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Estonian President apologizes for misfired interview remark
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 28 - 02 - 2008


Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said
Thursday he was sorry for misinterpreted remarks in a recent BBC
interview that caused a storm of criticism from Estonia's Russian-
speaking minority, according to dpa.
"I'm really sorry that my words were interpreted as offensive
toward someone's language or national feelings," Ilves told the
Swedish news agency TT, according to Postimees (The Courier)
newspaper.
Estonia is a safe home for anyone whose native language is not
Estonian, he said.
The president faced sharp criticism for his remarks to the BBC,
saying that learning Russian would mean downplaying the years of
Soviet occupation. A spokesperson for the president said his remarks
were misinterpreted.
"Comparing the text of the publication with the transcript one can
conclude that the journalist considerably freely utilized the
original material," the Estonian Television website said on Thursday.
The website of the Russian-language newspaper "Narvskaya Gazeta"
published the transcript of the interview obtained from the BBC
journalist Tim Whewall.
"Speaking Russian, Ilves said firmly, would mean accepting 50
years of Soviet brutalisation because most Russian-speakers settled
in Estonia only after it was occupied by the USSR towards the end of
World War II," the BBC Web site quoted Ilves in its report.
Estonia won back its independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union
disintegrated.
Estonia, like its Baltic neighbours Latvia and Lithuania, had
broken free from Russia in 1918 but was occupied by the Soviet Union
in 1940, seized by Nazi Germany in 1941 and again taken over by
Moscow in 1944.
The Soviets deported many Estonians to Siberia. Others fled to the
West during the Soviet era.
Ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking residents flooded the small
Baltic nation, part of the Soviet policy to tip the ethnic balance.
One-third of Estonia's 1.3 million people are Russian speakers.
Born in Sweden in 1953 to Estonian refugee parents, Ilves grew up
in the US, worked in Germany, and moved to Estonia after
independence, launching a political career that saw him elected as
president in 2006.
He doesn't speak Russian, although since taking office he has
often stressed that his mother was born in Russia and that his
grandmother was an ethnic Russian.
He speaks fluent English and German and recently started studying
French.


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