-Ugric movement," as well as with the fact that "Finno-Ugric peoples do not have any principal problems compared to other peoples in Russia unlike Russian-speakers in Estonia."

Ilves had used his address to focus on the preservation of languages and the importance of democracy and European values on the basis of the Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian experience of European Union membership.

Ilves said language and the preservation and development of languages are truly important. But, in his words, this can only be successful "when we are engaged not in a narrow philological activity or garnishing for ethnography, but a socially encompassing, in other words political, theme."

The three largest Finno-Ugric peoples have experience with this, he said. "The European Union umbrella has given the Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian languages new guarantees they have never before possessed in their history. In no other continent exist such guarantees and no other international entity takes the health of languages as seriously," Ilves said.

"In what I have said I have already drawn a line between those Finno-Ugric peoples who are in the EU and the rest, who aren't," the president said and added that this distinction raises an important question: do we draw any distinctions among Finno-Ugric peoples? "Belonging to the EU as countries can be used merely as a formal distinction without implying judgement," he said.

"Hungarians, Finns and Estonians have chosen so-called European values, which today manifest themselves in the use of liberal democracy to order society," he said.

In Ilves' words, this choice does not necessarily presume an independent state. "Back when these societies chose to be European, they had no states of their own and Europe, too, was very different from what it is today," he said.

"But freedom and democracy also make for good rules of the game in non-state structures. Freedom and democracy were our choice 150 years ago, when not even the poets dreamt of an Estonian state," the president said and added that many Finno-Ugric peoples have yet to make this choice.

According to Ilves, through the European Union the Finno-Ugric languages have for the first time in their history developed a truly global reach, ringing in the meeting rooms of Brussels and Strasbourg.

"Here, in Khanty-Mansiysk, which borders Europe's eastern geographic boundary, it may seem a bit odd to speak of Europe, the European Union, and European values. But still -- freedom and democracy are universal values that acknowledge neither national nor geographic borders," Ilves said and added that Europe's understanding of diversity as a value applies to, and must apply to, everyone.

"The Finno-Ugric peoples may indeed be small butterflies among all of humanity, but it is a concern for all of humanity to ensure that these butterflies not flap their wings in the wrong place the wrong time, in a way that might be fatal to those much larger than the butterflies," Ilves said. "This is why the ecology of cultures and peoples is an issue for all mankind. This is why the European Union cares."

Later during Ilves' visit to Russia, police detained 70 activists of the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi participating in a rally at the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow which Ilves was due to attend to donate a bust of semiotician Yuri Lotman.

"The Nashi activists wanted to ask the Estonian head of state if he really regards the Soviet soldiers whose remains were removed from Tonismagi in Tallinn as drunkards and marauders, and why he urged Finno-Ugric peoples in Khanty-Mansiysk to break away from Russia," a spokeswoman for the organization said.

The text of Ilves speech does mention the virtues of democracy and self-determination but it does not contain any urging of breakaways from Russia. However, sections of the Russian media interpreted his words as a call for ethic minorities to press for independence.

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