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Estonia split over WWII memorial | |
(about 6 hours later) | |
Estonia's president has refused to sign a controversial law that would pave the way for removing a Soviet war memorial. | |
Toomas Hendrik Ilves said some sections of the law were unconstitutional. | |
Earlier on Thursday the Estonian parliament passed a bill obliging the government to remove the monument within a month. | |
The "Bronze Soldier" has become a symbol of divisions in Estonian society. Ethnic Russians are firmly against the plan to remove it. | |
Most of the country's large Russian-speaking minority regard the statue as an anti-fascist symbol, but for many ethnic Estonians it honours a regime which occupied the country for more than 50 years. Russians form about one-third of the Baltic republic's population. | |
President Ilves accused some MPs of "irresponsible behaviour"Mr Ilves accused some Estonian politicians of using the issue "merely to draw attention to themselves" ahead of the 4 March parliamentary election. | |
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, quoted by the Interfax news agency, called the Estonian MPs' vote a "very big mistake and an act of blasphemy which is unacceptable in today's Europe". | |
The law would prohibit the display of monuments glorifying Soviet rule, which ended in 1991. | |
Mr Lavrov's deputy Vladimir Titov warned that approving the law would have irreversible consequences for relations with Estonia. | |
After clashes between ethnic Russian and Estonian activists at the statue, the Estonian government said it wanted to move the monument - and the soldiers' remains thought to be buried beneath it - to a more suitable location. | After clashes between ethnic Russian and Estonian activists at the statue, the Estonian government said it wanted to move the monument - and the soldiers' remains thought to be buried beneath it - to a more suitable location. |
Prime Minister Andrus Ansip said the government would be able to order the monument's removal anyway, using a law on the protection of war graves which was passed in January, the BBC's Laura Sheeter reports from Tallinn. |
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