Victims of communism memorial dedicated in Washington

By Pat Reber Jun 12, 2007, 17:15 GMT

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.