President Lennart Meri this morning spoke on the BBC World Service live programme ''The World Today'', where the Istanbul summit was analysed. The Estonian Head of State was introduced to the audience as a statesman who, by not attending the Istanbul summit, protested OSCE's soft stands on the Chechnya issue.

President Meri said that everybody should understand that Russia's war against Chechnya is not only about Chechnya, it is about the future of Russia, above all about the future of Russian democracy, and the future of international security.

To the programme manager's question that OSCE and a great deal of Western governments consider Russia as a nuclear power and member of the UN Security Council ''simply too big a fish to tangle with'', President Meri answered: ''Yes, I agree with you that Russia is and remains a big power, but that does not make the problems easier. We have to confront the reality, and from time to time I have the impression that, we prefer to have this shamanistic belief in the word put on paper while the war is unfortunately going on.'' He reiterated: ''If Russia occupies Grozny, it may gain a victory, but it will set off a chain of events, terrorism by the Chechens, and counter-terrorism by the Russians, that will make Russia ever more repressive, ever more violent and ever more interested in pursuing military action against its own people and its neighbours''.

To the question whether the Chechnya issue is so important to Estonia because of our fears for Russia's possible territorial ambitions in the Baltic States, President Meri replied that in his opinion, Estonia is pretty much a European country, thinking not only of its own interests, but also of the interests of Europe, and first of all of the interests of a democratic Russia. ''We will never lose hope that one day Russia will be democratic.'' There is always hope in Russia, but it is another question whether this hope prevails in the Russian parliament and its government, he added. As the President said, the Russian Prime Minister Putin is unlikely to end a war that has made more popular. ''But Yeltsin must confront the fact that he could easily go into history books as a man who brought Russia democracy and then took it away,'' President Lennart Meri said in his interview to the BBC this morning.


Press Service of the Office of the President
Kadriorg, November 19, 1999

back | archive of press releases | main page