Dear fellow countrymen and guests of the conference!

The fourteenth of July is a tragic symbol for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, one that is known nowhere else in the world.

At the dawn of this day, which fifty-nine years ago was as bright as today, approximately ten thousand citizens of the Republic of Estonia were imprisoned and deported to Russia in cattle wagons, the heads of families separated from the rest of the families. Only about one-tenth of them returned. Those who deported us did not mean us to return at all. We were taken away from Estonia for ever.

This was not the first crime committed by the Soviet secret police against the citizens of the occupied Republic of Estonia. People went missing immediately after the Red Army poured across the border of Estonia. But the fourteenth of July was the most massive crime before the Second World War hit Estonia, and because of this it has become the symbol of all earlier and later victims. The Soviet Union had occupied Estonia one year before the June Deportation. Occupation spawned from the secret protocol of the pact made between Hitler and Stalin, which divided Europe between the two dictators and unleashed the Second World War.

Today, let us ask ourselves and the world, what are the conclusions that we are obliged to make in order to keep the horrors of the past chained in the past for ever?

The historical experience of Estonia, as well as of Latvia and Lithuania, can only add a bitter truth to the numerous international conventions: forsaking the principles of democracy always has the most severe impact on small nations. This is why it is our obvious obligation to proceed from international law in the development of the relationships between states and nations and to be ready to punish violations of international law just as we punish violations of any other law.

Valuation of a democratic organisation of life and human rights is higher in the modern world than ever before. Only a few dare to rise against them publicly. At the moment, I sense a bigger threat in the temptation to solve economic and social issues and those concerning ethnic minorities with totalitarian means, but promising a democratic future at the same time.

The historical experience of the world has proven that totalitarianism creates only totalitarianism; totalitarianism makes evil the highest goal of life through which it subjects itself to a painful death with many victims. This is how the Nazi Third Reich and the bolshevik Soviet Union faced their inevitable death. The price that tens of millions of innocent people were forced to pay with their lives for the ideological temptations of totalitarianism horrifies and directs us also today.

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