Mr. Secretary-General,
Your Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,


I am grateful to you for the fact that we are both here today.

I have once before had the honour to speak in this room. That was as part of that historic day last year when at 11.40 o“clock on the 20th of December my honoured colleague, the ambassador of the Soviet Union, gave notice that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. On that day, I took the liberty of quoting orwell, to create history by joining together culture and politics. Today, this quotation, made somewhat shamelessly at the time, has together with secretary-general Manfred Wörner's consequent mild expression of displeasure become history.

It became history, just as the fact that I am today speaking to you as the President of the Republic of Estonia, who but recently assumed his post as a result of multi-party democratic elections in Estonia since the second world war. So, as you see, history can be just as in the fable of the rose and thorne. I am grateful to my elector's, but I am also grateful to NATO, for the political will shown by Western and Northern Europe and North America in supporting the democratisation process in my homeland, by which you supported Europe from Europe. Although this support was somewhat reserved, mostly of a moral character, perhaps even platonic, it created a strong counterweight to the forces of revanchism.

Believe me, I am fully able to appreciate and recall with thanks the visits to Tallinn by secretary-general Manfred Wörner last spring and by general Veiglik Eide this fall, not to mention the sight of the men of the standing Naval Force of Atlantic on the colourful streets of the old Hanseatic town of Tallinn/Reval. May I also recall Estonia`s active participation in the founding of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, and in its subsequent meetings. This was not the NATO umbrella, under whose protection we restored an amputated Europe on an almost-forgotten field hospital operating table, where hope still persisted among a people injured in the Second World War. This was not under the NATO umbrella, but it was in the shade of this Umbrella. I thank you, and you might thank the Estonian people. Estonia is once again standing tall.
What a beautiful time, this history!

The Estonian people used the brief period after the end of the first cold war and before the beginning of the Second Cold War with maximum efficiency, peacefully and self-confidently. Behind the iron curtain we had forty years to ponder the values of Europe, just as the thirsty wanderer in the desert ponders the oasis, to plain our strategies and tactics. Estonia, as you may recall, already five years ago played the role of Icebreaker in that part of Europe which you surveyed through a telescope as if looking at another planet, and which you called the Warsaw pact. It is not for me to make the accusation, that this was a part of our planet which was thoroughly forgotten. That on the edge of the Baltic, the memory of parliamentary democracy was never completely extinguished. That on the other end of this part of the world which you knew from satellite pictures and through the eyes and ears of journalists reporting what they saw and heard while racing around in comfortable intourist sedans, I photographed with my Nikon the neolithic tools which were in use in theTshukshi Kolkhoz named after Lenin. That in this part of the world exicted and still exists today an eighteenth-century. If you don't know what to do now with NATO, read Sakharov. If it is being suggested to you, that with the disintegration of the Warsaw pact, NATO must inevitably disintegrate, read him. Academician Sakharov and the Baltic States are also ready to answer those questions, which you are as yet unable to formulate.

So, as you see, the past becomes the present, and history becomes politics. And politics is, in our modern age, a factory which produces the future. And the Baltic States are the experimental workshop and research laboratory of this factory. Estonia is producing models which, I hope, will in the of twenty years begin moving on those Eastern European roads which are today still overgrown in forests.

What has Estonia achieved today, less than twelve months after our joining the NACC? Secretary-general Manfred Wörner would have difficulty recognising the streets of Tallinn today. True, our apartments are cold and our street lamps are glowing dimly in the dark of winter, because we must conserve energy. But in the shops of Tallinn you can by IBM computers, Danish beer, Reanult cars and, as you see, "Sabena" air tickets, all for Estonian kroons, which you may exchange in Nordic Banks according to an exchange rate which has, during the past half year of its existence, been as unchangeable as the Greenwich Meridian. I hope you don't mind if I remind you once again: Estonia was occupied by the Red Army on the basis of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1940, but this is only half of the crime. After the occupation began the colonizaton of Estonia, the deportation of Estonians to Siberia and the settlement of Russian colonists to Estonia for whom the huge Soviet armaments factories were built needing their thousands of workers. The liberation of Estonia, the restoration of a state ruled by law. Five years ago all of our work, creativity and inventiveness was tied by an umbilical string to Moscow. 96 % of Estonian exports went on command to Russia. Today, over 50 % of our exports goes to the west, in the first place to he Nordic countries - in small part also here, to Belgium. Don`t underestimate this change. This is the economic foundation of independence. Our national currency, whose emission was the object of so many ironical remarks by your television philosophers, has become the symbol for our decolonization and our most effective tool, our strongest weapon.

The umbilical cord which bound us to the Soviet past was cut through by our elections. The umbilical cord which tethered us to the economic slavery of the world's last colonial empire was cut through by the emission of our national currency. It is backed by gold and foreign currency reserves, it is called the kroon - though we are republicans and honest protestants - and its value has remained unchanged since the first day of its introduction: eight kroons are worth one Deutsche mark.

It sounds simple. But try to understand and appreciate, what lies behind it. Behind it is the readiness of the people to conserve, or, in other words, an ideslistic preparedness to live a poor and difficult life, so that economic restructuring can take place as quickly as possible. A favourable investment climate has been created in Estonia. Estonia has begun the privatization of large industry. Estonia has once again turned its face towards the west, without turing its back on Russian democracy. Estonia is once again a state open to all directions of the globe: Estonia is a state.

Me. Secretary-general:

From here arise three problems, which all direct us to the same conclusion. Let me list these as follows: first, Estonia is a state, and for this reason the pressure buy Russian extremists has drastically increased against the restored state of Estonia.

Second, the pressure on Estonia has grown, and thus the need to counterbalance this pressure has also increased. Please don't misunderstand me: this is not directed against Russia, and where democratic traditions are interwoven with greco-roman law, Russian democracy id young and needs support. Let this support be friendly and worthy but uncompromising: international law is and must be the basis of relations even when one state is very small and the other is very large. It is only on this condition that we may accept Russia as an European state, which shares European values: no matter what type of pragmmatic retreat form this imperative would leave the reform-minded Russian leadership isolated and force it into the embrace of the extremists, as unfortunately was the case with Mikhail Gorbatchov.

Third, the need for a counterbalance in the vacuum of the Baltic region has increased, and thus the need for cooperation with the Baltic states has grown more urgent. The need for cooperation is mutual, because this would be a guarantee for the stability of Northern Europe. If follows thus, that this is also, in the national interests of the Russian Federation. Leaving aside for the moment the black scenario of the assumption of power by Russian extremists, I would to draw your attention to the possibility of spontaneous processes developing. Among the former territories of the Soviet Union, Estonia has the most stable legal order and the fastest economic development. On our side of the border there is a positive development, on the Russian side we find a deepening economic and social chaos. The pressure on the Estonian border will thus be increased by economic refugees, organized crime, smuggling of drugs and weapons.

The danger of crisis erupting is all the greater, since Russia has to date failed to fulfil the decision of the 1992 Helsinki summit document, stipulating the early, orderly and complete withdrawal of ex-soviet forces form the Baltic States. Instead, during the recent period, Russia has tried to justify the continued presence of forces with political arguments regarding their stabilizing role, regarding the special role of Russia in peripheral areas. These political pretexts contain the seeds which could prove fateful for the democratization process in Russia and for Russia itself. Every state, which would like to see Russia move in a direction toward democracy and the market economy - Estonia just as much as the states of NATO - must recognize that such a political development is dangerous and in contradiction to Russia`s own interests, that is, dangerous to Russia itself.

For this reason, let me conclude by repeating my proposal, which I first made last year on the 2nd of December in Bonn; the possibility of a major crisis is by no means excluded. It can be prevented only via preventive diplomatic means. In this we find NATO's fatal contradiction: as long as there is no crisis, NATO's intervention is already too late. This dilemma has become clear to all of us after the tragic lesson of Yugoslavia. War in Yugoslavia, bloodbaths in the Dnestr region and the appeals of Zhirinovski-type politicians to aid the advance of the Russian flag with atomic weapons in both a westerly as well as an easterly direction in the name of a greater Russia sound as if they originate form the period of the great colonial empires, but in fact are quite contemporary. This is the reality, which points out the continued need for NATO as an organization, but which also points out the need for a more precise definition of NATO`s role. The simple clarity of the days of the Warsaw pact are gone forever, it is now in the interests of Europe to learn how to act preventively.

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