Edward Lucas
Europeanvoice.com
July 11, 2013
Some of the lost causes of the 1980s have been won; the others that remain may yet be won.
In the 1980s my social life revolved around events marking lost causes: freedom, democracy and independence in the captive nations of the Soviet Empire. We would gather in dusty social clubs and semi-derelict diplomatic missions, surrounded by the detritus of decades, the air laden with grim, determined refusal to accept the verdict of history. Victory was not in sight: the only plan was just to keep going. If some echo of our efforts crossed the Iron Curtain, it might at least be some solace to those enduring foreign occupation and totalitarianism.
People would shake their heads sadly at the waste of time. I remember a campaign, run by my university friend Anthony Finkelstein, to raise money to replace the ‘word processor’ confiscated by the Czechoslovak secret police from an obscure playwright called Václav Havel; I remember a bumper-sticker dating from the Moscow Olympics saying “Estonians out of Siberia, Soviets out of Estonia”, around the time that the Tartu University chemistry professor Jüri Kukk was dying on hunger strike in the Gulag. I remember interviewing for a BBC programme the priest Dick Rodgers who locked himself in a cage to highlight the persecution of the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya; a campaign by Keston College in Oxford in support of the jailed Lithuanian ‘underground nun’ Nijole? Sadu*aite?; and many more seemingly hopeless causes besides.
So I felt quite at home at a party in London last week to mark the Dalai Lama’s birthday. The food, folk music and prayers were different – but the essence, of loss, oppression, resistance and exile was the same. Many of those present had relatives in Tibet, or in jail in China.
Some had first-hand experience of Chinese oppression – such as Robert Ford, a sprightly 90-year-old, once the Tibetan government’s radio operator and perhaps the only remaining Westerner with first-hand memories of independent Tibet. After his capture during the China invasion in 1950, he spent five years in the gulag, adding prison Chinese to his fluent Tibetan. A handful of foreign diplomats turned up to the party too – though one ambassador begged me not to mention his name for fear of the vengeance that China would wreak on his small country. The Legatum Institute, a think-tank whose director of studies is my friend the author Anne Applebaum, deserves kudos for hosting the event.
It set the scene nicely for Captive Nations Week. A joint resolution of Congress in 1959 cites the enslavement by communist imperialism of “Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia, White Ruthenia, Rumania, East Germany, Bulgaria, mainland China, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, North Korea, Albania, Idel-Ural, Tibet, Cossackia, Turkestan, North Viet-Nam, and others”. It requires the White House to mark this in the third full week in July.
Soviet communism is dead. My lost causes of the 1980s are won. But there is plenty still to do. For the Tibetans, for the Uighurs of ‘Turkestan”, for “Mainland China”, as well as for the Tatars and Bashkirs of “Idel-Ural”, the Belarusians of “White Ruthenia”, and the North Koreans, freedom is still denied, by crony-capitalist, ethno-nationalist, or communist authoritarian regimes.
By the standards of the early 1980s, it is not hopeless. A new reason for hope is that China may well have more practising Buddhists than Communist Party members; many are attracted by the Tibetan tradition in that faith. That may prove to be a lethal chink in the regime’s grip.
Sadly, I do not expect the White House to use Captive Nations Week to echo the stirring rhetoric of the original resolution. But please consider what you can do for Tibet, and for other captive nations
