From: tammet@cs.chalmers.se (Tanel Tammet)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.soviet
Subject: Re: The ESTONIAN cabinet coalition agreement
Date: 10 Nov 92 10:51:52 GMT
Organization: Dept. of CS, Chalmers, Sweden

In <1992Nov8.221139.24477@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:

>I've read the paper that Tapani Hietnaniemi was kind to share with
>us, and I must say that I am impressed. It is a surprisingly
>strong declaration, and if the Estonian government can cooperate
>in the future as they did in composing this platform, it is very
>encouraging to know that Estonia are in firm and steady hands.

In my private opinion the new government is a kind of a "dream cabinet",
especially when compared to the last two governments consisting
mostly of rather dull (personal opinion) "specialists" of a 
late-soviet era.

One important consequence is that the new government will have
the political capital to act on the issue of soviet colonists / national
minorities. Eg. I expect them to restore very soon the package of laws
guaranteeing cultural autonomy for russians, jews, etc. and advertising
this package quite loudly. The curious fact about last two governments
was that in spite of the case that minorities actually enjoy very wide
cultural autonomy supported by the state (of course, all russian
and jewish schools are state-financed, etc), nowhere were the existing
rights/privileges explicitly guaranteed. I could come up with three 
reasons for that:

1) the previous governments did not have enough
legitimacy/support/political capital to work seriously
on such touchy and complicated issues;

2) some people in the government played into the hands of Moscow
to help the russian propaganda attacks. I am actually afraid that
was true for the noticeable part of the old supreme soviet.

3) there were important politicans (e.g. Savisaar) who were in favour of
granting the citizenship automatically to all current residents - 
this would among other negative things (in my opinion) have led 
to a strong weakening of the status of the Rep. of Estonia, as
it would not have exactly been the republic with the restored 
independence any more, but a republic with the new body of
citizens (and yes, of course the communists would have won the
elections, like in Lithuania, but this is just a commentary).    

>)The process of determining Estonia's citizenry, based on legal
>)succession, and compiling the registry of voters must be
>)completed. We will eliminate the traumatic bureaucratic obstacles
>)to granting citizenship to Estonian nationals in accordance with
>)Point 1 of Article 7 of the Law on Citizenship.
>)
>)Persons who registered as applicants for citizenship prior to the
>)election of the Congress of Estonia in February of 1990 must be
>)granted citizenship under simplified conditions (without the
>)language requirement), in accordance with Point 2 of Article 7
>)of the Law on Citizenship.

>What do these points say? Somewhere I saw a claim that the implication
>of the second paragraph is that 40.000 Russians would be saved from
>the language requirement? Is that so? Good news, in such case.

These points say several things:

1) Starting this spring/summer all the Estonian citizens (persons who
were citizens in 1939, their children and grandchildren, persons
married to Est. citizens) had to register themselves as such (e.g. in
order to take part of the referendum and elections and to get a 
new Estonian passport). However, the registration was not organized
as well as it could have been and the process and documents required
for getting an Estonian passport were sometimes embarrassing (eg. one of
my friends had lost his USSR passport, and in order to get an Estonian
he was required to fill papers for getting the USSR passport first
(all in Russian, of course ...), what he refused to do. Thus he does not
carry the new Estonian passport, still.

The Savisaar government (forced to resign in January) was actively against
any compilation of the register of citizens and issuing passports, etc.
Also, during the Va"hi government when this work actually started it
seemed that quite many politicians and bureaucrats still were in
favor of slowing everything down. Thus quite often there indeed were
"traumatic bureaucratic obstacles" involved in registering the actual
citizens whose case was not crystal-clear.

2) The current government will grant citizenship to those residents who
applied for it early (before Feb. 1990) when it was made possible to
apply for it and non-citizens were asked to apply for it (though it
was not yet clear at all that Estonia will soon regain independence),
under simplified conditions: no language requirement, no waiting period
(that is, more or less immediately). So, yes, all colonists who felt 
the support for the restoration of the Estonian independence and acted
by applying for the citizenship will get it without any further requirements 
whatsoever. I do not know the actual number of such applications,
unfortunately. 

3) At current moment there is some ethnic discrimination in the naturalization
process: noncitizen residents who are ethnic estonians are not required
to pass a language test. To my understanding the new government is willing
to also extend this discrimination to close finnougric people like
finns, karelians, vepsans, ingrians.

4) The old naturalization law (from 1939?) was chauvinist in granting
automatically the estonian citizenship to a wife of a citizen but not
vice-versa. This injustice will be repaired.


Regards,
	Tanel Tammet