 My name is Tunekelam, I am from Estonia and I've been representing Estonia in the European Parliament for the last 10 years. The Central and Eastern European Nations joined the European Union, it was in 2004. Then we realised how inadequate the knowledge about what happened behind the iron curtain in Eastern and Central Europe, how inadequate this knowledge was in the Western Europe and in Southern Europe. And we also realised that many more crimes against humanity happened in the 20th century just in the Eastern part of Europe. And as we were now united, then it was a very obvious need to unite also our historic memories, our understandings of history. And this is what we try to do, just to address the injustice, the crimes which have been done in the other part of Europe. We succeeded in adopting a resolution in April 2009 which was called Totalitarian European Conscience and Totalitarianism. And we tried to address the problems and the victims of all totalitarian systems in Europe. This resolution was broad based because we needed support of the majority of members of parliament and I think it's a good start. This 23rd of August was part of 2009 resolution to commemorate the 23rd of August which was the day of 1939 of Hitler's turning pact, cooperation pact. As a symbolic day to honour, to commemorate all victims of all different totalitarian systems in Europe. We couldn't accept this resolution without expanding it also to Franco regime in Spain. And then the Greek dictatorships, I think all these were covered by the resolution. I think it's just the beginning. Four years ago we adopted this resolution but still about half a dozen European states marked this 23rd of August. Estonia was the first because Estonian parliament immediately adopted a similar decision. Estonian government followed suit and in August 2009 in the same year we started our celebration. It started with a very impressive concert in an old naval factory which was restored as a temporary concert hall but it was symbolic. And a requiem by a Russian American composer, Amarba, who lives in New York was performed. Composed on the words of Anna Akhmatova, the famous Soviet time poet, who described already installing time or these crimes and tragedies in her poetry. This was very impressive. It was not on national level, it was done on international level. For the last four years many members of the European parliament have been pushing or putting pressure on the European Commission to come forward and provide support. It was not very difficult to convince the European Commission to collaborate and to assist. The question is about money, the quantity of money but already some programs have started to move on. And we are monitoring the preparations for the European History House. My good friend Hansger Pöttering, who was some years ago president of the European parliament, led the process and he is still leading the supervisory council of the History House. But we are keeping our eye on it so that it could be imbalanced and representative exhibition. The main pillar upon the European Union is built is solidarity, equality and feeling togetherness. And that's why we can't achieve these goals if we don't care about the history, about the fate of our neighbours who have become now our official neighbours. Even if they live more far away like countries of Northern and Eastern Europe. But I think that's why the European Parliament is so important. Because European Parliament brings representatives from 28 countries every week together from all over Europe, not depending on distance. And we can exchange information, we can contact each other, we can initiate joint projects, seminars, hearings, all what we need. And I'm very happy that I have several Spanish friends who are interested, who support this and have expressed their solidarity. I don't remember it very well, but I think there were problems also of equal assessment on both sides. Because just recently I read that on so-called Republican side at least 6,000 priests were murdered. Some of them even before Franco started his mutiny. And then the Republican side was clearly associated with the Soviet Union and then Communism, who supported them with weapons. And then the Communist International who sent their volunteers to the Spanish Civil War. So I think this is a very, very complex problem and you can't see it only in black and white. History has been typically manipulated. And I think our task is to try to integrate all European history in a balanced way. And in this process to overcome also our national historic prejudices, to rise higher from our national standpoints based on national history. We tend to regard some other nations as our enemies or in a different way. And I think the morale could be that every nation has very much positive and every nation has also committed something not so very positive. There are no ideal nations or states. Everyone has made something maybe wrong also. And now being together on equal level in the same organization, we have ideal opportunity just to overcome our national framework and raise to the awareness of all European history. But that supposes also developing interest towards our neighbors and towards those nations who are even more far away. That was why I started more than five years ago in a project which was ended, resulted in a book, Reunification of Europe, which is now published in Spanish. It is a first book where latest histories of ten post-communist nations who are now have become members of the European Union have been presented in one volume. Reunification of Europe, that was my initiative. It was supported by my political group, European People's Party. And this has now been translated into six more languages. These include French, German, Polish, Slovenian, Romanian and the last one was Spanish. Yes, I inspired this rich American couple to support the idea of building a museum instead of scholarships. And they accepted this and made it possible. But the problem is that the state is supporting this museum now. The idea was that private donators would build the museum and then give it over to the state. The museum is still controlled by a private supervisory council. But this includes also representative from the Ministry of Culture. And the salaries and the current expenditure comes from the state budget. We started our restoration of independence process by just by very much in commemorating the dates, the tragic dates. Like we have two dates marking depotations. One was the first depotations which took place on 14th of June 1941. And the other after the second Soviet depotation took place in 1949 or on 25th of March. And already under the Soviet Union when there was more liberalization, we started first of all to commemorate these events and bring flowers and restore the monuments. We still need a national monument memorial to the tens of thousands of victims of Stalinism. We started our first political meeting in 1987 with the appeal to the participants. That to give their signatures of support to this idea to build a memorial to the victims of Stalinism. And now the government has given its support. Our citizens' organizations, those of political prisoners are demanding that this should include the names of all those who are available, all names written on this monument, like it is in Washington DC, those who have died in Vietnam or Korea. And the government has not yet decided, but I think they have to follow this demand. My personal memories were an interesting fight to retain your integrity and to develop independent thinking. Because the totalitarian society asks you to follow only one model and only one way of thinking and to make it easier to you. Totalitarian dictatorship deprives you of all alternatives, independent press. We had no international press in Estonia. We had no foreign TV broadcasts. Our only channel to the west was Finnish radio. Finnish is close to Estonia. It is easier to learn. I started by listening to the Finnish radio and then I started to listen to BBC, English language broadcasts. So BBC became my home radio and main source of information for 30 years. And my mentality, my thinking developed based on discussions and style and tone of BBC. We had some communist papers which were allowed to Estonia, only communist papers. So I started to learn French to read Lemanite. It became soon disgusting. So I looked for something better. Then I found Italian unit Unita, which was really better. It was much more objective, much more informative. Then I read many Polish papers because Polish weeklies like Politica were the most informative in the Soviet system. They had a bit more press freedom. I followed events in Poland, strikes which took place in the 60s and 70s. I translated this information into Estonia and spread it in a limited way of course. But we followed very keenly Solidarnoist movement and I remember I translated hundreds of pages of Polish information into Estonian. I had small groups of intellectuals. We gathered, we exchanged information. Before that in 1972 we came to the idea that we should send a message out of Estonia to the West about situations here. Because officially it was so that 99.9% of population in the case of elections voted for the only list of candidates. There was one list of candidates that of communist party candidates. And we could doubt in it because often it looked like it was not 99%, maybe it was less than 90%. But there was no problem of falsifying the results anyway. So I started with first voting against. We never heard in the results that somebody had voted against. They ignored it but for my feeling, my personality it was important. Because I can say that having lived in the Soviet Union for half a century I have never officially supported the system. I almost voted against or then I started to boycott the elections. And this fight for personal dignity and credibility I think this was most important in the totalitarian system. Because you can't resist by arms. We couldn't do it anymore in the beginning from 1950s. But what one always can do is to distance yourself from official lies. It was Solzhenitsyn who wrote a famous booklet, Let's Live Without Lying. And he pointed very well out that every dictatorship is based upon two pillars. One is we know this is violence, brutal repression of all the opposition. But the other pillar is lies. Because you can't live with sheer violence for much longer. You need to justify your violence, your dictatorship in some way. And for that you need official lies. And this, the second pillar, the pillar of lies is most vulnerable. Because lies are very sensitive thing. And you should start first as Solzhenitsyn suggested but I had been doing this much earlier already. To distance yourself from official lies. Not to participate in them, not to support them. And then to live a different life as much as possible. It was not possible 100%. But at least you developed your personality. And this is a challenge to any totalitarian system. To have a number of citizens who don't care, who don't believe, who retain different values. And finally we came to the conclusion that we had two small underground groups. Estonian National Front and Estonian Democratic Movement. It was after Prague Spring, after that in Moscow emerged the first human rights groups. And so we decided to send a letter to the West. So they trusted it to me. We had United Nations Charter and the main pact on human rights just translated into Estonian. So we based this document strictly on international law. Proceeding from the fact that Estonia has been independent state, recognized by world communities. That we were members of the League of Nations, a European United Nations before the war. That we have been deprived of independence by Soviet Nazi pact and Soviet invasion. We asked United Nations for support to evacuate the Soviet occupation troops and provide help to organize free elections. Two extremist demands at that time, because there was no chance to meet them. But the point was not to get an answer, but we addressed it to the United Nations Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim. But the point was to let the western public opinion know that it's not the case that 100% or 99.9% of Estonian population supports the communist regime. That there are people who think in a different way and who are there to demand restoration of independence, which is rightful thing under international law. And so it came that despite the fact that five of us were arrested, that a couple of hundreds of people were house searched and fired. There was a massive reaction by the KGB when they knew, learned about, that such a letter was sent out of Estonia. We prepared it in 1972, but the reaction followed two years later because it took time to smuggle this letter out of Estonia. I was on the verge of arrest. Two people testified that I had prepared this document and explained it to the memorandum. I denied it. It was just after Helsinki Conference in 1975 when Brezhnev had signed for the first time to human rights commitments to the third basket. And then they were more cautious about repressions. They had to prove, you know. And I was during half a year in a very interesting situation. After every two weeks I was called into secret police headquarters. They looked for new witnesses and new proof. They had no material proof. I was cautious enough. But the two people testified against me. I denied. That was one to one. And then finally it ended that my supervisor, the KGB Colonel, told me that now we will end this, this process. And speaking in supportive terms, you won and I lost. Because I am absolutely convinced that you were the root of this evil. You did it, but we could not prove. So I was happy that I just lost my job, but I was not arrested. And the following period, about ten years, I worked as a night shift worker in a huge chicken farm, state-owned chicken farm. Why night worker? Because it was the best place for an intellectual to have much time, much free time. I worked fifteen hours shift during the night alone. I was most independent as one could be. And then I had two days free or I worked for two nights and then I had four days free. And salary better than civil servants. And I continued, of course, my underground activity. I mediated information between the West and the Soviet Union, letting the West know about human rights violations, about ecology, about all the problems. And we got from the West information so it became a regular exchange of information. And so I continued until I participated as a first open-air political demonstration in 1987, 23rd of August, a significant day. More at the Reventor Pact anniversary. When three thousand people who came, who ventured to come together, despite the threat of arrests and just KGB troops intervening and shooting you, they asked not for independence, we asked for truth. What happened on 23rd of August, 1939? Because we knew that in secret protocols of Reventor Pact, Hitler and Stalin divided Europe between themselves. And the Baltic states of Finland fell into the Stalin's interest zone. But it was not publicly admitted. So we are just presenting the demand. We want to know what happened. So this demand was presented and the result was, within one year, even Gorbachev managed to find in Kremlin archives authentic copies in Russian of the secret protocols. First he denied, no, no, no, there's nothing like that. But the pressure increased and finally he admitted, yes, there are protocols. And these protocols clearly show that Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians did not join the Soviet Union voluntarily. It was the result of two dictators and we were occupied. That was, we are not legally married to Moscow. Consequently, we don't even need a legal divorce. We just want to become free as soon as possible. And this was a most important moral and political boost because people now became, they realized that we have right to become independent again. Estonia was a very interesting laboratory, how to develop alternative democratic structures still under dictatorship. Dictatorship became more relaxed, but the KGB was there. We had in a country with 1.5 million population all the time over 100,000 Soviet troops. 100,000, one for every 15 civilians all the time. This demonstrated how much the Soviet government trusted the Estonians. I was one who started the first non-communist political party in the Soviet Union. Its name was Estonian National Independence Party, the name told all. It was a program, National Independence. This was not suppressed and this broke the taboo because people were used for half a century that there was only one political party. The other people don't be involved in politics, otherwise you'll be shot or arrested. But now we started it and the result was mushrooming of political parties during the second half of 1988. And there were immediately national independence parties formed in Latvia, in Georgia, in Tatarstan. Then we created the alternative transition time parliament, which was called Congress of Estonia. We organized elections in 1990 and this parliament was authorized as it was elected by legal Estonian citizens. Not ethnic Estonians only, but legal citizens who were citizens in Estonia Republic, which was occupied in 1940 and their descendants. We had national agreement, national unity agreement between official Soviet parliament and the Congress of Estonia. Which was based on the understanding of Congress of Estonia that is legal continuity of Estonia Republic. The same republic that was occupied, not new one. And so we agreed that we should proceed in creating a constitutional assembly which was elected half and half. Half members selected from the Supreme Soviet, half from the Congress of Estonia. It prepared a new constitution by spring 1992. Then we had first democratic elections in September 1992 and based upon this constitution was adopted by referendum in summer 1992. And then we had first elections in September 1992 and then the legal state power that democratic republic was restored. This is the same problem. They have not got no political assessment, no political verdict for their collaboration with actually communist party. Proved to be a criminal party responsible for mass murders and crimes against humanity. And they just sneaked out of the party and many get hold of state enterprises when they were privatized into politics and then this is our handicap. Not only Estonia, practically in all countries of Eastern Europe. We ended with 90% of people registered participating and 32 parties and movements taking part, 32 parties already. In the elections to the first Estonian parliament in 1992, I think there were several parties but I think seven parties got in. We have just a competition of these projects for a national monument. And I think our director, Katri Vires, could advise you. Because we had an exhibition of these projects here in the museum.