User:Mardus/Saved context

Andrus Ansip

• I cannot imagine that someone could go to Tõnismägi and in the darkness of the night, put the Bronze Soldier on the hook of the crane, and drive it away somewhere. This is not a solution acceptable for a constitutional state.

— at a press conference on 29 June 2006

In the quote, Ansip referred to the way the Lihula monument was removed in early September 2004, ostensibly under orders of then-Prime Minister Juhan Parts. The Lihula monument depicts an Estonian soldier who fought on the German side in World War II; the monument is devoid of any Nazi symbols, and is dedicated "[t]o Estonian men who fought in 1940-1945 against Bolshevism and for the restoration of Estonian independence." This monument now stands on private property. It should not be confused with another monument in Lihula dedicated to the Estonian War of Independence.

Then on late April 2007 during Ansip's own tenure as Prime Minister, the Bronze Soldier itself (symbolizing the Soviet occupation of Estonia) was relocated from its initial place on Tõnismägi under very similar circumstances in what became the Bronze Night, and later placed permanently in a rebuilt memorial at the Defence Forces Cemetery of Tallinn. The remains of the war dead buried beneath the memorial in Tõnismägi were subsequently exhumed under the auspices of local religious leaders, and transferred to their respective relatives.