UN General Assembly
1993

"unrealistic" interview on their television programme? One year later, in September 1991, I watched the raising of the Estonian flag on a United Nations flagpole and concluded that my mission had been completed. Today I am here to tell the Assembly, and perhaps also those sympathetic journalists, that my work as the first democratically elected post-war Estonian President has only just begun. Today my words are infused with self-confidence and hope. Estonia has been and is once again a State; Estonia has re-established its place under the sun. In this sense we share common attributes, experiences and goals with the vast majority of States represented here today. The majority of the States Members of the Assembly are only slightly larger or slightly smaller than Estonia, with its 47,000 square kilometres and 1.5 million inhabitants living on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Estonia was robbed of its independence and forced to be the colonial subject of an imperial Power, as was the case with the majority of the Members here today.