Ojuland addressed a press conference on July 15th, labeling the new campaign as “demagoguery”. She stated that the recent wave of claims that human rights of ethnic Russians are being violated reminded her of an equally tense time — the situation in the early 1990s when Moscow did its utmost to oppose the restoration of Baltic independence, using every available opportunity in the international media to claim that Russians were being denied basic human rights. Ojuland noted that this recent campaign is a reaction to Baltic accession to NATO and the European Union.
The Baltic Times noted in their coverage of the press conference that Ojuland believes that Russian pressure is being exerted even though EU officials see Estonia’s minority policy in line with the Copenhagen criteria that governs these issues, and that there is no reason for the EU to succumb to this pressure which is aimed at returning international monitoring to Estonia. The EU long ago concluded that there is no minority rights problem in the Baltics.
Moscow volleyed back Ojuland’s blistering serve with a statement of their own on July 19th. The Russian Foreign Ministry claims that far from trying to “discredit Estonia, as Ms. Ojuland claims, Russia is trying to help this country solve a number of known problems that obstruct its further democratic development and pose a threat of complicating its real integration into a single Europe without borderlines or double standards.”
The Russian propaganda machine is in full gear, but Mihkelson wondered what the campaign hopes to achieve. He suggested that slow news days during summer contributed to keeping the issue in the media, as it would have gone unnoticed in most other situations. Incidentally, Estonia has a parliamentary group, “For the Protection of Human Rights in Chechnya”, and their chairman Andrus Herkel also saw the case as a propaganda, not a human rights issue.
It has been bordering on the absurd that a former world superpower unable to adopt, much less enforce, democratic practice within its own boundaries resorts to such picayune allegations, mud-flinging — all to hide what happens in places like Chechnya and Ingushetia. Fortunately, there are some within the Russian polity who see things as they are, without exaggeration.
Boris Kagarlitsky is one such Russian. The director of the Institute of Globalization Studies wrote an interesting opinion piece on ethnic Baltic Russians, published last week, July 22 in The Moscow Times (foreign-owned and often courageous in their editorial criticism of the Putin administration). Kagarlitsky’s article, “A Common Baltic Future” is a reasoned look at the hopes and goals of both Baltic nationalists and the ethnic Russian minority in those countries. Dismissing elected Latvian-Russian nationalist Tatyana Zhdanok, who has already organized circus-like stunts with Russian speaking schoolchildren as merely an exotic addition to an already colourful Europarliament, Kagarlitsky points out the obvious. Ethnic Russians in the Baltic States recognize full well that they are better off than their compatriots in the “historical homeland” are. This not merely because of a higher standard of living, for even noncitizens in Latvia and Estonia have more control over their lives than full-fledged Russian citizens. Kagarlitsky argues that Moscow does not have much use for Baltic Russians either, save as necessary propaganda tools. In truth their countries’ relations with Russia do not affect the status of the Russian language and its speakers in the Baltics. Indeed, there is no “Russian problem” in the EU — Latvia and Estonia would not have been admitted into the union if their laws had not been in line with EU norms. Thus agreeing with Ojuland — the Copenhagen criteria already rules.
Demagoguery, however seems to be the foundation of Russia’s foreign policy misadventures of late. Discrimination and humiliation are but two words used by demagogues; appealing to prejudices and passions has long been Russian political strategy. Ojuland is bang-on in identifying this strategy — Moscow’s unprincipled political agitation has become wearingly tiresome. But what else can we expect from a country that has no respect for human rights but knows all about propaganda as a political tool?