BONJOUR L'ESTONIE

Estonia might be small but it can teach us a lesson !

Hamish McRae

The scene is Tallinn airport. On Thursday evening I was changing a few Estonian crowns back into either euros or sterling – whatever, I said to the woman in the currency bureau, was easier.

"Oh, have euros," she said with a grin. "Much better."

But this is not a bleat about the collapse of sterling, dire though it has become. Rather it is a celebration of the competence and delight of Estonians. There is something wonderful about small states, and Estonia with its 1.4 million population has had to make being small an advantage. The former prime minister, Mart Laar, told us that one key factor enabling the country to make its successful transition from a centrally planned economy to a market one was that the government had no money. So it had to figure out ways of doing things on the cheap.

I asked the head of one of its best schools, the Tallinn English College, what was the single greatest advantage they'd had. (Estonia scores very near the top of the OECD study of the ability of 16-year-olds, and quite a bit ahead of us.) His reply : "Limited resources."

Estonians not that capable as they think

Marge Tubalkain-Trell

Estonians aren’t that fine and brisk as one thinks and working quality is low, said Arho Anttila at Pärnu management conference.

“Estonian people are very good and normal, not lazy like Sami Lotila wrote. But they have a problem. Since they’ve lived in a closed system for so long, they don’t know what’s actual international level.

They think they’re very fine and laborious, but actually it is not so. With a broader horizon, people could change themselves,” said Anttila, who is a manager of NOW! Innovations.

KGB planned to kill Estonian Prime Minister Edgar Savisaar

In August, 1991, the Estonian special service detained a man who alleged that he had been sent to Tallinn by the USSR State Security Committee (KGB) with the task to kill Estonian Prime Minister Edgar Savisaar, newspaper Eesti Ekspress reports. The reporter of the paper got

Edgar Savisaar

acquainted with 23 pages of this case kept in the archive of the Security Police (KaPo) and given out to the journalist on the basis of the Law on Public Onformation.
Some days prior to the coup d’etat in Moscow and restoration of independence of Estonia, the 37-year-old Russian Andrei Stekolshchikov arrived at border guards post at the port of Pirita, showed a shabby certificate of an employee of the KGB and told the commander of the company, Ivar Pihakho, that he had received the task to kill the then Prime Minister and leading politician of Estonia, Edgar Savisaar, however, he did not wish to carry out this order.
Stekolshchikov was later detained at hotel Briis by the officers of the Special Service (division of protection of the Estonian government) and he informed them that he had to organize an attempt on Savisaar (or if it was not possible, on the chairman of parliament, Arnold Ruutel) with use of an anti-tank gun which he had to obtain at one of the Soviet military units in the territory of Estonia.
Stekolshchikov whose relation to the Ministry of Defence of the USSR was confirmed later was temporarily placed under protection in a psychiatric clinic and after restoration of independence of Estonia was sent to Moscow.

NewCardio names new vice president and CMO

NewCardio, a cardiac diagnostic and services company, has appointed Ihor Gussak as its new chief medical officer and vice president, effective immediately.

Dr Gussak joins NewCardio from Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, where he held a senior executive role for the past year.

Dr Gussak received his MD from Tartu University School of Medicine (Tartu, Estonia), and his PhD in medical sciences/cardiac electrophysiology (acute myocardial ischemia in clinic and experiments) from the National Center for Surgical Treatment of Severe Cardiac Rhythm Disturbance and Cardiac Pacing (Kaunas, Lithuania).

Branislav Vajdic, president and CEO of NewCardio, said : "Dr Gussak is a recognized leader around the world in the area of clinical trials and cardiac safety. We are exceptionally pleased to add him as a senior member of our management team and look forward to benefiting from his expertise and leadership."

The great language myth

By Vincent Freeman with additional reporting by Adam Mullett

TALLINN-VILNIUS - Estonians can be strange people. Not only do they dislike Russian speakers speaking Russian, they don’t like Finnish tourists speaking Finnish.
“We are not in Finland. If you can’t speak Estonian, speak English” would be a typical response.
It’s understandable that Estonians prefer English — it is, after all, an international language. Also, in this part of the world, it is politically neutral. Russian, German and even Swedish can be associated with occupation and colonization. Estonia and the other Baltic states are small nations, and they can’t expect everybody to learn their language.

There are also practical reasons. The fact is, a lot of people living in Estonia don’t speak Estonian. It is possible for two people born in Tallinn in the same year to be forced to converse in English because it is the only language that they have in common. It’s part of the great Russian-Estonian divide.
The trouble is that the Estonians don’t actually speak English all that well. According to official figures, Finns actually speak English better than most Estonians.

Some 50 percent of Finns consider themselves fluent in English, compared to a third of Estonians, according to figures from their respective foreign ministries.
Estonians don’t realize this, of course, because they don’t speak English to each other..
It is one of the great myths of the region that you can get by with just English. It’s not that people don’t speak the language — it’s that the people who you need to speak it don’t.
One third of Estonians speak no English at all, and it seems that they all work in some form of customer service.

Ilves : A portrait

Toomas Hendrik Ilves was 31 years old when he first visited the Baltic republic he would one day lead. But Estonia had been on his mind for much longer.

“Being a child of refugees is different from being a child of immigrants,” explained the Estonian president in a brief phone interview this past September. During the Soviet occupation of Estonia from 1944 to 1991, “people could not choose to leave, but fled, meaning there was a much stronger domestic connection [for me]. And second, I really hated communism … and wanted to do something to help.”

Ilves, who was born in Sweden to Estonian exiles and grew up in the United States, recalled the introduction to his homeland in 1984 “as one of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen—to see normal people [trying to live] in the face of totalitarianism.”

Sixteen years after Estonia regained its independence, that picture has changed dramatically. It has one of the top-performing economies in Europe, enjoying 11 percent growth in 2006. According to Business Week, it is also one of the most “wired” countries, with every school in the capital city of Tallinn connected to the Internet and much of daily business—from paying parking tickets to voting for members of parliament—conducted online.

Mart Laar's Biography

* When Mart Laar began his second term as prime minister of Estonia in 1999, the country was in the midst of a fiscal crisis. The collapse of Russia's economy the year before had left Estonia's stock market reeling, and the government was struggling to fund the benefits promised by Soviet-era social programs.

Laar realized that the only way for Estonia to weather the crisis was to finally leave behind the legacy of its communist past. He announced deep cuts to paternalistic state welfare programs, slashed business taxes, and urged liberalization of international trade. By the end of his term, the government's Bureau of Privatization was dissolved; more than 90 percent of the economy was in private hands. The economy was growing 7 percent annually, and Laar was widely credited as the force behind the creation of the "Baltic Tiger."

Mart Laar believes in economic freedom because he believes in the Estonian people. As a young student of history, Laar braved Soviet arrest by researching Estonian resistance to the World War II occupation. In his first term of office, he negotiated the withdrawal of Russian troops from the country, introduced the highly stable Estonian currency, and implemented a flat tax that has decreased steadily since 1994.

Laar is not an economist, and he says that his boldness came mostly from naiveté. "I had read only one book on economics—Milton Friedman's Free to Choose," he said. "I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatization, the flat tax and the abolition of all customs rights, was the result of economic reforms that had been put into practice in the West. It seemed common sense to me and, as I thought it had already been done everywhere, I simply introduced it in Estonia, despite warnings from Estonian economists that it could not be done. They said it was as impossible as walking on water. We did it : we just walked on the water because we did not know that it was impossible."

Archbishop Petersoo "brought a strong sense of tradition"

GENEVA - The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) has sent a message of condolence to the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church (EELC) Abroad following the death of Archbishop Udo Petersoo in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. He died on 14 May, aged 72.

In a letter addressed to the Toronto-based EELC, LWF General Secretary, Rev. Dr Ishmael Noko described Petersoo as a partner in the joint LWF work, who understood the depth of the meaning of a communion of churches in view of the church's close working relationship with sister churches in Europe. "Working with the community of believers in North America as archbishop, he brought a strong sense of history and tradition to the culture," he said.

Noko paid tribute to Petersoo's strong commitment to the gospel during his tenure as archbishop. "As a leader in the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church Abroad, he exhibited a strong faith and a love of God's people. Many have been blessed by his service," the LWF general secretary noted.

Petersoo was born in 1934 in Tallinn, Estonia. A graduate of the Waterloo Lutheran Seminary in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, he was ordained in 1975. Prior to his September 1990 election as EELC-Abroad Archbishop, he was dean of Canada and pastor of Toronto's St Andrew's congregation.

Archbishop Udo Petersoo is survived by his wife, Reet Petersoo, three children and one grandchild. The funeral service will be held on 27 May at St Andrew's Estonian Lutheran Church in Toronto.

The EELC currently has around 6,600 members. It joined the LWF in 1947.

WINDOW TO THE FINNO-UGRIC WORLD

AKEN SOOME-UGRI MAAILMA

Language	Number of Speakers * According to the All-Russian population census 2002	Level of endangerment (UNESCO)
Tundra Nenets Forest Nenets (Yurak)	31,311*	endangered
Forest Nenets		seriously endangered
Enets (Yenisei Samoyed)	119*	nearly extinct
Nganasan (Tavgi)	505*	seriously endangered
Selkup (Ostyak Samoyed)	1,641*	seriously endangered
Kamass	extinct since 1989
Khanty (Ostyak)	13,568*	endangered
Mansi (Vogul)	2,746*	seriously endangered
Hungarian	14,500,000	not endangered
Komi (Zyryan)	217,316*	endangered
Permian Komi	94,328*	endangered
Udmurt (Votyak)	463,837*	endangered
Erzya (Mordvin), Moksha (Mordvin)	614,260*	endangered
Meadow Mari (Cheremis)	451,033*	endangered
Hill Mari (Cheremis)	36,822*	endangered
Ter Sami, Kildin Sami	787*	seriously endangered
Skolt Sami	500	seriously endangered
Inari Sami	400	seriously endangered
Northern Sami	30,000	endangered
Lule Sami	2,000	seriously endangered
Southern Sami	500	seriously endangered
Livonian	very few	nearly extinct
Estonian	1,000,000	not endangered
Votian	60	nearly extinct
Ingrian	362*	seriously endangered
Vepsian	5,753*	seriously endangered
Karelian Proper	52,880*	endangered
Livvi (Aunus Karelian~Olonetsian)		endangered
Lude (may be a dialect of Karelian)		seriously endangered
Finnish	5,500,000	not endangered

Homage to Uno Kaljulaid provides mathematical insight

* The late Uno Kaljulaid was an eminent Estonian algebraist of the last century. “Semigroups and Automata. SELECTA Uno Kaljulaid (1941 – 1999)”, edited by Jaak Peetre and Jaan Penjam, pays tribute to this pioneer of the mathematical culture.

This book provides a collection of papers and manuscripts of Uno Kaljulaid. For the first time, Kaljulaid's 1979 Candidate thesis, which was originally typewritten in Russian, is published in English. His thesis is devoted to representation theory in the spirit of his advisor B.I. Plotkin : representations of semigroups and algebras, especially extension to this situation, and application of the notion of triangular product of representations for groups introduced by Plotkin.

Through representation theory, Kaljulaid also became interested in automata theory, which at a later phase became his main area of interest. Another field of research concerns combinatorics. Besides being an outstanding and most dedicated mathematician, Uno Kaljulaid was also very much interested in the history of mathematics. In particular, he took a vivid interest in the life and work of the great 19th century Dorpat-Tartu algebraist Th. Molien. Kaljulaid was also very interested in teaching and exposition, or popularization of mathematics.

No other book on mathematics connects different fields like representation and automata theories and combinatorics. This publication is not only interesting for mathematicians and computer scientists; non-specialists will also be able to broaden their horizon.

Join for the finals of Miss World, in Sanya, China, on 10th December 2005

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ALBANIA - Suada SHERIFAJ	AMERICAN VIRGIN ISLANDS - Kmisha-Victoria COUNTS
ARGENTINA - Emilia IANNETTA	ARUBA - Sarah Carolina JUDDAN
AUSTRALIA - Dennae BRUNOW	BAHAMAS - Ordain MOSS
BARBADOS - Marielle Chetham ONYECHE	BELGIUM - Tatiana SILVA BRAGA TAVARES
BOLIVIA - Viviana MENDEZ RIVERO	BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA - Sanja TUNJIC
BOTSWANA - Tshegofatso  ROBI	BRAZIL - Patricia REGINATO
BULGARIA - Rositsa IVANOVA	CANADA - Ramona Rina AMIRI
CHINA PR - Ting Ting ZHAO	CHINESE TAIPEI - Su-Jung HSU
COLOMBIA - Erika QUERUBIN	CONGO DEMOCRATIC REP. - Nelly DEMBO OSONGO
COSTA RICA - Leonora JIMENEZ MONGE	CROATIA - Maja CVJETKOVIC
CYPRUS - Orthodoxia (Doxia) MOUTSOURI	CZECH REPUBLIC - Lucie KRALOVA
DENMARK - Trine LUNDGAARD	DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - Elisa ABREU DE LOS SANTOS
ECUADOR - Marielisa MARQUES GUTIERREZ	EL SALVADOR - Alejandra Mirian CARCAMO RAMOS
ENGLAND - Hammasa KOHISTANI	ESTONIA - Laura KORGEMAE
ETHIOPIA - Seble MEKONNEN	FRANCE - Cindy FABRE
GEORGIA - Salome KHELASHVILI	GERMANY - Daniela RISCH
GHANA - Inna Mariam PATTY	GIBRALTAR - Melanie CHIPOLINA
GREECE - Aikaterini STIKOUDI	GUADELOUPE - Meryta MELINA
GUATEMALA - Maria Ines GALVEZ CLOSE	GUYANA - Jasmine Samoy HERZOG
HONG KONG CHINA - Chui Chui IP	HUNGARY - Tunde SEMMI-KIS
ICELAND - Unnur Birna VILHJALMSDOTTIR	INDIA - Sindhura GADDE
INDONESIA - Lindi Cistia PRABHA	IRELAND - Aoife Mary COGAN
ISRAEL - Keren SHACHAM	ITALY - Sofia BRUSCOLI
JAMAICA - Terri-Karelle GRIFFITH	JAPAN - Erina SHINOHARA
KENYA - Cecilia Murugi MWANGI	KOREA - Eun-Young OH
LATVIA - Valerija SEVCUKA	LEBANON - Lamita FRANGIEH
LIBERIA - Snoti FORH	MACEDONIA FYRO - Milena STANIVUKOVICH
MALAWI - Rachel LANDSON PHIRI	MALAYSIA - Emmeline Wei Shu NG
MALTA - Ferdine Irma FAVA	MARTINIQUE - Moana-Sarann ROBINEL
MAURITIUS - Meenakshi Shivani PUTTY	MEXICO - Dafne MOLINA LONA
MOLDOVA - Irina DOLOVOVA	MONGOLIA - Khongorzul GANBAT
NAMIBIA - Leefa Shilkwa LEEFA	NEPAL - Sugarika K.C.
NETHERLANDS - Monique PLAT	NEW ZEALAND - Kay Margaret ANDERSON
NICARAGUA - Valeria GARCIA DAVILA	NIGERIA - Omowunmi AKINNIFESI
NORTHERN IRELAND - Lucy EVANGELISTA	NORWAY - Helene TRAASAVIK
PANAMA - Anna Isabella VAPRIO MEDAGLIA	PERU - Fiorella Maria CASTELLANO GARCIA
PHILIPPINES - Carlene AGUILAR	POLAND - Malwina RATAJCZAK
PORTUGAL - Angela FONSECA SPINOLA	PUERTO RICO - Ingrid Marie RIVERA SANTOS
ROMANIA - Raluca VOINA	RUSSIA - Yulia IVANOVA
SCOTLAND - Aisling Nuala FRIEL	SERBIA & MONTENEGRO - Dina DZANKOVIC
SINGAPORE - Shenise Wong Yan YI	SLOVAKIA - Ivica SLAVIKOVA
SLOVENIA - Sanja GROHAR	SOUTH AFRICA - Dhiveja SUNDRUM
SPAIN - Mireia VERDU TREMOSA	SRI LANKA - Nadeeka Samanmali PERERA
ST LUCIA - Joy MATTY	SWAZILAND - Zinhle Marcia MAGONGO
SWEDEN - Liza BERGGREN	SWITZERLAND - Lauriane GILLIERON
TANZANIA - Nancy Abraham SUMARY	THAILAND - Sindie JENSEN
TRINIDAD & TOBAGO - Jenna-Marie ANDRE	TURKEY - Hande SUBASI
UGANDA - Praise Juliet AKANKWATSA	UKRAINE - Yuliya PINCHUK
UNITED STATES - Lisette DIAZ	URUGUAY - Daniela TAMBASCO MARFETAN
VENEZUELA - Berliz  CARRIZO ESCANDELA	VIETNAM - Huong Giang VU
WALES - Claire EVANS	ZAMBIA - Precious Kabungo MUMBI

World's vast ranks of the stateless

By David Montero

DHAKA – Borders have made all the difference in the life of 25-year-old Noor Islam. He was born in Bangladesh, but an invisible line has virtually confined him to Geneva Camp, a squalid enclave in the capital, Dhaka.

Shifting borders dictated this fate. In 1971, when East Pakistan gained independence as Bangladesh, Islam's family and some 300,000 other Urdu-speakers found themselves without a nationality in the new Bengali state.

"In Geneva Camp, we don't have much access to education and jobs," Islam says, adding that citizenship would dramatically transform their lives.

The so-called Stranded Pakistanis are one of the largest and oldest communities of stateless people, a group estimated to number 11 million across the globe. Their predicament deserves more attention, say experts, since national identity is the most fundamental of human rights - indeed, the very right to have rights.

"They are the ultimate forgotten people," says James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative in New York. The problem persists, he says, in part because nation-states still enjoy broad discretion under international law to grant or deny citizenship as they see fit.

"Even as human rights norms have steadily evolved over the past half-century, the field of citizenship has remained one of the last bastions of untrammeled state sovereignty. As a result, citizenship creates a giant loophole in the international human rights framework," Mr. Goldston writes in an e-mail.

Statelessness is the untold dark side of new nations, including those in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. To date, nearly 20 percent of the population in Latvia and Estonia are stateless persons, according to one estimate. Thousands of stateless people languish in poor conditions in some of the most politicized and conflict-ridden areas of the world, including Palestine and Iraq.

The reasons for the problem differ from region to .........

Estonie : Premier évêque ordonné depuis 60 ans, Mgr Jourdan

* Depuis soixante ans, c’est le premier évêque ordonné en Estonie : le P. Philippe Jourdan, prêtre français de l’Opus Dei sera en effet ordonné samedi 10 septembre à Tallinn, annoncent la nonciature apostolique à Tallinn et le service de presse de la Prélature (cf. www.opusdei.org). Une ordination sous le signe de l’œcuménisme.

Le nonce apostolique pour les Pays Baltes, Mgr Peter Zurbbrigen, sera le célébrant principal. Mgr Xavier Echevarria, prélat de l’Opus Dei, sera l’un des évêques consacrants, ainsi que l’archevêque de Moscou, Mgr Tadeusz Kondrusiewic.

Mgr Jourdan sera le seul évêque pour tout le pays, qui compte environ un million et demi d’habitants, dont 33 % de Russes et d’Ukrainiens. Il est majoritairement protestant, mais l’Estonie est fière de toujours se dire « terre mariale », grâce à un décret du pape Innocent II, de 1215. Et depuis le 1er mai 2004, l’Estonie fait partie de l’Union européenne.

Mgr Jourdan est le premier évêque depuis 1942, et le second depuis la Réforme luthérienne (XVIe siècle). Il a été nommé par le pape Jean-Paul II le 23 mars dernier, quelques jours avant sa mort, ce qui a particulièrement touché les fidèles catholiques d’Estonie. En tant qu’archevêque de Cracovie, Karol Wojtyla avait été ..............

The Baltics: More famous than you might think

* Take a trip to any part of the world and the phrase “I come from the Baltics” is likely to be met with confused looks of wonder and confusion. “The Balkans ?” people reply. But more and more, this part of the world finds itself in the news. As the Baltics emerge as independent countries after years of occupation, the world is getting a better sense of their unique identity. A common question might follow : “What are the people like ?” To assist in answering this question, TBT staff has put together a list of some of the most famous and maybe not so famous people with connections to the Baltics.

Mikhail Baryshnikov – Latvia - Mikhail Nikolaevitch Baryshnikov was born in Riga in 1948. He started dancing in 1960. He studied in Leningrad under the famous Aleksander Pushkin and began to make a name for himself early on in his career. In 1974, Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union and started dancing with the American Ballet Theatre. He has become the face of ballet not only in cultural circles but among common people and has been described by dance critics as “the most perfect dancer of all time.”

Zydrunas Ilgauskas – Lithuania - This 30-year- old Kaunas native joined the Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball League for the 1997 season. The 7’3’’, 230 pound center has remained with Cleveland since being drafted. He was named to the Eastern Conference All-Star Team in 2002-2003.

Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn - Estonia – These three Estonian born computer geniuses were only in their twenties when they invented Kazaa in collaboration with a Swedish programming company. Kazaa, a peer to peer file sharing program, allows people to find virtually any song or movie on the internet—sometimes even before it is officially released—and download it for free. But the trio insists they never thought of creating it to bypass buying licensed music, movies and software. Says their ...........

Strange deal makes Hanschmidt country’s richest individual

TALLINN - The list of the richest businessmen is Estonia suddenly, and somewhat mysteriously, changed last month when Uhispank founder Ain Hanschmidt acquired a huge swathe of Tallink though paying a measly 166,600 kroons (10,645 euros) for the asset.
According to reports, Hanschmidt’s lawyer, Aare-Heino Raig, transferred his shareholding in OU Abante, which controls a significant portion of Tallink shares via subsidiaries, to Hanschmidt.

Independent sources say the real value of the Abante stock is some 45 million euros.

What’s more, two days after the deal was made, Hanschmidt started working as CEO of Infotar, a firm that owns 55.53 percent of the Tallink Group, which specializes in ferry services along the Tallinn-Helsinki route.

Hanschmidt has declined to comment on the transaction, while analysts have surmised that the businessman most likely exercised an option that he arranged in the late ‘90s.

The business paper Aripaev speculated that the deal might have been arranged when Hanschmidt was CEO of Uhispank, the only bank that issued a credit to a cash-strapped Tallink in 1996.

Unfortunately, all who might have .............

Mao Tse Tung (Mao Zedong) the sociopath - not the great hero says new book

*A book about to be released in October, in Canada, re-paints chairman Mao in a less favourable light, as a downright bloodthirsty sociopath. An article written by Geoffrey York, of the Globe and Mail's Beijing bureau, analyzed "Mao : The Unknown Story", a book written by Jan Chung (best selling author of the non-fiction book "Wild Swans") and her husband Jon Halliday. Considering that Mao is literally deified in communist China - and outside as well - this is a serious reality check.

The book debunks all of the theories floated about Mao from the point where he was installed by the USSR and then overtakes his mentor Josef Stalin (as well as Adolph Hitler) in murder putting the death toll at 70 million.

The high number of people killed had something to do with the fact that Mao enjoyed his "work" with public executions, which even his European counterparts would not attempt. He was quite willing to sacrifice half of China's population for the ultimate goal of ............

Study : Age, income affects residents’ e-voting perception

*The poll, carried out at the end of May and in early June, shows that 40% of respondents regard the opportunity to cast one’s vote on the Internet as fully or generally reliable, whereas 44% see it as rather or fully unreliable.

People who trust the reliability of e-voting prevail among respondents aged under 34, people with higher education, with above-average income and residents of Tallinn. Russian-speakers are a bit more sceptical, showing that ethnic background generally has a small effect on how respondents perceive e-voting. Supporters of different parties, however, vary more widely on the topic.

ETHNIC MINORITY CONVENES ITS CONGRESS IN THE UNDERGROUND

INFORMATION CENTRE OF FINNO-UGRIC PEOPLES
Tallinn, Estonia
Phone/fax : + 372 644 9270
E-mail : suri@suri.ee

The 2nd Congress of Ethnic Maris of the Republic of Mari El was held in the forest in fear of persecution.

The extraordinary congress condemns the policy of Russian administration and expresses its gratitude to the international community for support.

Amidst a wave of persecution on ethnic grounds and physical violence against the indigenous nation of Russia's autonomous Republic of Mari El, the 2nd extraordinary Congress of Ethnic Maris of the Republic of Mari El was held
June 5 in a traditional holy grove, the cultural organisation Mari Ushem reported.

Attended by foreign press and visitors, the popular representative assembly was ........