ROUNDUP: Bush opens victims-of-communism memorial: Reagan anniversary
By Pat Reber, dpa
Eds: Adds Reagan 'wall speech' background, recasts headline; epa
photo 00000401036536; adds Czech, Hungary parliamentarians; Latin
America, Asian, European deaths; German reaction to Lantos; sidebar
on 100 million moving shortly =
Washington (dpa) - 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 ceremony coincided with the 20th anniversary of the late
president Ronald Reagan's controversial 'tear down this wall' speech
in Berlin that challenged then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to
advance the cause of freedom.
'He was clear in his statement,' US President George W Bush said
of Reagan. 'He said, 'tear down the wall,' and two years later the
wall fell.'
Bush and other speakers noted that as the Berlin Wall came down in
1989, 'communism crumbled' and liberated millions from 'unspeakable
oppression.'
They also noted that in addition to persistent communism in China,
Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea, there was a new scourge of
radical Islamism, and that America would lead the way in this
challenge, too.
Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos, chairman of the House of
Representatives committee on foreign affairs, noted his personal
history as a Holocaust survivor who grew up in Hungary and then fled
the communist takeover.
'It was a privilege to fight against Nazism, it was a privilege to
fight against communism,' and it's a privilege to fight radical
Islamism that is 'determined to take us back 13 centuries,' Lantos
said.
The crowd 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
the famous Vietnamese poet, Nguyen Chi Thien, who spent 27 years in
Vietnamese jails under communism, where he wrote, recited and
memorized his poems.
Members of the Czech and Hungarian parliaments were also present
in the audience.
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.
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.
Lantos, who was instrumental in the decade-plus of work it took to
build the memorial, said 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.'
In Berlin, the German government defended Schroeder from the
verbal attack, saying it was an 'unseemly' observation about the
former chancellor.
During his final weeks in office in 2005, Schroeder signed an
agreement between Germany and Russia to help 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.
The figure of 100 million political deaths under communism was
based on the 1997 book by French scholars, 'The Black book of
Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,' published by Harvard
University.
The book, hailed by US reviewers as a groundbreaking documentary
work, put the largest death tolls at 65 million in China and 20
million in the Soviet Union.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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