In the thick of the downtown rioting

  • 2007-05-02
Australian-Estonian Rudi Tuisk was one of the many bystanders caught in the middle of the riots. He gave The Baltic Times' Joel Alas a first-hand account of the chaos. On Thursday night (April 26) my friend Piret Sillo and I were at the Pirita Yacht Club trying to chill out. We had felt the tension mounting in town during the day and wanted to get away from it for a while. It was late in the night when Piret got a phone call from a friend to say that her store was being robbed. Piret owns Marlboro Classics, a clothing store in the Old Town.

We caught a taxi who was brave enough to drive us right in the middle of the crowd. We were sitting in the taxi as we watched the store being ransacked. The mannequin from her store were being used to break other shop windows.
Our taxi was the only car driving through the thick of the crowd. The cars that came after were being attacked.
We went to my apartment in Roosikrantsi nearby. We rang the police who said they were too busy, but said it was safe for us to go back to the store. A good client of Piret's called and offered to drive us in.

The police strategy on Thursday night [appeared to be] to avoid being dispersed 's to set the lines and hold them. The result was that commercial property suffered. But they were able to answer the phones and they were professional.
There were still heaps of youths hanging about when we returned to the shop in the early hours of Friday morning.
The reason shops in her area were hit so hard was because there was a construction skip bin full of concrete from a building under renovation. They [looters] used it to smash the windows.
The shop's windows were smashed, there were clothes out on the street. They had taken everything of value, and smashed some of the computer equipment and gotten into the cash drawer.
We called Falck security because we wanted a team of guards to secure the street 's not just for Piret's shop but for all the shops nearby, who all had a lot of valuable goods to protect.

Falck sent a team of about six or eight guards who told us they would take care of the situation. About 20 minutes later, the Falck guards had disappeared. They left one skinny guard standing outside staring at his feet. He wouldn't have been able to protect anything. They gave no explanation.
Piret's shop has an alarm system, but they [Falck] didn't respond to it, and they didn't contact her to inform her.
At 8 a.m. on Friday (April 27) we came back to clean up. I took shovels, tools, a drill and gloves and we got stuck into it. We wanted to get the shop back in business as quickly as possible. Other stores were putting up wooden boards, but we wanted to replace the windows to send a message to everyone.
We cleaned all the remaining stock out of the store and put up signs telling people that the security cameras had filmed everyone going in, and that they would be caught. It got a lot of attention 's gangs of young people walking past stopped and saw that.

The glass repair guys spent all afternoon putting new glass in. They had just finished by the time it got dark. At about 7 p.m. the street was rushed by a mob after some scuffles with the police. Luckily the construction skip had been removed so there was no ammunition to throw at the windows.
Again, there were lots of guys out on the street and I thought Friday night would be worse. We stayed in.
On Saturday night (April 28) the police went in hard, stopping guys and girls 's which was the right thing to do, because there were lots of girls involved in the looting too.

What I want to know is why the government didn't call a curfew for young people. Why didn't they stop the trams running in from the suburbs at night, or at least have police on the trams and buses? I heard they closed some roads, but not enough.