President of the Republic on the Reception of the Year of the Elderly in Kadriorg, on June 29, 1999
29.06.1999

My dear guests,

for a long time, I looked for the word by which to address you, and I will still be searching for this word today and tomorrow. I was reminded of my first time in New York, when a friend of mine bought me a reduced-price ticket, a ticket on which it was printed that it was meant for senior citizens. And I have often wondered why we have never made the effort to find, in our mother tongue, the words that would be more correct than vanur, or ''an old person''. Open the Estonian dictionaries, and you will see that unfortunately the ending ''-ur'' in Estonian usually has a negative connotation, with one or two exceptions, including the word sõdur (soldier). So I would like to address you today just as my fellow citizens, some younger, some older than myself. And I myself am 70 years old.

I am glad to receive you here in Kadriorg today, right after Midsummer, and after having returned from Riga between three and four o'clock in the morning. In Riga, we shook hands with the resigning Latvian President Guntis Ulmanis, who said that he had given a lot of thought to his plans for the future. He also had an idea that the political experience that we have accumulated here in the Baltic States should be preserved. He wishes to carry this idea to life. He would like to create a society or an association that would include - and again, for the lack of the Estonian word I use the English phrase - senior statesmen. Indeed, Guntis Ulmanis is much younger than everybody here. But the Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus is of my age, and I was glad to realise that he supported this idea. The experience we have acquired is valuable, it is a value to be preserved.

This lengthy introduction of mine should explain the reason why the Republic of Estonia needs you. Our country needs you because Estonia's life experience is alive first and foremost in you. It is alive in the years that you have left behind you. It is alive in the dreams and hopes you never betrayed, even at the time when the hand of the alien power was clenching our throat, trying to force us to speak alien languages and alien minds instead of our own. This is an immense value - this experience of yours. In brief, it means nothing else but faithfulness to Estonia.

If we believe the Estonian papers, I have two reasons for gratitude and delight. You have chosen me the patron of the Year of the Elderly. And when I visit the Estonian schools and universities, it seems to me that I relate just as well to the generation for whose sake we and our mothers and fathers have had to suffer so much, or even to leave this world too early. The bridge between the youngest and the oldest may be the most important factor of our social and political life. In any case, it is much more important in Estonia than in Sweden or in Germany or in any other country. This is so exactly because the restoration of our Republic also means the building of a bridge. One arch of the bridge rests on the memories and experiences from the years 1938-1939 - I would rather not mention the year 1940 - and the other arch on the other bank where the young people live and act. But the river separating our generations should not separate our experiences. And we, all of us together, are the bridge over that river.

We could discuss the Estonian policy towards the elderly, and this will be discussed in more detail by the Secretary General Mr. Danilov, the man who will take the floor next. I would like to ask you something else. What is the policy of the elderly towards the Republic of Estonia? Because the fact that we are in advanced age, or in the old age, gray-haired, or like some of us here, almost without hair, does not mean that we should not have the policy of our own towards the Republic of Estonia. If this were so, Estonia would fall apart. The language as such is a bridge that has survived all hard times and links all generations. But there are so many values besides the language, and these values can reach the other bank only if you are active, if you understand that it is your responsibility to work out your policy towards the Republic of Estonia. If you understand that it is only from you that the youth can learn know that here, in Estonia, we have had a country where there was no hatred, where honesty prevailed, where concord prevailed. Of course, this does not mean that we were living a fairy tale - we had our hardships. First of all, there was hard work, but there was also the deep pride over this work. There was the joy the work gave us. This is probably the most valuable conclusion we could draw. This is like the pole of a torchlight battery that - through your words, through the example you set - needs contact to the other pole in order to yield a spark, to give out light. Even if this other pole is so different from our generation, it likewise wishes to see Estonia as a unanimous, smiling, and hardworking European country. Let us join these two arches of the bridge even before the rain begins. And Estonia will have a beautiful way to the future!

Thank you!