TALLINN - The wartime monument scandal continued into its second week, with Russia expressing its anger at acts of vandalism against monuments to fallen Red Army soldiers and local activists holding a vigil as a call to peace.
The wave of vandalism, believed to be carried out by ethnic Estonians, occurred as a result of the government's decision to remove the Lihula monument to Estonia's freedom fighters.
"The defilement of graves as an act of vandalism naturally cannot give us any other feeling than indignation," a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry told Interfax.
"This form of vandalism has been assuming a mass scale lately, which appears to be sacrilegious, to say the least, if not provocative," the spokesman continued. "Apparently, those who have problems with their historical memory should be reminded that vandalism is perpetrated against the graves of and monuments to soldiers of the anti-Nazi coalition. We expect that the authorities will take necessary measures to restore and protect them."
In the latest incident, vandals painted a swastika and a cross along with the word "Parts" on the base of a WWII monument to the dead of both warring sides in Kuressaare, capital of Saaremaa Island.
Vandals have desecrated several Soviet monuments, mostly with graffiti, following the Sept. 2 removal of the Lihula monument, which depicted a freedom fighter wearing a Wehrmacht uniform. The removal resulted in a clash between police and locals and a few minor injuries.
Meanwhile, thousands of candles were lit on the night of Sept. 9 to create a chain of light between the central WWII Red Army monument in Tallinn and the former site of the infamous Lihula monument.
The event's organizer, journalist Juku-Kalle Raid, said the candles were placed with about 10 centimeter intervals near the so-called Bronze Soldier at Tonismagi, though a couple of kilometers southwest on the Tallinn-Parnu road the distance between candles was a couple of dozen meters. Further on the motorway there were even less candles, but Raid said the vigil participants had nevertheless managed to put a 100-kilometer candlechain together.
"With the lighting of candles we wish to say that a people is living here who hate violence and war, we wish to say that we are not Nazis or communists. We are simply a people who have often found themselves in complicated situations in history. And we are a people who are allowed to and must remember their dead," Raid said in a statement.
The vigil had been agreed on by the police and government.
Raid said the participants were volunteers, journalists, writers and members of the youth caucus of Pro Patria Union.
Finally, representatives of the Estonian Union of Freedom Fighters said during a meeting with Prime Minister Juhan Parts on Sept. 10 that they did not associate themselves with the dismantled Lihula monument.
Parts and union officials said it was regrettable that problems related to the monument had overshadowed the need to acknowledge and remember the Estonians who fell in the struggle for independence.
One union official, Kuno Raude, said that freedom fighters consider it essential that Parliament make a political assessment of the WWII events and recognize the defense battles of 1944 as a struggle for the restoration of independence.
The prime minister said the government intends to continue a study on the country's recent history and make it known elsewhere in the world in order to tell the truth about what happened in the Baltic country during the occupations and about crimes committed by the totalitarian Nazi and Soviet regimes.
