Dissidents, human rights and security.

Natan Sharansky, once a dissident who spent 9 years in the Soviet gulag, is co-hosting a conference on democracy and security in Prague next month, together with former president of the Czech Republic Václav Havel and former prime minister of Spain José María Aznar, where he hopes to give dissidents around the globe a forum to be heard.

President Bush will be the keynote speaker.

Organized under the auspices of The Prague Security Studies Institute, the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at The Shalem Center and the Foundation for Social Analysis and Studies in Madrid , this is the "first-ever event to bring dissidents together with leading politicians in democratic countries to discuss the importance and relevance of democracy and to explore ways to promote democracy in totalitarian regimes, and the empowerment of dissidents in that process."

Mr. Sharansky finds that President Bush is a dissident like him: a lone voice in the West. He told Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post:

"It's not that the democracy policy was adopted and applied and turned out not to work," Sharansky said. "There was never a strategy for applying it. There was no unity of purpose. Hardly any political leaders besides Bush believed in the concept. Even here in America there was terrible resistance. It's not enough that the president believes in the policy and wants to act. He has to be able to carry the country and the bureaucracy with him."

Mr. Sharansky is a fervent believer that dissidents of tyranny must be supported by the free world. He knows that dictatorships are week from the inside because they must control the vast number of "double thinkers" who, unlike the small numbers of dissidents, are afraid to revolt because they have no support from the outside world.

He draws an analogy between what is going on in Iran right now with the Solidarity movement in Poland under communism. Mr. Sharansky says that there is a comparable movement in Iran, but unfortunately, unlike Solidarity, it has no support from the outside.

As to his views about the debate on linking democracy and security:

First, when you are sitting with other dissidents in a Soviet prison, it becomes so clear that if we have anything in common it is this cause of human rights and democracy. It is not about left or right; nor is it about this or that religion. Human rights and freedom is a cause for everybody.

Second, for many years I was in solitary confinement, where I could talk only to myself. When you speak about the linkage between democracy and security in the free world, very often you find you are speaking only to yourself. Nobody really wants to listen; nobody really wants to believe in it."

It will be interesting to hear what the outcome of this debate will be during the conference, and whether the lonely dissidents of today will garner any more support...

There is more on Mr. Sharansky, his cause and the up coming conference at The Weekly Standard.

Sharansky dissident President Bush Czech Republic democracy and security Human Rights Havel Aznar Solidarity Poland