This 1989 world news report on the Baltic Chain is a lesson for journalists today

Take a look at how ABC News covered the the Baltic Chain protest in their World News Tonight on this day in 1989.

The report is centred on the protestors, treats them as people with agency, and properly reflects their perspectives about their own countries. The report also explains the historical context without an imperial lens. The response is from Moscow (where the correspondent is based) is included, but it's not provided with an entitlement to frame the entire story.

That’s how you do it.

Update: Wow. Reporter Jim Laurie responded.

Background

The Baltic Chain protestors achieved something truly spectacular, despite no mobile phones, no social media, and with a brutal regime determined to stop them.

Two million people across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania formed the world’s longest unbroken human chain of nearly 700km across our three then occupied nations.

When pictures of this circulate on social media today, it’s too often by engagement farming accounts that treat it as just a pretty spectacle of people coming together across borders.

It’s treated on the same level as that vacuous “World Clap Day” bullshit that’s been going around recently.

But the Baltic Chain had a real purpose and a real message for the world.

They were marking the half century anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the criminal collusion between the Nazis and Soviets to divide up other people’s nations and pave the way for the aggression that sparked the Second World War.

The continued occupation of the Baltic countries half a century later meant that war wasn’t over. The Pact had to be fully annulled.

As the Baltic Chain organisers said in a statement on the day:

“…only then will Europe divest itself of the last colonies of the Hitler-Stalin era, and the Baltic nations will get the opportunity to determine their own destiny on the basis of free self-determination.”

“…one way or another, we have to solve it together, proceeding from the principles of international law. A common European home can only be set up if all European nations are granted a free right to self-determination.”

“Let us unite our voices and demand that Hitler-Stalin pacts together with their secret protocols be declared null and void from the very moment of their signing! Let us declare the annexation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania unlawful!”

So the Baltic Chain was indeed spectacular, visually and logistically, and incredibly brave.

But the really, really world changingly spectacular thing they achieved wasn’t the hand holding alone.

It was the actual annulment of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, officially declared just a few years later, fully restoring their independent states, and ending the occupation.

Although, if only these people had access to Twitter then they could have learnt from Western academics lecturing them that their experiences of being colonised are actually invalid because the Soviet Union was so more nuanced than that in a way that ordinary people experiencing it wouldn't understand.

And, seriously, fuck that World Clap Day thing.