Estonia’s Parliament was behind barricades on Saturday for the first time since Soviet tanks tried to crush the independence movement in 1991, as violence rocked Tallinn for a second night after the removal of a Soviet war memorial.
Seventy-four people were injured, including nine police officers, as gangs made up mainly of young Russian speakers ran riot in Tallinn, smashing the windows of the Art Academy, breaking into the National Theatre and robbing liquor stores.
Disturbances were also reported in the town of Johvi, 165km north-east of Tallinn, a region inhabited mainly by ethnic Russians, marking a worrying trend that the violence could be spreading throughout this small country of 1,34-million people.
Rioting had first erupted in Tallinn on Thursday night when police tried to prevent a small group of youths from breaking through a security cordon set up around a towering bronze figure of a Red Army soldier ahead of the statue’s removal.
A 20-year-old died after being stabbed during the first night of violence and 300 were detained in what officials have called the worst unrest to rock Tallinn since Estonia regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
The statue was moved to a secret location in the early hours of Friday in an attempt to prevent further unrest.
Concrete barricades have been set up along the road leading to Parliament and in front of the legislative building after about 60 youngsters demonstrated outside, shouting ”Fascists” in Russian and calling on Prime Minister Andrus Ansip to come out.
The last time the Estonian Parliament was barricaded was in 1991, when Soviet tanks advanced on Tallinn to crush the drive for independence from the Soviet Union.
Rampage
A few hundred people went on the rampage overnight in the town of Johvi, smashing the windows of buildings and cars and vandalising a statue of General Aleksander Tonisson, who led an Estonian army unit against the Russians during Estonia’s war of independence in 1918.
The statue of Tonisson, who went on to become mayor of Tallinn and was executed by the Soviets when they first occupied Estonia in 1940, was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire.
Estonia, like its Baltic neighbours Latvia and Lithuania, briefly enjoyed independence between the two world wars, before being occupied by the Soviets at the start of World War II and then by the Nazis.
It was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union at the end of the war and only regained independence in 1991, when the USSR crumbled.
The Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial at the heart of the unrest is seen by Estonians as a symbol of 50 years of Soviet occupation, during which tens of thousands of Estonians were murdered or deported and large numbers of ethnic Russians shipped in as Moscow tried to ”russify” the Baltics.
Earlier this year, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves called the statue an insult to Estonians and ”a monument to mass murder”. Russia considers it a sacred memorial to the Red Army soldiers who defeated Nazism in World War II.
Angry reaction
Russia reacted angrily after the statue was moved before daybreak on Friday following the first night of riots in Tallinn.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the Estonian government of fomenting tensions, and the Russian Senate approved a resolution calling for diplomatic relations with Estonia to be broken off.
Gangs of youths in downtown Tallinn shouted ”Rossiya! Rossiya! [Russia! Russia!]” and waved Russian flags in the overnight unrest, as police tried to keep them away from aggressive Estonian youths. Police detained about 600 people, many of them drunken, Russian-speaking teenagers, officials said.
Access to the Estonian government’s website was restricted on Saturday after ”attacks originating from foreign servers” were stepped up.
Estonian leaders have called on people not to heed calls to attend public gatherings.
Deputy Speaker of Parliament Kristiina Ojuland urged youngsters not to respond to ”provocations” posted on the internet. ”That’s what Russia is waiting for impatiently — a fight between Estonian and Russian-speaking young people,” she said.
Central Tallinn was calm on Saturday morning, according to an Agence France-Presse correspondent. — Sapa-AFP