I must say, regarding your recent story "Bigotry and Denial," I fully empathize with Joe Bloggs' feelings of nervousness whenever he approached Estonian immigration officials. As a British Asian, my problems with them began in autumn 2003 when one official stubbornly refused to believe that a non-white person could have bona-fide European citizenship - and held me up for 25 minutes while they rudely demanded other identification, asked for signatures, and finally contacted the British embassy for a faxed copy of the passport page. Never in all my travels to Asia, Africa, and the United States and all over Europe have I ever been treated this way.
I sent angry letters to the Estonian consulate in London and my local MEP, who brought the issue up in the European Parliament - but it didn't seem to make much of a difference to Estonian immigration officials' unprofessional behavior.
There was the trip back from Riga via bus and, at the Estonian border, the humiliation of being the only person targeted by the border guard who boarded the bus, holding my passport as if it was a worthless piece of paper, and demanded loudly to know what my reasons were for going to Estonia and where I was staying.
There were the ridiculous questions at the airport, such as "How long have you lived in Britain?" when my passport clearly states my place of birth as being London, England! Or when I once remarked, "Tere!" to a border official, she immediately became very suspicious and demanded to know how I knew any Estonian and had I lived there before and if so, doing what exactly.
And the one thing that always happened was the unpleasant, suspicious look when I handed your passport to them, which made one feel like they have already been branded a criminal - followed by seriously intense examination of the passport by the official: scratching, bending, passing a couple of times under the violet light.
I would fly into Oslo or Denmark, where after a 10-15 second look; the officials would wave me through. And places like Denmark and Norway are much more likely destinations for immigrants than Estonia. I know Estonia likes to think of itself as a Nordic country, but believe me as a non-white European citizen, you can really feel the vast difference in welcome between those countries and Estonia.
A. Rahman
United Kingdom
