Mart Niklus's fate is unknown (12/27/87)

Mart Niklus's fate is unknown

NEW YORK - The 80-year-old mother of leading Estonian human and national rights activist Mart Niklus has notified contacts in the West that she has had no word from her son since he was apparently returned to Perm Camp 36 in March of 1987.

"I don't even know if he is still alive," Elfriede Niklus writes in a letter recently received by the Stockholm-based Relief Center for Estonian Prisoners of Conscience in the USSR.

The Estonian American National Council based in New York noted that Amnesty International and other human rights and Helsinki monitoring groups also have no information as to Mr. Niklus' condition or whereabouts. All letters sent to him are being returned to the senders by Soviet authorities.

No information has come even from underground sources in Soviet-occupied Estonia. Via telephone on December 4, usually well-informed sources in Estonia explained that they did not have any news about Mr. Niklus.

Mr. Niklus was brought by the Soviets to his native Estonia briefly this spring in order to extract a confession or a plea for amnesty from him. When he would not comply, he was returned to the Kuchino region. Human rights experts speculate that he was probably sent to notorious Perm Camp 36.

"Niklus is very principled and completely unwilling to compromise with those who have incarcerated him illegally," explained Tiit Madisson, former prisoner of conscience who was recently expelled by the Soviets for organizing the August 23 demonstrations in Tallinn, Estonia. "He will never sign such a fake confession, but will continue to demand justice and that the Soviets comply with their own laws, regulations and Constitution, all of which they violate with impunity."

The Relief Center is demanding to be informed about Mr. Niklus, Enn Tarto, and other Estonians held in Soviet prisons, slave labor camps, and psychiatric institutions. "So far, glasnost has only made it even more difficult to obtain concrete, basic information about prisoners of conscience, added Mr. Juriado. "At least an aged mother should be told where her son is."

Mr. Niklus was jailed for protesting the Molotov-Ribbentrop (Stalin-Hitler) Pact of 1939 as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He has spent half his adult life in Soviet prisons and concentration camps.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were independent parliamentary democracies and members of the League of Nations before the Soviet Union forcibly annexed them in 1940. The United States and most Western nations consider this annexation illegal under international law.

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