Speech by Minister Ilves at the Commemoration of Estonian Foreign Ministry colleagues deported and killed by the Soviets

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Estonia,
15 January 2001


Mr. President,
Mr. Prime Minister,
Dear Colleagues,

Today, just half a year before we commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the June Deportations, we have come together to pay homage to our colleagues from the Estonian Foreign Ministry. - To those colleagues persecuted only for having worked in the Foreign Ministry, and who therefore were forced to suffer unspeakable horrors. We have come together today to honor those government officials. We have come together too, to express our faith that what was done to them, our colleagues, will never, ever, happen again.

I would begin with a reminder: The Foreign Ministry is the sole institution of the Republic of Estonia, which throughout the Soviet occupation maintained not only de jure or legal continuity, but in fact maintained de facto continuity. The Estonian Foreign Ministry has worked without interruption for 83 years. Even then, when it became impossible to continue on the territory of Estonia, the foreign service worked on, defending the interests of the country at the political as well as the interests of Estonian citizens at consular level. Diplomats such as August Torma, Johannes Kaiv, Aksel Linkhorst and Ernst Jaakson continued their work in Estonian representations abroad until their deaths. Ernst Jaakson was one, who managed to see the restoration of Estonia statehood and continued to work as a diplomat for many years beyond that.

I remind you of all this so that we might understand one point: the people we have gathered to honor today are not names from a distant and halcyon past. No, they are in the direct sense of the word our colleagues. Three of them are here together again with us today. These people came to the foreign service for same reasons as we, they did the same work in the same institution. In Helsingi and Berlin even in the very same building.

Presently we shall unveil a commemorative plaque, on which two hundred and thirty one names are inscribed - two hundred and thirty one! I would like at this point to thank Professor Eero Medijainen for his painstaking work in finding them all.

In today's Foreign Ministry 231 persons would constitute about 60 per cent of our staff. One must, however, keep in mind that before the war no more than eighty government officials ever worked in the Foreign Ministry at one time and the entire staff never surpassed 120.

What was the fate of the 231 colleagues on the plaque?

Sixty-three were either shot or died in the camps. At least three persons committed suicide either prior to or during or in fear of arrest. Among the killed or dead were nine ministers or their equivalent; consequently fifty-seven were Foreign Service officials just like you.

Those colleagues paid the ultimate price for their government service. In addition, another fifty who were arrested, deported or persecuted survived and, having been released from the camps died later in Estonia or on the territory of the Soviet Union. Today we have the extraordinary opportunity to honor three of our colleagues, who survived and are with us today: Tamara Kask-Skolimowska, Erich-Ronald Lipstok and Edgar-Volmer Kõrver.

Among these depressing and anonymous statistics no figures exist for how many family members - spouses and children - were deported along with their loved one in the foreign service. Nor is it known how many of them died in Siberia. One child of a diplomat who did survive deportation is with us today. The President of Estonia.

Many of our colleagues were working abroad at the time of occupation. I recall how ambassador Ernst Jaakson once showed me a fifty-year old telegram he had saved, in which the communist puppet regime informed the young deputy consul, that upon setting foot on the territory of the Soviet Union he would be immediately shot. Altogether at least eight-five Estonian diplomats remained or fled abroad. Here I would also like to once again say on behalf of Estonia, thank you to those governments that allowed our diplomats to continue working as well as to those gave them asylum.

This depressing roll-call of the fates of our colleagues does show one thing: what befell them did not just happen, it was thoroughly premeditated and planned, systematic extermination. The killing machine was in fact so systematic, that it merely sufficed to have worked for a short time some time in the past in the Foreign Ministry. People were simply hunted down. So, for example, August Vahe, who in 1921 worked in a semi-official capacity as secretary to the Estonian Consul in Tiblisi merely for a few months, and later even changed his name, was nonetheless tracked down. August Vahe died under interrogation in 1951, thirty years after leaving the Foreign Service. The reason for his arrest: working for the Estonian Foreign Ministry.



Dear Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Elsewhere, diplomats also die while performing their duties in government service, and elsewhere too, they are honored on commemorative plaques. To serve your country as a diplomat can be life-threatening anywhere. And indeed, if you read the commemorative plaques in foreign ministries in the West, you will find the names of diplomats who throughout the history of their country have died in service in places all over the world.

For us, however, it is different. Two states, two regimes destroyed the lives of our colleagues. One successor state destroyed the lives of two colleagues and has apologised. But the other regime systematically destroyed lives and hunted down diplomats. That state, that murdered millions and decimated tens of nations, collapsed - thank God - ten years ago, on Christmas Day, 1991.

Were all that in the past, our feelings today would be simpler and clearer. It appears, however, that the past has not passed. As opposed to the exemplary Vergangenheitsbewältigung policy of Germany, we see that crimes of the past are not regretted, instead they are in fact glorified.

The Stalinist hymn is restored, the Butcher of Budapest, Andropov, is honored with a bust. The founding day of the state terror organisation CheKa by the mass-murderer Felix Dzersinky is celebrated as a holiday. The badge of office stolen from our illegally arrested and deported President is the object of some kind of bait-and-switch game, not to mention our stolen embassies. But let each chose their own standards by which to proclaim their existence and nature. We are told: Don't even think of receiving an apology from us. Quite frankly, we don't.

The past, however, is not a five-and-dime store, where you pick and choose among the bric-a-brac; where one can select what to extol and what to deny. By no stretch of logic is it possible for a country to say it has nothing to do with the crimes committed by the USSR and simultaneously proclaim that the embassies of Estonia are property of the legal successor to the USSR and not the property of Estonia.



Dear Colleagues.

All of us in Estonia have a tendency, a completely understandable tendency, given fifty years of Soviet horrors and abominations, to exalt the Republic of Estonia, including the achievements of the Foreign Ministry during the twenty years before the occupation. This attitude is mirrored in our language: we still speak of 1918-40 as the "Estonian Time" or the "Time of the Republic", as if today were neither the Estonian Time or Time of the Republic. In human terms, this is completely understandable. Ever since Plato first described this tendency, it has been noted how people generally tend to believe that that which came before us was better. That what we have now is merely a pale copy. That we are mere dwarves who stand upon the shoulders of the giants of the past.

I would, nonetheless, describe contemporary Estonian foreign policy as lessons learned from the pre-war period. Back then, three factors worked against a successful Estonian foreign policy:

1. The nature of international relations between the two wars
2. A distancing from democratic practices that began in 1934 and with that, a concomitant isolation in the international arena.
3. The nature of Estonian Foreign policy-making back then

The general international situation in the inter-war period was, as we know, based on power-politics and secret diplomacy. This made it nearly impossible for a small country to influence, and often let alone even to know what was going on in foreign relations or what decisions were made over its head.

In 1940 Estonia was isolated and face-to-face with its own problems. Agreements it had signed were not lived up to, international organizations were incapable of fulfilling the objectives they had set out for themselves. European countries viewed one another with doubt and suspicion; one's own interests were to be defended at the expense of another's. This kind of autarkic thinking became more and more commonplace, culminating finally with World War Two.

After the War it was finally understood, that only one remedy would work against autarkic thinking and secret diplomacy: political, economic and military competition among the countries of Europe had to be transformed into co-operation, thereby eliminating the rivalry of the pre-war period. After fifty years, Europe is close to accomplishing what in the inter-war period was impossible. Through the European Union, conflict in Europe has been superceded by economic co-operation, the growth of general well-being and the flowering of democracy. To that, NATO has added effective military power that is directed against no one, yet today provides a sense security even beyond its own borders.

Herein lies the difference with 1939. Back then, each country feared that contributing to international co-operation meant losing something of one's own, doing without; that a benefit for one country necessarily comes at the expense of another. The European Union and NATO, on the other hand, work on the principle that a benefit for one is an advantage for all, that the whole of co-operation is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

When we speak of the need to integrated into Europe, I always hear in the mind's ear the opposite of integration in the words of the British Foreign Secretary in 1938. This was back at the time when the Western Powers were dismantling what was then the sixth largest industrial economy in the world, Czechoslovakia, consigning that country to oblivion. Neville Chamberlain said back then: "It is a small and faraway place, of which we know nothing." If already Czechoslovakia was too small, too far and too little known, what then was pre-war Estonia?

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, secret deals between powers, the shameful betrayal of countries that occurred in 1938 in Munich, and in 1945 in Yalta, are removed from the realm of the possible only through the integration of the whole of Europe. This in fact is the reason why Estonia must become a member of the European Union and a member of NATO. This is the only way to be at the table where and when decisions are made. If we do not belong to the Union or to NATO, the fate of Estonia again will be decided by others, not by us.

2. To return to pre-war Estonian foreign policy: democracy in Estonia after 1934 stood on weak foundations. A country, if it had a political police, even though not a repressive one; a country, where political parties were banned, although a democratically elected parliament did function; and censorship, even if mild - such a country could not enjoy any special sympathy and support in the rest of the democratic world. Thus, compared to Czechoslovakia, Estonia was not only smaller and farther away, but also suffered from a certain political isolation. Estonia lacked the parliamentary oversight and openness of civil society that goes with a fully democratic society. And this was as ruinous as international isolation. In foreign policy, absence of oversight meant that a very small elite decided the fate of the Estonian nation and people, signing the Basing Agreement with the Soviets and later capitulating to the USSR. Even the Estonian Foreign Service did not really know what was happening, to judge from the memoirs of our diplomats.

Third, with hindsight, we must view as one shortcoming of Estonian foreign policy the politicization of diplomacy. Politically appointed ambassadors, whose qualifications cannot compete with those of career diplomats, have been fateful for other countries as well. At least one country has analyzed why just Estonia was successful in being among the first to begin negotiations with the European Union. One reason, it concluded, was that Estonia does not have political appointees among its diplomats.

I personally consider the depoliticisation of the Foreign Service after the restoration of independence to be one of the foundations of Estonia's success in foreign affairs. Before the war, however, it was different. How else than by politicisation can we explain such a short-sighted decision as to close for good Estonia's embassy in Washington in 1925 and to recall our ambassador, Ants Piip, later shot by the soviets?



Dear Colleagues,

I would like finally to speak about why we are in the Foreign Service in the first place. I know from our discussions, from your phone calls and e-mails, how disheartened you become when once again some politician or journalist berates and heaps scorn on your work. Or when someone announces publicly that a fashion model - to my mind an altogether capable model, but who has never flaunted her Estonianness - has done ten times more for Estonian foreign policy than the whole of the Foreign Ministry.

So too I feel your hurt, when the press interprets Estonian successes in EU membership negotiations not as the genuine accomplishments they in fact are, but rather as a sell-out Estonian interests. What point is there in working long days at low pay, if one the one hand, you are abused by politicians and journalists, and on the other hand, you know full well that in the private sector you could earn far, far more. Many in fact have gone that route.

We still lack in Estonia that understanding you find in many other democratic countries, that to serve your country is one of the noblest of pursuits. We lack the kind of thinking described to me once by a high American official. One of his forefathers was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. For over eleven generations someone in his family had always gone into public service, to serve his country: "We simply have this principle," he said, "anyone can earn money, but only the best are called to serve your country."

Being a good civil servant is not a laughing matter. It assumes of one a certain character, at least if we want the government to fulfill its functions. An official must be talented and devoted, he or she must be the kind of person who, were they to work elsewhere, would earn far more, but who nonetheless prefers to serve one's country. Why? Because it is more exciting, because it is more creative, because it is nobler. But if serving one's country is considered to be shameful, then one's country itself becomes an object of shame.

These issues bother me especially today, because that commemorative plaque where the names of ministers and typists, ambassadors and couriers, protocol and political officials stand side by side, shows, that should things ever again go very wrong, the same fate shall await us as well.

The names on that plaque are the names of our colleagues. More importantly: they were - and are - the same as you in spirit: people, often young, who came to build up their country and to take it into the world. For that many paid the ultimate price.

My thoughts and feelings today are summed up on that commemorative plaque by the words of Betti Alver:

Life itself
pulled you from the open waters
to be the light of the world
through time.

In the name of life
you stand for the living.
In the name of life
you will stand fast against fate
if needed.


Thank you.