Eastern Europe Lions Reach Out to Ukraine (Walesa & Havel Helping Out)

[Khephra]

VIENNA, Austria -- Eastern Europe's lions in winter have rediscovered their roar. When Ukraine descended into postelection chaos this week, the most stirring pleas for a peaceful resolution came not from Washington but from Warsaw and Prague.

Communist-era freedom fighters Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel have emerged from the shadows to offer Ukraine's opposition some poignant and very personal counsel born of their own struggles for democracy.

"I opposed the Soviet Union and I opposed communism and I came out victorious," Walesa, the founder of Poland's Solidarity movement and his country's first democratically elected president, told a huge crowd that massed on Kiev's Independence Square. "Ukraine has a chance."

Havel, a former president and dissident playwright who led the Velvet Revolution that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, made an impassioned plea to Ukrainians to keep their protests peaceful.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-ukraine-lions-in-winter,0,4662700.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

[madrchsod]

1. can they stop here in the usa

after they are done. wait a minute,i forgot, 59 million+ people don`t give a shit whether they live in a democracy or not....