Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson
Born in 1939. Foreign minister of Iceland in 1988-95, thereafter ambassador to the US, Finland and the Baltic States. Now a visiting professor in the universities of Iceland. As a scholar, he studies the role of small states in the international system.
Besides Boris Yeltsin, the leader of Russia, there was another representative of a foreign state visiting Estonia during the Bloody January. Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson, foreign minister of Iceland, was the only Western politician who had the courage to travel to the Baltic nations during the crisis.
Hannibalsson remembers vividly a telephone call in the middle of the night from Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis who said: “If you mean what you have been saying, come immediately to Vilnius to demonstrate personally your commitment, in our hour of peril. The presence of a NATO Foreign Minister does matter”. “In response”, Hannibalsson recalls, “I immediately set off on a visit to the capitals of all three Baltic States.”
Hannibalsson's visit may, indeed, have helped avoid a larger bloodbath. In order to understand Hannibalsson's and Iceland's contribution to the restoration of the Estonian Republic, one should consider the background of Gorbi-mania that had conquered the West and the general disrespect of the wishes of the Baltic peoples. For instance, when foreign minister Lennart Meri travelled to Copenhagen in June 1990 to take part in the CSCE conference on human rights, he was literally thrown out. Hannibalsson was one of very few who stood up in defence of the Baltic States, noting that these states could not be sacrificed to the altar of the so-called peace process. He was the first to resurrect the concept of “small state solidarity”. From this moment on, Hannibalsson remembers, he did not miss a single opportunity to remind the Western leaders of the fact that restoring the Baltic States was “a moral imperative that could not be hedged or glossed over in the interest of political expediency”.
Already as a student, Hannibalsson had dealt with Eastern Europe and the problems of the USSR. His brother was one of the first from the West who after World War II had graduated from a university in the USSR; he also had contacts in Lithuania and Estonia. Hannibalsson remembers that, relying on expert knowledge, they forecast early on the end of the Empire. In 1989, they were already sure of the success of Baltic independence movements and they remained optimistic even in January 1991. After the coup of 1991, Hannibalsson understood that the right moment for freedom had arrived. Iceland became the first state to recognise the independence of the Baltic States.
- Estonian SSR
- Latvian SSR
- Lithuanian SSR
- Russian SSR
- Byelorussian SSR
- Ukrainian SSR
- People´s Republic of Poland
- German Democratic Republic
- Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
- People's Republic of Hungary
- Socialist Republic of Romania
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- The Moldavian SSR
- The People´s Republic of Bulgaria