quote: RIGA, Latvia (CNN) -- President Bush, in a speech to the Latvian people on Saturday, called three Baltic nations' transfer to Soviet control after World War II '"one of the greatest wrongs of history."
"The Baltic countries have seen one of the most dramatic transformations in modern history, from captive nations to NATO allies and E.U. [European Union] members in little more than a decade," Bush said.
He was in Riga, Latvia, speaking at a press conference with Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Lithuanian President Valdus Adamkus and Estonian President Arnold Ruutel, after meeting with the three leaders.
Bush referred to the 1945 conference at Yalta, often cited as the beginning of the Cold War, and acknowledged the United States' role in it.
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt participated in the conference, along with Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and FDR later faced criticism for what critics saw as giving Eastern Europe away to Stalin.
The conference, he said, resulted in the captivity of millions -- "one of the greatest wrongs of history." Bush also called Soviet oppression "evil."
"When powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable," he said.
"We have a great opportunity to move beyond the past and learn the lessons of that painful history," he told reporters. The countries were annexed by Moscow after the fall of Nazism and chafed for decades under the Kremlin's iron-fisted rule.
"The Baltic peoples kept a long vigil of suffering and hope," Bush said. "Though you lived in isolation, you were not alone. The United States refused to recognize your occupation."
Bush, on the first leg of a politically sensitive European trip marking the end of World War II, earlier told reporters the end of the war 60 years ago "meant peace" for much of the world but "brought occupation and communist oppression" to the Baltic states. Kremlin's concerns
In answer to a reporter's question about Russia's displeasure with Bush's trip to Latvia, he said he would "continue to speak as clearly as I can to [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin that it's in his country's interests that there be democracies on his borders."
"The idea of countries helping others become free, I hope that would be viewed as not revolutionary, but rational foreign policy, as decent foreign policy, as humane foreign policy," Bush said.
The Kremlin has expressed concern about Bush's visits to Latvia and Georgia, which the president will also visit on this trip, because of Moscow's strained relationships with its former satellites.
Russian officials also have objected to Bush's use of the word occupation in reference to the fate of the Baltics. (Full story)
Baltic leaders have urged Putin to renounce a 1939 pact between Russia and Nazi Germany that led to communist rule in their countries. The Associated Press reported that Putin told German television that Russia had renounced that deal in 1989. (Full story)
Bush also called for free elections, set for next year, in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, which his administration has repeatedly referred to as the last dictatorship in Europe.
The people of Belarus "should be allowed to express themselves in free and open and fair elections," Bush said. Three Star Order
Earlier, Vike-Freiberga presented Bush with her country's highest honor, the "Three Star Order," calling him a "signal fighter of freedom and democracy in the world."
"I admire your country's courage," said Bush, who along with Vike-Freiberga laid wreaths at the foot of Freedom Monument, a towering obelisk that marks the country's independence from communist rule.
After his talks in Lativa, Bush flew to the Netherlands where he landed Saturday evening. There, as part of the events marking V-E Day (for victory in Europe), Bush plans to lay a wreath at the Netherlands American cemetery on Sunday. Later he will join world leaders for a victory celebration in Moscow that will include a military parade in Red Square.
Bush also is scheduled to visit Georgia before returning to the United States.
I must say I'm impressed but being Marxist Leninist myself I refuse to believe that the liberation of the eastern european countries was in any way a military occupation.
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
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Marxist Leninists are notorious for denying reality. That's the whole basis of communism in the first place.
Posts: 1996 | Registered: Feb 2004
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You know, it's an interesting thing. I agree with Bush about the Yalta agreement being an expedient. But the historians among us will probably be quick to point out the contexts in which the war-ending agreements were made. People were tired of wars. The economies of the various involved states were either in a shambles or so completely tied up in military spending (or both) that there were serious problems brewing at home. And the prospect of going to war with former allies (when you know their strength and they know yours) in order to foster anything different from those agreements was probably not a pleasant thought either.
My quibble with Bush's stateement is that I really don't see his Administration eschewing the behaviors that have gotten the US involved in "pay for it later" types of decisions. Our current buddy-buddy attitude toward Saudi Arabia and Pakistan's non-democratic regimes is an expedient if ever there was one. We've been looking the other way on human rights abuses for certain countries we hope to have as friendly trade partners. This isn't new. But rhetoric claiming we've "learned our lesson" rings a bit hollow.
And his line about "Democracies are peaceful" might cause a few snickers to people in Hawaii, Panama, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, and currently in the Middle East. Not that we didn't have fine, high-minded reasons for many of those aggressive acts, but the point is that we weren't necessarily forced reluctantly into the role of occupying or aggressive force.
If anything, the policy of stop-gaps to win a few years or decades of peace seems in full flower. As always.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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Korea was an "aggressive act"? Only if our involvement in the European half of World War II was an aggressive act. Hell, we even got UN approval for it.
There's a huge, qualitative difference to what we did to Eastern Europe and those other examples you mentioned. The western allies forced relocations back to the eastern bloc after the war. They did to those countries almost exactly what the world had done to Czechoslovakia before WWII.
If you want to draw parallels, go with Chile, Iran, and the like.
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