The Conscience of Europe

That's what Vaclav Havel has become and the Continent should be embarrassed by its appeasements.

Havel's op-ed in today's WaPo salutes Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident agitating for freedom and democracy who's been confined to house arrest by the Burmese junta, and excoriates the rest of the Euros for failing the dissidents in Cuba and China. Some excerpts:

Aung San Suu Kyi is still kept under strict house arrest, and the Burmese generals have fortified themselves even more against any attempts at a dialogue. A dialogue? To conduct a dialogue with a regime that consistently disdains basic human rights and freedoms -- that uses arms instead of words and harassment and violence instead of discussion -- probably does not make any sense.

This is something that the European Union recently learned the hard way when it thought -- partly out of naivete, partly out of expediency -- that a more forthcoming attitude toward Fidel Castro's regime would lead to a more forthcoming attitude on the part of Castro toward his political prisoners and dissent in general. But Castro made a fool of the E.U. He released a few critically ill prisoners, secretly jailed some others and did not let some European parliamentarians into the country. Those parliamentarians who somehow managed to slip in were unceremoniously expelled.

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Even a decade and a half after the fall of communism there, the citizens of Central and Eastern Europe still vividly remember that their communist rulers made the same arguments. Abuses of human rights and freedoms have never been and will never be solely internal affairs of any country. As someone who years ago experienced firsthand the arbitrary rule of a dictatorial regime but then lived to see better times -- to a large extent because of the international solidarity extended to us -- I appeal to all those who have the opportunity to act against such arbitrary acts to express their solidarity with people who to this day live in a state of "unfreedom."