[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 142 (Tuesday, October 19, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12848-S12850]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MERI OF ESTONIA

 Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, on October 13, the Broadcasting 
Board of Governors--which supervises all U.S. Government-sponsored 
international broadcasting--held a ceremony celebrating its new status 
as an independent agency.
  Among the speakers was the President of Estonia, Lennart Meri, who 
delivered a very thoughtful and eloquent speech on the importance of 
international broadcasting to the mission of promoting democracy and 
freedom around the world.
  I commend it to all of my colleagues. I ask to have printed in the 
Record, the text of President Meri's speech.
  The speech follows:

           The Unfinished Tasks of International Broadcasting

  (By Lennart Meri, President of the Republic of Estonia, Washington, 
                         D.C., 13 October 1999)

       No one talking in this city about the importance of the 
     media could fail to recall Thomas Jefferson's observation 
     that if he were forced to choose between a free press and a 
     free parliament, he would always choose the former because 
     with a free press and a free parliament, he would end with a 
     free parliament, but with a free parliament, he could not be 
     sure if he would end with a free press.
       I certainly won't become the exception to that practice. 
     But if these words of your third president and the author of 
     the American Declaration of Independence continue to resonate 
     around the world, one of his other observations about the 
     press may be more relevant for our thinking about the current 
     and future tasks of international broadcasting. Responding in 
     June 1807 to a Virginia resident who was thinking about 
     starting a newspaper, Jefferson argued that ``to be most 
     useful,'' a newspaper should contain ``true facts and sound 
     principles only.''
       Unfortunately, he told his correspondent, ``I fear such a 
     paper would find few subscribers'' because ``it is a 
     melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not 
     more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is 
     done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood.'' And one of 
     the greatest advocates of the power of the media to support 
     democracy concluded sadly, ``nothing can now be believed 
     which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious 
     by being put into that polluted vehicle.''
       Jefferson's optimistic comment about the role of a free 
     press came as he was helping to make the revolution that 
     transformed the world; his more critical ones came after his 
     own, often less than happy years as president of the United 
     States. Given my own experiences over the past half century, 
     I can fully understand his shift in perspective and can thus 
     testify that were Thomas Jefferson to be with us today, he 
     would be among the most committed advocates of international 
     broadcasting precisely because of his experiences in the 
     earlier years of the American republic.
       For most of my adult life, I lived in an occupied country, 
     one where the communist regime suppressed virtually all 
     possibilities for free expression in public forums. As a 
     result, we turned to international broadcasting like Radio 
     Free Europe, Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, and the BBC 
     to try to find out what was going on.
       Let me go back in memory for a moment. Estonia was already 
     under Soviet occupation when the ``Battle of Britain''--
     solitary England's solitary battle against the totalitarian 
     world--began. This is how I saw it, at the age of twelve, 
     before our family was deported to Siberia. Nazi Germany 
     bombastically boasted of its victories, London spoke of 
     losses. And yet each broadcast from London, day after day, 
     ended with the English newscaster's dry announcement: ``Das 
     waren die Nachrichten am 5. Juni, am hundert sechs und 
     funfzigsten Tage des Jahres, wo Hitler versprach, den Krieg 
     zu gewinnen.''--``These were the news of June 15, 156th day 
     of the year when Hitler promised to win the war''. There was 
     no irony in these words. Rather, there was the pedantic 
     knowledge of a pharmacist--how many drops of truth 
     morning, day and night were necessary to keep the ability 
     of doubt alive. The end of World War II found me in exile, 
     buried deep into the heart of Russia, a couple of hundred 
     kilometers from the nearest railway station. You had your 
     Victory Day celebrations, and so had I. I bought a crystal 
     of selenium to build a radio receiver. During the time of 
     war, all radio equipment had been confiscated in Russia. 
     Now, suddenly, I was holding in my hands a thumb's length 
     of a glass tube containing a crystal and a short wire--my 
     pass to freedom. The third receiver, built already in 
     Estonia, finally worked, and I have been with you ever 
     since. I doubt whether it is in my powers to give you a 
     convincing picture of our spiritual confinement. Imagine 
     being blind, unable to see colours, to perceive light or 
     shadows; being surrounded by the void space without a 
     single point of reference, without gravity that would feel 
     like motherly love in this spiritual vacuum. And then, for 
     a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, or even--a royal 
     luxury--for a whole hour--the void would suddenly be 
     filled with colours, fragrances, voices, the warmth of the 
     sun and the fresh hope of spring. How many of you remember 
     the Moscow Conference of 1946, to which so many Estonians 
     for some unknown reason looked forward with hope? I 
     remember Mr. Peter Peterson from the BBC covering the 
     conference, I remember, the intonation of Winston 
     Churchill, when he said of the winners of this very 
     ``Battle of Britain'': ``That was their finest hour''. I 
     remember the lectures of astronomer Fred Hoyle, to which I 
     listened taking notes from week to week. Under Soviet 
     rule, his discovery was banned as ``idealistic''.
       Some years ago, when I received Javier Solana, the 
     Secretary-General of NATO, in Tallinn, I compared the 
     inevitability of the expansion of the island of democracy and

[[Page S12849]]

     NATO security structures with Fred Hoyle's expanding 
     universe, and noticed when I was still speaking that Mr. 
     Salona was deeply and personally moved by my speech. ``You 
     could not have known,'' he said afterwards, ``that Fred Hoyle 
     was during my university studies my research subject.'' This 
     is how the radiation from an antenna materialises into 
     attitudes, actions, and landscapes. Allow me two more 
     comments. It is my duty to thank from this chair your 
     predecessors for the decision to start broadcasts in Estonian 
     on Radio Liberty, and even more for the decision to transfer 
     the broadcasts in Estonian to the responsibility area of 
     Radio Free Europe--in full concord with the non-recognition 
     policy of the United States. I do not know how this decision 
     was taken. During the Korean War, I heard from the Russian 
     broadcasts, that the next day, the first Estonian broadcast 
     would be on the air at 1800 hours. I was still a student and 
     lived in Tartu, in a dormitory, which housed more than 500 
     students. I mentioned the forthcoming Estonian broadcast to 
     one single friend. Stalin's terror was rampant in Estonia. 
     For the time when the broadcast begun, my room was full of 
     people, and more were coming. I will never forget that day, 
     those solemn thirty minutes, and least of all the atmosphere 
     in my room. Those people were the friends of my friend's 
     friends. I knew a few, most were strangers to me. Every 
     listener stood apart, in different directions, motionless, no 
     glance met another, no word was spoken, we parted in silence. 
     Such gatherings were punished with twenty-five years of hard 
     labour. Not a single one of these twenty or thirty people got 
     into trouble, which bespeaks of a high morale.
       And my last point. I have myself worked at the radio, and 
     know and knew the most distressing doubt--or ignorance, to be 
     more accurate--whether your message did find your listeners. 
     The broadcaster's work is like a dialogue with the stars: 
     he can hear his own voice, but never gets any answer. The 
     listener's temptation to respond is overwhelming. In 
     spring 1976 Radio Free Europe informed that the Estonian 
     polar explorer. August Massik had died in Canada. I picked 
     up the phone and dictated a message for the writers' 
     newspaper, and it appeared two days later, on June 18. In 
     the circumstances of totalitarian seclusion, this was 
     quite an accomplishment, which, I hoped, would morally 
     support Radio Free Europe's Estonian staff. I must 
     confess, I also wrote to your countryman Alistair Cooke 
     the following lines, and I am quoting: ``Your word has 
     always penetrated the Iron Curtain. Every week you have 
     been a member of our family. I don't remember if you have 
     ever spoken about Estonia, but you have always spoken as a 
     European about the democratic world, which is the same''. 
     I was deeply moved to get Alistair Cooke's reply, which I 
     would very much like to read to this audience: ``It will 
     be plain to you'', Alistair Cooke wrote, ``why I 
     particularly cherish letters from people who listened, 
     sometimes at their peril, from behind the Iron Curtain. Of 
     all such, your letter is at once the most touching and the 
     most gratifying. I am deeply grateful to you and wish you 
     all good things as you approach what (to me) is early 
     middle age! Most sincerely, etc. Alistar Cooke''. That was 
     the role you have played, and I doubt whether you yourself 
     are aware of how much an antenna can outweight the world's 
     biggest army.
       Frequently, these sources provided the only reliable news 
     we could get about what was going on not only in the outside 
     world but also in our own country. These broadcasts were our 
     universities: They provided us with the materials we needed 
     to understand our world and ultimately to build a movement 
     capable of reclaiming our rightful place in world.
       Indeed, one of the key moments in the recovery of the 
     independence of my country is directly tied to international 
     broadcasting. On January 13, 1991, Russian leader Brois 
     Yeltsin flew to Tallinn in the aftermath of the Soviet 
     killings in Lithuania. While there, he not only signed 
     agreements acknowledging the right of the Baltic states to 
     seek independence from the Soviet Union but he issued a 
     statement calling on Russian officers and men not to obey 
     illegal Soviet orders to fire on freely elected governments 
     or unarmed civilians.
       Through a series of FM and telephone connections from 
     Tallinn via Helsinki to Stockholm to Munich, Yeltin's words 
     reached REF/RL's Estonian Service and then were broadcast 
     throughout the Soviet Union on all of that station's language 
     services. I am convinced that that broadcasting by itself 
     prevented Moscow from taking even more radical steps against 
     our national movement and thus set the stage for the recovery 
     of our independence as well as for the dissolution of the 
     Evil Empire as a whole.
       Just one indication of how important that action was to us 
     is the fact that the head of RFL/FL's Estonian Service at 
     that time, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, is now Estonian foreign 
     minister.
       I can't stress too highly what these broadcasts meant to me 
     and to my fellow Estonians in another sense as well. During 
     the long years of occupation, these broadcasts in our own 
     languages demonstrated that the world, and that there was no 
     basis for pessimism about our future. And these broadcasts, 
     especially those which were about our country, reminded not 
     only us but the Soviet Authorities that they would never 
     be able to prevent us from regaining our freedom.
       When we finally did so in 1991, I like many other Estonians 
     and, I suspect, like many of you, looked to the future with 
     enormous self-confidence. and also like many of you, I was 
     sure that the chief contribution of international 
     broadcasting to my country lay in the past. Indeed, it was in 
     that spirit that I nominated Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 
     for the Novel Peace Prize, an honor I still believe it should 
     ultimately receive.
       Surely, we thought, with communism overthrown and with our 
     own independence reaffirmed, we could quickly establish our 
     own free press, one that would provide our citizens with the 
     information they would need not only to recover from the past 
     but to allow us to re-enter Europe and the West.
       But the experience of the past eight years has shown that 
     such optimism was misplaced. First of all, the privatisation 
     of the media did not make it free. Because of economic 
     difficulties, privatisation both reduced the number of media 
     outlets, thus paradoxically stifling freedom, and encouraged 
     those remaining to seek readers and listeners by appealing to 
     the lowest common denominator among our citizens. Instead of 
     elevating the understanding of their audiences, all too many 
     of our media outlets played to the worst in them, filling 
     their pages or their broadcasts with sex, violence, and 
     charges of corruption.
       That is why I have complained so often that the path from a 
     controlled press to a free press all too often lies through 
     the worst kind of yellow press.
       There is a second reason why our optimism about our own 
     domestic media was misplaced; the experiences and values of 
     the editors and journalists who now work in the domestic 
     media. Not surprisingly, almost all of them are products of 
     the Soviet system. Their understanding of what the media is 
     for and what they do is thus very different from that of 
     journalists who have grown up in a free media environment. 
     They see media outlets as a form of propaganda, something the 
     new owners frequently even encourage, and they see individual 
     news stories as a chance to push their own agendas rather 
     than to report accurately on what is going on.
       And there is yet a third reason why we expected too much 
     too soon in this area after the collapse of communism. A free 
     press needs a free audience be it readers or listeners, and 
     such an audience is not something that has been created 
     overnight in any country.
       It did not happen overnight even in the United States which 
     never faced the same kind of tyranny that we did. Indeed, 
     Jefferson complained about this as well when he said that for 
     the citizens of his day, ``defamation is becoming a necessity 
     of life; in so much that a dish of tea in the morning or 
     evening cannot be digested without this stimulant.''
       But the impact of the Soviet system in my country was far 
     deeper and more insidious than that and far deeper and more 
     insidious than many people either in Estonia or in the West 
     want to acknowledge. It involved more than the mass 
     executions and deportations, more than the destruction of 
     much of the landscape, and more than 50 years of the 
     stifling of our lives. It involved in the very first and 
     most important sense the deformation of our minds and 
     souls, a deformation that means that even today many of us 
     cannot confront reality except through the filters 
     provided by that past. Estonian is not an easy language to 
     learn, but any of you who can listen to Estonian 
     broadcasts or who read Estonian newspapers or journals 
     will immediately feel what you are listening to or reading 
     is something very different from the media you are used to 
     in this long-established democracy. And if you listen or 
     read while you visit my country--and I invite all of you 
     to do so--you will be shocked by the difference between 
     what you hear and see in the media and what you hear and 
     see all around you.
       Jefferson again understood this problem when he wrote: 
     ``The real extent of this misinformation is known only to 
     those who are in situations to confront facts within their 
     knowledge with the lies of the day.'' And he added that ``I 
     really look with commiseration over the great body of my 
     fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the 
     belief, that they have known something of what has been 
     passing in the world in their time.''
       I share that feeling almost every time I pick up an 
     Estonian paper or listen to a broadcast by a domestic 
     Estonian outlet.
       Now, lest you accuse me of being overly pessimistic, let me 
     hasten to add that there are notable exceptions among owners, 
     among journalists and especially among readers and listeners. 
     There are owners of media outlets in my country who do 
     believe in the principles of a genuinely free press. There 
     are journalists who understand that news is not the same as 
     propaganda and that checking facts is important. And there 
     are many readers and listeners who know what genuine news is 
     and increasingly expect to get that and not the poor 
     substitute they are often given.
       One of the reasons that I have some optimism about the 
     future of the free media is that our very oldest citizens 
     remember the media from before the Soviet occupation and our 
     very youngest are growing up without the constraints of the 
     communist system. These two groups have been responsible for 
     most of the positive changes in our country since 1991 not 
     only in the media but in all fields of endeavor. Indeed, I 
     think it is symbolic that I am a representative of those who 
     remember Estonia before the Soviets came

[[Page S12850]]

     and our prime minister Mart Laar, perhaps the youngest 
     national leader in the world, came of age as they were 
     leaving.
       Another reason I am somewhat more optimistic than you may 
     think is that international broadcasting has already done 
     some important work. Those of us who listened to what the 
     Soviets called the ``foreign voices'' not only heard the news 
     but learned what news is--and importantly what it isn't. Many 
     of our best journalists have been regular listeners to RFE/
     RL, to VOA, to the BBC and to all the others for their entire 
     lives. That gave them the courage to think differently and a 
     model for their profession. Without it, we would have been 
     much further behind.
       But there is a final reason for my optimism: the continuing 
     impact of international broadcasting to my country and to its 
     neighbors. Estonians and many other people around the world 
     fudge their own media on the basis of what 
     international broadcasting tells them. That operates as an 
     important constraint on the tendency of domestic media 
     operations to go off the rails, but it also means that 
     these audiences are learning what news is and thus will 
     demand it from their domestic outlets. And when they do, 
     then there will be genuinely free press and the 
     possibility of genuinely free society.
       Consequently, I am now convinced that the greatest 
     challenges for international broadcasting lie ahead and not 
     in the past, for overcoming the problems Jefferson identified 
     two centuries ago is not going to be easy or quick. Estonia 
     as many of you know has done remarkably well compared to many 
     of the other post-communist countries, but our problems are 
     still so great in the media areas as elsewhere that we will 
     continue to need your help and your broadcasts long into the 
     future.
       On behalf of the Estonian people, I want to thank you in 
     the United States for all you have done in the past and are 
     doing now through your broadcasts to my country and to other 
     countries around the world. I believe that international 
     broadcasting is and will remain one of the most important 
     means for the spread of democracy and freedom. And 
     consequently, I am very proud to greet you today on the 
     occasion of the formation of the Broadcasting Board of 
     Governors as an independent agency--even though I want all of 
     you who are celebrating that fact to know that your greatest 
     challenges lie ahead and that those of us who are your chief 
     beneficiaries will never let you forget it.
       Thank you.

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