Bush opens victims-of-communism memorial: Reagan anniversary (Roundup)

By Pat Reber Jun 12, 2007, 18:35 GMT

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.