Lagle Parek

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Lagle Parek (2011)

Lagle Parek (born April 17, 1941 in Pärnu ) is an Estonian politician and activist. Parek was best known as a dissident in the Estonian Soviet Republic in the 1980s, and as a punishment she spent several years in labor camps. After Estonia gained independence in 1992, she was briefly interior minister in Estonia's first democratic cabinet under Mart Laar .

Life

deportation

Lagle Parek was born in Pärnu on April 17, 1941. Her father and former commander of the Estonian army, Karl Parek, was arrested by the NKVD in 1941 , deported to Leningrad and executed in the same year. In March 1949, at the age of seven, Lagle Parek was born together with her mother, the art historian and museum director Elsbet Marek (* 1902), her sister Eva-Marju (* 1931) and her grandmother, the Estonian actress Anna Markus (* 1878), as part of the "operation Priboi" in the Novosibirsk Oblast deported. The family was not able to return to Estonia until 1954/55 after an amnesty.

Dissident in the Estonian Soviet Republic

Lagle Parek then studied civil engineering at the Technical University in Tallinn . She then worked as an architect for the State Building Administration of the Estonian SSR .

Lagle Park remained a dissident against the Soviet regime. In the 1970s she published information about human rights violations committed by the Soviet authorities, distributed prohibited literature, signed appeals and appeals. On October 10, 1981, she participated in a petition and an open letter from 38 authors from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to the USSR; In this letter they demanded a nuclear-free zone around the Baltic Sea and the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from the Baltic Soviet republics.

This and the publication of articles in émigré publications earned her an arrest on March 5, 1983 and a subsequent charge of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. On December 16, 1983, the Supreme Court of the Estonian SSR sentenced her to six years in a labor camp and three years in exile. With her, Heiki Ahone and Arvo Pesti were sentenced. She was then in the women's section of the labor camp DubrawLag in the middle Volga located Mordovian ASSR detained. Together with Tatiana Velikanova, Irina Ratuschinskaja and other supporters, she organized protests in the camp, including a hunger strike. In 1987 she was released early due to the changing political conditions in the USSR.

Engagement in democratic Estonia

Parek in Tartu (1988)

After her return to Estonia, Lagle Parek founded the "Party of National Independence of Estonia" ( Eesti Rahvusliku Sõltumatuse Party ) as a founding member in 1988 . The ERSP was the first democratic party to be founded after the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940. Lagle Parek headed the party from 1988 to 1992. In 1992 she ran in vain for the election of Estonian President , she received only 4.3 percent of the vote.

In the parliamentary elections in 1992, the ERSP received ten seats in the Riigikogu with 8.8 percent of the vote. The party joined the coalition government, from October 1992 to November 1993 Parek headed the Interior Ministry in Prime Minister Mart Laar's cabinet . In the wake of the Pullapää crisis, in which soldiers of the Estonian army mutinied, she stepped down alongside Defense Minister Hain Rebas.

Despite her resignation from the government, Parek remained active in the context of her partisan engagement. Her party joined forces with other parties to form the Res Publica , which later became the Isamaa (Union of the Fatherland).

today

Lagle Parek lives in the Pirita nunnery near Tallinn and was chairman of the Estonian Caritas .

Honors

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Frederik Rother: Estonian activist Lagle Parek - "Ekre still doesn't understand the country's problems". In: Europe Today. Deutschlandfunk, November 18, 2019, accessed on November 22, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Parek, Lagle
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet dissident and Estonian politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Parnu