DECOLONIZATION (1966-1970)

The main tool of BATUN was visiting the permanent missions of the UN Member States in New York. The visits played a special role in 1968 when they were part of the activities related to the 50th anniversaries of the proclamation of the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The original idea was to create ten two-person, bi-ethnic delegations to undertake 15-20 missions to be backed and financed by Baltic exile organizations. The campaign took about two years. In June 1968 the BATUN Annual Meeting authorized the visits. They began on 23 December 1968 and lasted into the summer of 1969. By that time 86 permanent missions had been visited or had materials mailed to them. In 39 of the permanent missions, the heads of the mission – ambassadors or the chargés d’affaires – received the BATUN delegations. About ninety people had been recruited to make the visits, but only sixty actually participated. In late 1968, the delegates were provided about fifty pages of instructional materials and samples of the materials to be presented during the visits. After each visit, the members of the delegation would fill out a report on the visit and send a thank-you letter to the host.

In 1968, the 50th anniversary of the declarations of independence in all three Baltic countries provided the reason for BATUN’s first extended public diplomacy and lobbying campaign. BATUN organized the sending of letters to the heads of state of UN Member States from Baltic exiles – individuals and organizations – and their friends. The campaign was called “Baltic Power”. The letters asked that the Baltic Question needed to be raised or, if it had already been raised, supported at the UN. The campaign was proposed in 1967 and the letters were written in 1968.

The global campaign by Baltic exiles to send the letters to the heads of state or governments effectively replaced the visits to the foreign ministries. More than 17,000 letters were sent to some 110 Heads of State, i.e., the office of each head of state received over 400 letters.

Some Examples of responses from governments and Embassies:

On August 21, 1968, in the middle of the letter campaign, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia. Norberts Trepša, the president of BATUN, sent a letter to all the Permanent Representatives of the UN Member States asking that the Security Council react immediately and uncompromisingly to the invasion and proposed a Special General Assembly session to deal with the Soviet bloc invasion. He pointed out the parallels between the invasions of the Baltic States in 1940, Hungary in 1956and the invasion of Czecho­slovakia in 1968. BYFF quickly responded with a demonstration on August 22, 1968 at the Soviet Mission to the UN.

Operation Goldfinger (June 1967/68) was the first and probably the most intensively prepared for and successfully executed worldwide public protest in BATUN’s history. The Soviets claimed that the Baltic gold and ships that had been evacuated to the West were their property. For a long time, both sides had been making claims against the other for the restitution of property, like the Baltic gold, or investment losses caused by the other side. The UK Government, which continued to the de jure recognition of the Baltic States after World War II ended, maintained that only the, currently non-existent, governments of the independent Baltic States could legitimately claim the gold. By 1951, the unclaimed gold had become the property of the government, and after 1967 the disposal of the gold became a sensitive political issue as the Parliament moved to pass a law regarding its disposal. The UK and USSR had begun negotiations regarding their respective claims in 1940. Over the next 25 years, the intermittent negotiations made little progress due to disagreements over the legitimacy and the value of the many claims. Finally, in February 1967, the newly elected Labor Government, in search of a success in foreign relations, cleverly agreed with the USSR to finesse their disagreements. A year-and-a-half later, after repeated, contentious debates, the British Parliament passed the Foreign Compensation Act of 1969. The Act determined that the money received from the sale of the Baltic gold and other assets could be used to pay the USSR for £ 0.5 million worth of consumer goods and settle the claims of British creditors against the USSR. Thereby, Prime Minister Harold Wilson would have ended forever the long, unsuccessful negotiations with the USSR over mutual claims and satisfied the British creditors without a cost to the taxpayer, while maintaining its de jure non-recognition policy regarding the annexation of the Baltic states.

On May 15, 1967, demonstrations took place at British embassies and consulates in 28 cities in 19 countries. In addition, Baltic organizations and individuals sent thousands of letters of protest to governments around the world. Despite harsh criticism from many British citizens and Baltic exiles, in 1969, the British Parliament passed the Foreign Compensation Act, which sought to implement the Wilson-Kosygin agreement. In order to appease the Baltic exiles, high-ranking British officials stated that the policy of non-recognition of the legitimacy of the incorporation of the Baltic States into the USSR remains unchanged.

BATUN’s Executive Chairman Normunds Trepša also sent Kosygin a telegram wherein he challenged Kosygin to restore the complete freedom of the Baltic States. Ambas­sador Arthur J. Goldberg, the US Permanent Representative to the UN, also received a telegram from Trepša. The telegram asserted that Kosygin had “opened the way for the inclusion into the deliberations of the (General Assembly of the UN) the question of the Baltic States” and noted that such action would fulfill “the unanimous will of the US Congress as expressed recently in H. Con. Res. 416”. In this resolution, the US Congress urged the President “to direct the attention of world opinion at the United Nations… to the denial of the rights of self-determination for the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.” All other UN Member States, except the Communist block Member States, re­ceived a letter accompanied by background material. The letter asked the Member States to demand the “complete restoration of freedom to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.”

1969 marked the 30th anniversary of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Stalin and Hitler that divided Eastern Europe into two spheres of interest. During a meeting on March 3, 1969, the BATUN board decided that this event would be the focus of the organization’s protest activities for that year. The plan was to stage a rally called Day of Concern on September 20, 1969 at the UN headquarters in New York. In the days prior to the rally, BATUN members distributed leaflets in midtown Manhattan. However, only about 500 people attended the rally. The participants approved a resolution condemning the Soviet Union and calling upon the member states of the UN to call upon the Soviet Union to cease its occupation of the Baltic States. A local NY TV station reported on the rally, but otherwise it attracted little attention in the mainstream media.

BATUN came up a strategy to garner reciprocal support for the Baltic Question, i.e., to support decolonization everywhere, especially in Namibia. For BATUN, Namibia was also provided the basis for asking the questions. Should the Baltic issue also be raised in the General Assembly or in the Decolonization Committee? Or should BATUN look for “basically similar, but potentially more successful, approaches?” No diplomat thought that BATUN should try to bring the Baltic Question before the General Assembly, even if it could find a Member States willing to do so. In the words of a Portuguese Chargé d’Affaires, “you would certainly lose.” Although about a dozen diplomats had suggested that the Decolonization Committee was the appropriate forum for the Baltic Question, no committee member was willing to raise the Baltic Question before the Committee. Ecuador, a new member of the Committee, pointed out two problems. Firstly, the Baltic States, having once been inde­pen­dent, cannot be measured by the standards of colonial countries. Secondly, since the General Assembly determines the agenda of the Committee, it was not available to outsiders.

BATUN produced a one-page resolution with a decolonization theme, formatted as a UN General Assembly resolution with six preambles and two operative paragraphs. Recalling that the UN has assumes of some responsibilities of the former League of Nations, such as the defense of rights of the people of Namibia, and taken note of the recently established Council for Namibia, BATUN recommended the establishment of a UN Council for the Study of Conditions in Member States of the Former League of Nations which have not yet attained membership in the United Nations and asked that the study of the three Baltic countries be placed on the agenda of the Council.

Support for Namibian independence was a great opportunity for the Baltic Youth for Freedom (BYFF’s) first demonstration in 1968. The demonstration typified BYFF’s approach to its public actions, which were designed  to attract attention and reinforce its message of all peoples’ right to self-determination.

In July of 1968, news reached BATUN that the Western powers in charge of West Berlin had banned the World Latvian Youth Congress from holding its meeting there, although this had approved by the Congress and the government of West Germany. BATUN reacted immediately with its usual array of tactics, including letters to the UN permanent missions, the US Congress, the Allied leaders and the UN. BYFF organized a demonstration at the US mission to the UN to deliver its message of outrage at the actions of the Western Allies, which seemed to be capitulating to the Soviet allegations that the Latvian Youth Congress posed a “gross provocation” to the Soviet Union.

1970 was the year of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the UN. And to mark this event, a week-long celebration was being planned by the UN, which would include events throughout NYC during the week attended by delegations from all the UN members. Despite the disappointing experience of the Day of Concern in 1969, the Board of BATUN decided that this event call for a week-long response culminating in a large rally on Sunday, October 18, 1970 in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the UN.  The plan was two-fold. First, a truck carrying a large sign that said ‘Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania want freedom and membership in the UN’ would drive around NY to the venues of all the events that were part of the week-long celebrations. The truck carried young Baltic protestors, who would jump off the truck and stage small ad hoc demonstrations and hand out leaflets at all the venues. About 20 thousand leaflets were to be distributed throughout Manhattan, particularly in the UN area. Press releases and background papers on Baltic history, the occupation and russification of the Baltic States, were also prepared and distributed and a press center was set. After a week of ‘guerilla’ demonstrations, the rally took place as planned with about 4,000 people attending, surrounded by a significant number of NY police.

The rally actually took place in the plaza around the corner from the UN, since the street in front UN headquarters had been closed off to traffic. However, at the end of the rally, the last speaker Msgr. Balkunas  announced that ‘these kind policemen are now going to allow us to march to the UN’. He stepped to the barricades lifted one aside and started walking. He was peacefully followed by the all the rallygoers. And the police did not stop anyone. At that time, many of the NYC police were of either Irish or Italian descent, and therefore Catholic, so perhaps that’s why they hesitated to stop them. Later the crowd proudly marched past the UN headquarters with their Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian flags flying. 

At the Times building on October 24^th, the Baltic activists adopted some very simple tactics: a group of young people approached the front desk accompanied by a couple of adults, and said they were there to go on a tour of the building (which wasn’t true). While, the NYT staff tried to resolve the problem, the young people sat down in the revolving doors blocking the entry and exit from the building. Juta Virkmaa and Mari Linnamaa stayed outside and distributed leaflets explaining the reasons for the sit-in to the annoyed Times workers who wanted to enter the building.

The demonstrators’ demand was simple: they wanted to have a meeting with the editorial staff of the Times, to discuss why the newspaper never reported on any Baltic news. After some negotiating, agreement was reached and a meeting was scheduled. Thereupon, the young activists got back on the truck and rode through nearby Times Square shouting slogans to ‘Free the Baltic States’. Their victory lap was filmed and broadcast on the TV news that night.