SCORE! for FREEDOM

By Khmer Democrat, Phnom Penh
Expanding our Mind Series

Sooner or later, the wind of freedom refreshes - in the former Eastern bloc, in Latin America - as in Cambodia! "CAMBODIA without HUN SEN! CAMBODIA without HUN SEN!" Excerpts from IHT article:

Russian Activists See Change in a Humble Protest
By Ellen Barry
International Herald Tribune, Oct. 31, 2010

MOSCOW — There was nothing grandiose about the demonstration in Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow on Sunday night.

The organizers stood on the back of a truck and spoke through tinny speakers. The audience was squeezed behind the metal fencing that has sliced up the plaza, a traditional gathering place for dissidents, so a parking garage can be built underneath.

But that was enough, for this one night.

For a year and a half, these activists have engaged in a standoff with Russian authorities as they have asserted their right to free assembly — demonstrating, essentially, for the right to demonstrate. Nine times the riot police have dispersed them and herded them onto buses.

This time, having gotten a permit in what appears to be a civics experiment for both sides, it was heady just to hear chants of “Russia without Putin” echoing off the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall.

But the arrests of the Strategy-31 demonstrators — among them Lyudmila Alekseyeva, 83, the grande dame of Russia’s human rights movement — had become such a drag on Russia’s reputation abroad that it forced the country’s leaders to back down, said Aleksei A. Venediktov, the director of Ekho Moskvy, a liberal radio station.

“They think concession is weakness and weakness leads to catastrophe; that is their real belief,” he said. Advocates were able to convince them that demonstrating was “a normal constitutional right and not a threat or a provocation.”

“It was not easy to convince them,” he added.