Speech by President of the Republic of Finland Tarja Halonen at the funeral of President Lennart Meri

Dear family members of President Lennart Meri, esteemed President and Mrs. Rüütel, and beloved people of Estonia,

President Tarja Halonen Photo: Harri A. Sundell

Is with profound sadness that we have come here today to witness the last journey of President Lennart Meri. With his passing, his family has lost a loved one, the people of Estonia have lost a great statesman, and the people of Finland have lost a loyal friend.

Though we miss him and mourn him, we are comforted by fond memories of a person who was truly unique. He was a man who achieved much during his lifetime. Lennart Meri was a deep-thinking humanist who had a very special affinity with the Finno-Ugric peoples. Tirelessly, he worked to improve the prosperity and well-being of the people of Estonia.

Lennart Meri was a charming personality whom it was impossible not to warm to. For us Finns, he was a fascinating relative, a cosmopolitan and an artist. For us, he was the new Estonia. Lennart Meri was a person who was able to translate difficulties that he had faced in his life into strengths in his personality and into the encouragement to his fellow-men. He had the ability to live each moment to its fullest and to transfer his enthusiasm to others to achieve shared goals.

The events, which led to the new independence of Estonia, linked the fate of our neighbouring country even closer to the history of Finland. At the time of the new independence of his country, Lennart Meri was in Helsinki. There he, as Foreign Minister, sat in a black car flying the blue-black-white Estonian flag for the first time. We remember well his words on this occasion: "I leaned back into the corner of the car and realized what happiness it is, that one can identify the happiest moment of one's life before that moment is over."

Hüvasti, kallis sõber!
Farewell, dear friend



***

Meri, who served two terms as Estonian president from 1992 to 2001, was buried in Tallinn's Forest Cemetery on March 26. Meri died in a hospital in Tallinn from a brain swelling caused by a malignant tumor in the early hours of March 14.

Lennart Meri, President of the Republic of Estonia in the years 1992-2001 died on Tuesday, March 14, after a long and serious illness. An oecumenical service will be held in the Kaarli Church on Sunday, 26 March, as part of the state funeral.

All those who wish to, can say goodbye to President Meri in the church on 25 March.

Biography

Lennart Meri was born on March 29, 1929, in Tallinn in the family of the Estonian diplomat and later Shakespeare translator Georg Meri. With his family, Lennart Meri left Estonia at an early age and had to study abroad, in nine different schools and in four different languages. His warmest memories are from his school years in Lycee Janson de Sailly in Paris.

The family was in Tallinn at the time when Estonia was occupied by the Soviet armed forces. In 1941, the Meri family was deported to Siberia along with thousands of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians sharing the same fate. Heads of the family were separated from their families and shut into concentration camps where few survived. At the age of 12, Lennart Meri started his career as a lumberman. He has also worked as a professional potato peeler and a rafter.

The Meri family survived and found their way back to Estonia, where Lennart Meri graduated cum laude from the Faculty of History and Languages of Tartu University in 1953. The Soviet administration did not allow him to work as a historian. Lennart Meri found work as a dramatist in the Vanemuine, the oldest theater of Estonia, and later on as a producer of radio plays in the Estonian broadcasting.

After a trip to the Tian-Shan Mountains in Central Asia and the old Islamic centers in the Kara-Kum Desert in 1958, Lennart Meri wrote his first book which met the warm reception of readers. Already as a student, Lennart Meri had had to earn his living with writing, after his father had been arrested by the Soviet powers for a third time. With the help of his younger brother who had to quit his studies and take a job as a taxi-driver, he managed to support their mother and complete his studies. Yet it was only through his first book that Lennart Meri discovered his true calling. For a quarter of a century he wandered alone or arranged expeditions to the regions of the Soviet Union that were the hardest to reach, and where he was fascinated by the cultures of small ethnic groups, the history of the discovery and colonization of Siberia and the constantly deepening economic and ecological conflict between the local needs and the planned economy of Moscow. The books and films born of these travels managed to penetrate the Iron Curtain and have been translated into a dozen languages. The film "The Winds of the Milky Way," shot in cooperation with Finland and Hungary, was banned in the Soviet Union but won a silver medal at the New York Film Festival. In Finnish schools, his films and texts were used as study materials. In 1986, Lennart Meri was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of the Helsinki University. He had become a member of the Estonian Writers' Union already earlier, in 1963. In the 1970s he was elected Honorary Member of the Finnish Literary Society.

Between his travels, Lennart Meri translated the works of Remarque, Graham Greene, Vercors, Boulle and Solzhenitsyn. At the time of the totalitarian russification campaigns, Meri's literary works, films and translations significantly contributed to the preservation of the Estonian national identity. His "Silverwhite" which became the most popular of his works, an extensive reconstruction of the history of Estonia and the Baltic Sea region, depicted Estonians as free people in Northern Europe, as active agents in an open world.

After more than twenty years of expectations, the Soviet administration finally gave the permission for Lennart Meri to travel behind the Iron Curtain, and Meri persistently used the opportunities open to him in Finland to remind the free world of the existence of Estonia. He established trustful relationships with politicians, journalists and the Estonians who had fled from the occupation. He was the first Estonian to take abroad the protest against the Soviet plan of mining phosphate in Estonia, which would have rendered a third of the country uninhabitable.

In Estonia, environment protection soon grew into the Singing Revolution which was led by Estonian intellectuals. Lennart Meri's speech "Have Estonians Got Hope?" focused on the existential problems of the nation and had strong repercussions also abroad. Lennart Meri's shift of focus from literary to political activities was smooth and yet antedated the political events. In 1988, he founded the nongovernmental Estonian Institute to promote cultural contacts with the West and to send the Estonian students to study abroad. Estonia's cultural missions opened under the umbrella of the Estonian Institute in Copenhagen, Stockholm, London, Bonn, Paris and Helsinki functioned as embassies and became officially so in August 1991, when the democratic West restored diplomatic relations with the Republic of Estonia.

Neither for Estonia itself nor for the West had the Soviet occupation disrupted the continuity of the Republic of Estonia or eliminated her international obligations and rights. Therefore, Estonia does not belong to the "new democracies" as the Republic of Estonia was an active member of the League of Nations already in 1921.

Lennart Meri signed the instruments for the restoration of diplomatic relations already as the Minister of Foreign Affairs. To this post he had been appointed on April 12, 1990, by Edgar Savisaar, leader of the Popular Front, after the first non-communist elections. Prior to this, Lennart Meri and other authors had already published the collection of documents titled "1940 in Estonia" (1989), which unsuccessfully attempted to convince the Soviet members of the Parliament that the occupation and Sovietization of Estonia were based on the criminal Hitler-Stalin pact dividing Europe between the two totalitarian regimes.

As the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lennart Meri's first task was to create the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, employ studious young people, and establish a steady communication channel to the West, and at the same time, represent Estonia at the more important international conferences. He participated in the CSCE Conferences in Copenhagen, New York, Paris, Berlin and Moscow, in the founding conference of the Council of the Baltic Sea Countries, had several meetings with the American and European heads of state and ministers of foreign affairs, and was the first East European guest to give a presentation at the NATO headquarters in Brussels.

After a brief period as ambassador of Estonia to Finland, Lennart Meri was elected President of the Republic of Estonia. Lennart Meri was sworn into office on October 6, 1992. On September 20, 1996, Lennart Meri was elected President of the Republic of Estonia for a second term.

Lennart Meri was in his second marriage. His wife Helle Meri worked as an actress in the Estonian Drama Theater until 1992. Meri's first wife, Regina, emigrated to Canada in 1987. Lennart Meri has three children: sons Mart and Kristjan and daughter Tuule.

Tallinn newsroom, +372 6 108 861

BNS 14.3.2006

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