Itching for Eestimaa: A blog about the world's only post-communist nordic country.

[Harold Schiffman]

Itching for Eestimaa
A blog about the world's only post-communist nordic country.

teisipäev, Detsember 18, 2007
tools of foreign policy

After reading through Chris Schüler's piece in The Independent which
blends his trip through a neighborhood of Latvia with random facts
about Estonia to synthesize a generic attack on 'the Baltic republics'
in true "I'm a brave reporter in an unsafe place" British fashion, I
got to thinking about how any random report can be used as a political
weapon in the hands of foreign policy thinkers. (Hat tip to Ivan vs.
Jaan by the way) First, I would like to slime Schüler, not for
insulting the fatherland of Estonia, but because he was unable to put
several concepts together to better explain the situation for his
readers.

Schüler writes about Estonia's large industrial ethnic Russian
population brought here during the Soviet period. Then he writes about
the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then he writes about high
unemployment and drug use that has contributed to a high rate of HIV
among Russophones in northeast Estonia. Then he writes about the high
percentage of ethnic Russians in Estonian jails. And what's to blame
for all of this? The Language Act.

You see, if all Estonia's institutions had Cyrillic lettering on their
signs, everything would be better. Even though ETV offers news in
Russian, most commercial forms are available in Russian, and even
Postimees -- the newspaper of Jaan Tõnisson who encouraged the switch
from German to Estonian in public life a century ago -- has a Russian
edition (!), it's still not enough.

If Estonia was like Finland, then everything would be different. There
would be no large unemployed minority in industrial northeastern
cities that turned to crime and drug use to ease their pain and
accidentally contracted HIV. Why? Because Finland kept the Soviet
Union out of Finland.

If only he could have managed to connect the obvious dots of large
migrant population + economic collapse = unemployment = increased
crime and drug use and suicide, Schüler might have managed to serve
his readers. But he didn't.

In his article he uses reports by Amnesty International and others to
back up his interpretation. But that got me wondering about how
Russian speakers were treated across the Gulf of Finland where they
now make up nearly 1 percent of the population, putting them in
striking distance of the Swedes (5.5 percent) for having their
language coequal with Finnish.

It turned out that in the Council of Europe's latest report on
Finland, published just last month, it was found that Russian speakers
there are complaining about their level of support there too:

Representatives of the speakers informed the Committee of Experts
during an "on the spot" visit that they have difficulties in
developing a dialogue with the government regarding the status of the
Russian language.

In addition, during the on the spot visit, the Committee of Experts
was informed by the speakers about the possible closure of the Russian
public library of the Institute for Russian and East European Studies.
As a result, the books would be dispersed in different specialized
libraries not open to the public.
Russians have difficulties in developing a dialogue regarding their
status? The Finns are closing Russian libraries and dispersing their
books to "specialized libraries" where they will be kept out of the
hands of Russian speakers?

Did I mention that Finns like to wear rings with swastikas on them?
They even defend their collaboration with Nazi Germany during the
Continuation War in 1944? I know, it's really ugly up there in Halonen
country.

One can only hope that the next time The Independent sends a reporter
to Estonia, they'll wind up writing about Finland. Seems like a
natural choice.

http://palun.blogspot.com/2007/12/tools-of-foreign-policy.html


-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to
its members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner
or sponsor of
the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
disagree with a
message are encouraged to post a rebuttal. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)
*******************************************