POLAND: Dissidents from around the world gathered yesterday in the Polish port of Gdansk, where Lech Walesa urged them to follow the freedom-fighting example of Solidarity, the trade union he helped transform into a pro-democracy powerhouse 25 years ago this month.
As part of nationwide celebrations of the first Solidarity strikes against Poland's communist regime, Mr Walesa welcomed activists from as far afield as Cuba, Burma and the Middle East, and gave them a pep talk on fighting authoritarian power.
"There is no single recipe for resolving the conflicts around the world," Mr Walesa told his audience in Gdansk's ornate Artus Court. "But look carefully to see if you find in the example set by Solidarity some elements which could be useful to you."
Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright struck a similar note at a conference in Warsaw: "We all know that the ideology of pressure and force did not die with the USSR. It lives on in countries such as China, Zimbabwe, North Korea and Belarus." Dissidents from all those nations were in Gdansk yesterday and told grim tales to a gathering of politicians, think-tank members and journalists.
The focus fell on Belarus, Poland's neighbour, which Washington has denounced as "the last dictatorship in Europe".
Belarussian opposition activist Vincuk Viachorka said leader Alexander Lukashenko had turned his country into a "freezer surrounded by walls", where independent media, education and dissent had been crushed.
Since peaceful revolutions brought pro-western reformists to power in Ukraine and Georgia, Mr Lukashenko has put greater pressure on potential sources of opposition, even closing a university for fostering too many contacts with foreign academics.
The European Commission vowed yesterday to boost its presence in the Belarussian capital.
"We are preparing a decision to send a charge d'affaires to Minsk to monitor the situation on the ground," said commission president José Manuel Barroso.
"We are very concerned with the situation of human rights in Belarus," he said after meeting the Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Slovakian premiers.
In Gdansk, there were words of frustration and some tears at the slow pace of change in countries such as Belarus, Cuba and Zimbabwe. But the most horrific tales came from Asia, from men who had escaped the deadly prison camps of China and North Korea.
Some 200,000 North Koreans are believed to be subject to slave labour, torture and arbitrary execution in the "Kwan-li-so" penal labour colonies.
According to prison camp survivor Kang Cheol-Hwan, movements such as Solidarity exist there only in the realms of fantasy.
"I witnessed the shooting of lots of prisoners in public executions. Their legs were broken by beating and their mouths were filled with rocks to prevent them saying any last words," he said.
"People cannot dream of speaking out in the face of such atrocities. This is something akin to what happened in the time of Hitler and Stalin."
Harry Wu, who survived 19 years in a Chinese gulag, denounced the West's fostering of economic ties with Beijing, asking: "Can money convince a tiger to become vegetarian?"