Voices of the Gulag

From Tallinn, Estonia, a correspondent writes:

Mart Niklus was released a few months before the other well-known Estonian prisoner Enn Tarto. Both continued to languish in Soviet camps for years after the beginning of "glasnost" and "perestroika". They had been incarcerated for speaking out for human rights - something that the new Soviet "openness" under Gorbachev supposedly no longer criminalized.

Estonian ex-Gulag prisoners urge world leaders to shun Moscow V-day event

TALLINN, April 13 (AFP) - Two Estonians who were held in labour camps as political prisoners during the Soviet occupation of the Baltic state urged world leaders in a letter published Wednesday to boycott events in Moscow on May 9 to mark the end of World War II.

"Seeking to divert the attention of the world from both past and present crimes, the leaders of the Russian Federation intend to stage on May 9 a grand propaganda event to which leaders of many countries have been invited," the ex-prisoners, Kalju Matik and Mart Niklus, said in their open letter, which was sent to the leaders of five countries.

The letter is addressed to US President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, all of whom have accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin's invitation to the May 9 ceremonies.

The two ex-prisoners said that the only way world leaders could justify their attendance at the event would be by presenting a joint demand that amends be made for crimes committed by the former Soviet Union and, more recently, Russia.

The letter cites atrocities carried out against civilians during the five-decade Soviet occupation of the Baltic States and Poland, including deportations and the mass murder, as well as in present-day Chechnya, where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed over the last decade as separatists battle the Russian army.

Matik spent six years in a forced labour camp in Russia and Niklus more than 16 years in Soviet prisons and camps in the 1970s for "anti-Soviet" activities. Niklus was only set free in 1988.