Washington - Survivors of communism from Belarus, Vietnam
and dozens of other countries gathered Tuesday near the US Capitol
building to dedicate the city's first-ever memorial to the victims of
communism - an estimated death toll of 100 million.
The crowd of several hundred included the president of the self-
proclaimed Belarusian government in exile, Ivonka Symaniec Survilla,
who fled the communist takeover of her country as a young girl, and a
Vietnamese poet, Nguyen Chi Thien, who spent 27 years in Vietnamese
jails under communism writing, reciting and memorizing his poems.
For Thien, 68, the memorial - a statue of the goddess of
democracy holding a lamp high in her right hand - was a 'very
important' reminder to young people who 'must learn their history
lessons.'
'I am deeply touched when I see this monument,' said Thien, who
lives in southern California, in an interview.
The statue is a replica of one carved by Chinese student sculptors
in the spring of 1989, and erected during protests at Tiananmen
Square that provoked severe reprisals from the Chinese communist
government.
US President George Bush told the crowd that the end of communism
in many countries last century was proof that 'freedom is a light
that burns in every human heart.'
The statue 'reminds us that when an ideology kills tens of
millions of people, and still ends up being vanquished, it is
contending with a power greater than death,' he said.
He vowed that similar forces would bring down the expansionist
drive of radical Islamism.
Congressman Tom Lantos, who was instrumental in the 20 years of
work it took to build the memorial, spoke about his own experience
fighting both Nazism and communism.
Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who chairs the House of
Representatives committee on foreign affairs, used the platform to
say he anticipated a closer relationship in the Atlantic alliance
with the departure of two European leaders - former German chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder and former French president Jacques Chirac.
He recalled how the US saved Europe from fascism and protected it
from communism for generations, only to have these two men turn their
backs in the fight against the next wave of tyranny, Islamic fascism,
by failing to support the United States in its 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Lantos provoked gasps of amusement and surprise in the crowd when
he said he would like to call Schroeder 'a political prostitute, now
that he's taking big cheques from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin.
But the sex workers in my district objected.'
During his final weeks in office in 2005, Schroeder signed an
agreement between Germany and Russia to build a pipeline under the
Baltic Sea to supply gas directly to Germany.
After leaving office, he became chairman of the North European Gas
Pipeline, which is 51-per-cent owned by Russian state natural gas
company Gazprom - a move that provoked outrage in Germany.
Russia has used its energy reserves as a political chip in its
continuing bid for hegemony in eastern Europe, and has come under
severe criticism for repression of press and other freedoms.
For many in the crowd, including Survilla, Russia's regional
dominance has changed little since communism. Survilla, 71, who lives
in Canada, said she had only returned once to Belarus since leaving
as a child, in the brief period of freedom after the fall of the Iron
Curtain in the early 1990s.
She said she would not return again because of the risks that the
pro-Russian dictatorship of Belarus could try to physically harm
her.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
USA
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