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| Europe |
| Riots in Estonian capital injure 66, causes much damage |
| 2007-04-29 |
| A second night of rioting and vandalism in the Estonian capital injured 66 people, including six policeman, following the government's decision to remove a Soviet war memorial revered by minority Russians. More than 500 people, many of them adolescents, were detained throughout the night as groups of vandals prowled the streets of downtown Tallinn breaking shop windows and looting stores, police spokeswoman Julia Garanza said Saturday. The trouble was sparked by the government's plan to remove a World War II statue - dubbed the Bronze Soldier - and exhume a number of Soviet soldiers buried next to it in downtown Tallinn. Estonia's Russians - less than one-third of the country's 1.3 million population - regard the monument as a shrine to Red Army soldiers who died fighting the Nazis, but ethnic Estonians consider it a painful reminder of hardships during a half-century of Soviet rule. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #3 Oddly enough, I think that the Russians will find it much easier to get along with the Estonians if the Estonians brutally crack down on their Russian minority and even expel many of them. This is because Russians are more comfortable with authoritarian regimes than they are liberal societies. They see the end of Saddam as a tragedy, because the "clarity" of his dictatorship was replaced with the "uncertainty" of democracy. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-04-29 10:19 |
| #2 And this is any different than the minority Sunnis in Iraq still trying to exert their power? The Estonians remember when the Red Army invaded in June 1940 not as liberators but as part of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2007-04-29 08:51 |
| #1 Shouldn't that header read "Russian organized thugs riot in Estonia"? |
| Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2007-04-29 08:22 |