Economist slams Amnesty International Report on Estonia
The Economist magazine has criticized a recent Amnesty International report, describing it as unfair and unbalanced.
Last week, Amnesty International presented a report on linguistic minorities in Estonia entitled “Discrimination must end”, which stated non-Estonian-speaking people had no guarantees of education in Estonia and could not equally compete on the labor market. Estonian authorities rejected the accusations presented in the report, noting that the report is largely based on outdated or biased information.
The Economist largely corroborated these views, saying the report echoes Kremlin propaganda in a way that Estonians find sinister and offensive. But most puzzling of all, it is a bizarre use of Amnesty’s limited resources. Just a short drive from Estonia, in Belarus and in Russia, there are real human rights abuses, including two classic Amnesty themes: misuse of psychiatry against dissidents, and multiple prisoners of conscience. Yet the coverage of these issues on Amnesty website is feeble, dated, or non-existent.”
The Economist finds Amnesty to have become just another left-wing pressure group. It points out that Amnesty International used to be an impartial and apolitical outfit focused on the issue of political prisoners. It recalls Amnesty’s campaign on behalf of Soviet prisoners of conscience, such as Jüri Kukk, an Estonian chemistry professor, in the 1980s.
The Economist says that during the Soviet occupation Moscow promoted mass integration into Estonia and the collapse of the evil empire left Estonia with hundreds of thousands of resentful, stranded ex-colonists, citizens of a country that no longer existed.
“Some countries might have deported them. That was the remedy adopted in much of Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Germans and Hungarians—regardless of their citizenship or politics—were sent “home” in conditions of great brutality.
“Instead, Estonia, like Latvia next door, decided to give these uninvited guests a free choice. They could go back to Russia. They could stay but adopt Russian citizenship. They could take local citizenship (assuming they were prepared to learn the language). Or they could stay on as non-citizens, able to work but not to vote”, the leader went on.
“Put like that, it may sound fair. But initially it prompted howls of protest against “discrimination”, not only from Russia but from Western human-rights bodies.
“The Estonians didn’t flinch. A “zero option”—giving citizenship to all comers—would be a disaster, they argued, ending any chance of restoring the Estonian language in public life, and of recreating a strong, confident national identity.
“They were right. More than 100,000 of the Soviet-era migrants have learnt Estonian and gained citizenship. In 1992, 32% of the population had no citizenship. Now the figure is 10%.
The Economist recalled how a correspondent tried to buy postage stamps in Tallinn using halting Estonian and was told by the clerk, in Russian, “govorite po chelovecheski’ (speak a human language).
“That was real discrimination. Estonians are unable to use their own language in their capital city. Now that’s changed too”.
“Reasonable people can disagree about the details of the language law, about the right level of subsidies for language courses, and about the rules for gaining citizenship. Nowhere’s perfect. But Estonia’s system is visibly working. It is extraordinarily hard to term it a burning issue fir international human-rights organization”, The Economist said.
Reproduced from Estonian Review, December 20, 2006.
Estonian Review is available over the Internet: http://www.vm.ee,or type in “Estonian Review”
