Violence in Tallinn as Soviet statue removed

ESTONIA:One person was killed and dozens injured in Estonia yesterday, when the dismantling of a Soviet war memorial sparked the country's worst violence since it reclaimed independence from Moscow in 1991.

Riot police used tear gas, a water cannon and flash grenades to disperse about 1,000 demonstrators who gathered in the centre of Estonia's capital, Tallinn, to oppose the relocation of the Bronze Soldier statue to a military cemetery, along with the bodies of Red Army troops who are believed to lie beneath it.

Most of the protesters were from Estonia's large ethnic Russian community, and they were joined later by non-Russian youths on an early morning rampage through Tallinn that landed more than 300 people in jail.

One man died of stab wounds and 57 people were injured, including 13 policemen.

Many Estonians loathe the Bronze Soldier as a symbol of postwar Soviet occupation, but Moscow reacted with fury to its removal from the city centre.

Russia's upper house of parliament unanimously passed a motion urging President Vladimir Putin to sever ties with Estonia, while Konstantin Kosachyov, head of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house, called for the "toughest possible reaction" to Tallinn's "barbaric, blasphemous" move.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov warned Moscow would take "serious steps" against Estonia, with whom it has had rocky relations since 1991. "Demonstrators came to protect a holy site and a monument to the people who liberated Estonia and Europe. The Estonian government spat on those people."

Russian speakers often complain of discrimination in Estonia, where strict language laws make it difficult to get jobs or citizenship without proficiency in Estonian. Many of them see the Bronze Soldier as a monument to the Red Army's heroic defeat of Nazism. But Estonians remember well that the Red Army first invaded their country in 1940, before being driven out by Hitler's troops a year later. And when Soviet forces did return to "liberate" the Baltic states in 1944, they stayed on as often brutal occupiers until independence was regained in 1991.