"Go back to Nigeria, Go back to Africa!" Estonians shout at US NATO African American troops

"Go back to Nigeria, Go back to Africa!" Estonians shout at US NATO African American troops

FORMER Soviet republic of Estonia is on a collision course with the United States, following attacks on US African American  troops stationed there. Several local leaders have called the taunted the troops calling them Nigerians while asking them to go back to Africa.

One of the three Baltic States that were the first to break away from the Soviet Union, leading to its demise, tiny Estonia with a population of just 1.3m has about 500 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) troops stationed there. Some of these troops will participate in the independence anniversary parade in the capital Tallin.

Because Estonia has just about 5,500 troops with a little more than 30,000 in reserves, NATO is planning to send a battalion of 500 to 1,000 each to the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These troops will consist of American, British and German soldiers but NATO leaders are having second thoughts given the recent clashes between locals and the troops.

While Estonians welcome foreign defenders with open arms, they do not like the faces of certain Nato soldier, in particular, those with darker skin colours than the European stereotype embraced by the noisy minority in Estonia. For instance, on 2005 in Vilnius, the capital of neighbouring Lithuania, two black American Nato soldiers were attacked in front of a local casino, resulting in severe injuries as their faces were smashed and their teeth knocked out.

In 2015, during the Independence Day parade, while African-American troops wearing NATO uniforms marched on the main street of Estonia’s capital, local racists shouted all kinds of racial slurs, including, “Go back to your grandparents in Nigeria.”

This abuse has been condemned by Jaak Tarien, the Estonian Air Force supreme commander, who said: "You are attacking the people here to defend our independence. They are willing to give their lives for our freedom but are you, petty patriotic racists, ready to give so much for our country?”

Since then, there has been evidence of racism against American NATO troops in restaurants, hotels and on the streets of Estonia, where Go back to Nigeria has become a widely used attack on American soldiers. Air Marshal Tarien apologised saying that his fellow Estonians, with their racist attitude towards dark-skinned Nato soldiers serving in the country, made him feel both ashamed and embarrassed.

Washington's embassy in Estonia also found it necessary to angrily protest the attacks on US soldiers, publishing an article in the Estonian newspaper Õhtuleht titled Racism Concerns Us All. In it, the embassy’s charge d’affaires Chever Voltmer condemned the racially-motivated verbal and physical assaults of our American soldiers in Tallinn.

Retired General Ants Laaneots, a member of the Estonian Parliament’s Defence Committee, has his own explanation for the blatant acts of racism on Tallinn’s streets. He added that he does not exclude the conspiracy that the attacks on African-American troops were ordered by private individuals from Russia to compromise his country in the eyes of the US.

- Nigerian Watch