Further notes on the Oslo Freedom Forum: Rwandans, Tibetans, Eritreans, Ukrainians, Russians, Afghans, Saudis, Venezuelans, et al.
Editor’s Note: The Oslo Freedom Forum took place in the Norwegian capital from May 23 to May 25. Yesterday, we published Jay Nordlinger’s first installment of notes. Today is the second and final.
I meet an American of my acquaintance, who works in foreign policy. I ask him about his family. He has a daughter, 20 years old, who was studying in Milan earlier this year. But, when Russia’s assault on Ukraine began, she left school, suspending her education. She felt compelled to go to Warsaw, to help with refugees, in any way she could. Then she went to Ukraine itself, and helped with the clean-up of Bucha, where some of the worst massacres occurred.
What a woman. Kind of gives one hope for the future.
• Carine and Anaïse Kanimba are delightful young women. They are about an important mission: getting their father released from prison. He is Paul Rusesabagina, known as “the hotel manager.” It was he who saved more than a thousand people in the Rwandan genocide. His story was depicted in the 2004 movie Hotel Rwanda. President George W. Bush saw it twice. He met with Rusesabagina in the Oval Office. They discussed Darfur (the genocide there). Later, Bush awarded Rusesabagina the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And now the hotel manager is a political prisoner of the Rwandan dictator, Paul Kagame.
Rusesabagina adopted Carine and Anaïse after their parents were murdered in the genocide. To meet these young women — it is really something.
• Chemi Lhamo is another brave and compelling young woman. She is a Tibetan in Canada. She was elected president of the student body of her university. (No surprise there. She is a natural.) This caused a wave of nastiness, directed at her by PRC types. “China is your daddy” and all that. Yet Chemi Lhamo soldiers on.
You might think of Tibet as a lost cause: swallowed up by China, its nationhood crushed out. But it is not a lost cause to the Tibetans, and many of us hope to see that land Tibetan again.
• From the stage of the Oslo Freedom Forum, you hear many mind-boggling stories. Few are as mind-boggling as that told by Filmon Debru, who is an Eritrean survivor of human trafficking. He was bought and sold. Bought and sold. Tortured daily, almost to death. He lost half of each hand. Later, his hands were repaired, at least to a degree, by an Israeli surgeon. Today, he is in Germany, working as a software developer for Siemens.
What people endure. The courage and persistence they demonstrate.
• You can watch the goings-on at the Freedom Forum on YouTube: here, for example, and here.
• If there is an MVP, writing branch, of the Ukraine war, it may be Anne Applebaum, the historian and journalist. No slouch himself is her husband, Radek Sikorski, a former foreign minister and defense minister of Poland. He, too, is a journalist, and was foreign correspondent for National Review, in the late Cold War. Applebaum is present at the Freedom Forum. So is Alexander Sikorski, son of Radek and Anne, who is a recent Yale graduate who now works for the Human Rights Foundation. A chip off the old block — blocks — which is a wonderful thing to be.
• Oleksandra Matviichuk, the Ukrainian human-rights lawyer, makes an important point: People say, “Just give away territories.” They tell Ukraine to cede territories, in order to satisfy Putin and end the war. First, the idea that Putin would be satisfied by bits, rather than the whole, is ill-informed. But second: Ukraine is not fighting merely for territories. It is fighting for the people in those territories. Have you seen what Russian forces have done to people under their control in Ukraine? They have killed them, raped them, kidnapped them, burned their villages to the ground.
Foreigners speak blithely about “territories.” Ukrainians are fighting for their people, for themselves.
• Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, gives an address to the Freedom Forum by video. “We have no option but to defend our right to exist,” he says. He also says that Ukraine’s model is very different from Putin’s. We’re talking about models of government and society. Ukraine’s model is a dire threat to Putin’s. Putin knows it all too well. What’s more, says the foreign minister, people have rights simply by virtue of being human — rights from birth.
These are elementary things. And extremely important to restate, and to bear in mind.
• Paul Massaro is an American, a policy adviser to the U.S. Helsinki Commission. Here at the Freedom Forum, he is speaking in his own capacity. And he says that, to the extent the West is united on Ukraine, it’s thanks to Zelensky and the Ukrainians. The West did not necessarily want to be united — at least behind the Ukrainians. Many, many people thought the war would be over in about three days. Then we would go on with business as usual, in our trademark accommodationist way. But Zelensky and the Ukrainians made this impossible.
Which is amazing.
• After many years of smug success, the authoritarians have overstepped, says Garry Kasparov. Putin’s assault on Ukraine has aroused the sleeping West. In every age, there is a battle between freedom and tyranny, Kasparov says. And, today, the Ukrainians are on the front line. They have reminded the world of the costs of freedom. Western countries are paying — money, equipment. This is extremely important. But the Ukrainians are paying in blood.
There is an old concept: sacrifice. Ukrainians have reminded the world of it. The Ukrainians are making tremendous, barely speakable sacrifices. What about the rest of us? Can we do without our Russian gas? Our T-shirts made in the Xinjiang region, by slave labor? Do the Ukrainians not shame us a little?
About Russia, Kasparov is very sharp. The best thing that could happen to Russia is to quit imperialism. To expunge the virus of imperialism from the national body. Russia has so much to offer: scientifically, artistically, and so on. But the government is bent on the conquest of other nations and peoples. This keeps Russia down, whether Russians know it or not.
What is glorious about the mass murder and mass rape committed by Russian forces against the Ukrainian people? What is glorious about Russia’s status as a pariah — or near pariah, or should-be pariah — in the world?
In a sense, Russian defeat in Ukraine would be as good for Russia as it would be for Ukraine. The Kremlin has bewitched and distracted the Russian people with imperialism for long enough. Let Russia at last be a nation at peace, prospering.
• You will want to meet Zarifa Ghafari. I will write about her soon. She was one of the handful of female mayors in Afghanistan. And one of the youngest. She has survived more than her share of murder attempts. She is positively amazing, this young woman.
• Abdulrahman al-Sadhan is a political prisoner in Saudi Arabia. He was kidnapped, held incommunicado, tortured. . . . That’s how they operate, the Saudi authorities. Sadhan worked for the Red Crescent (as the Red Cross is known in many a country). Anonymously, he tweeted some remarks critical of the government. And the authorities found out.
Campaigning to win his release is his sister, Areej. She is a speaker here in Oslo. And I have podcasted with her. The love she has shown. And the determination and the bravery. Such people set an example.
• I see many old friends, and many of my favorite people. Pedro Burelli, speaking for his country, Venezuela. Leopoldo López, doing the same. Enes Kanter Freedom, the NBA player. He stands tall, in more than one way. Emil Constantinescu, the former president of Romania, and a champion of democracy in the former Soviet bloc and elsewhere. He is one of the most dignified people I know.
It’s a joy, and it’s fortifying, to be among such people. If you ever needed a tribe — you could do a lot worse. . . .
• Marina Ovsyannikova is a television journalist in Russia — was. It was she who, on March 14, stepped into the studio during a live broadcast, stood behind the anchorwoman, and delivered an anti-war message. She told the audience that the state media were lying to them. Marina is now in exile. She has been disowned by her family — a very, very painful thing. Sometimes, though, you have to take a stand. You have to act, even if “irrationally.” That is Marina’s belief.
I get to know her a little, here in Oslo, and it is rather moving.
From the stage of the Freedom Forum, she says that, when she was a student, she read 1984. This was in 1998. Totalitarian times were past, at least for her country, Russia. She could not imagine that anything like 1984 would ever return.
For 20 years, she says, Putin has built a cynical, lying propaganda machine. She could no longer bear to be part of it. Independent media have been wiped out. The people are drugged, in a way: drugged by propaganda. And inflamed by it. They are taught to hate Ukraine, hate the United States, hate Western Europe. And this can have disastrous consequences, as we have seen.
She makes a simple statement, but one hard to improve on. One unquestionably honest. “I want my children to live in a free country.” I hope they do.
• Walid Ben Selim and Marie-Marguerite Cano give a wonderful performance. He is a Moroccan singer-songwriter; she is a French harpist. He sings beautifully, and in tune (which is part of beauty, for sure); she plays with alertness and skill. How refreshing, to hear something new (to me) and commendable.
• It is so easy to be cynical in this lousy world. To think that no one’s good. That no one’s worth anything. That there is no real good and evil, just gray and game-playing. That between freedom — so-called freedom! — and tyranny there is no real difference. “What, you think we’re so innocent?” Such bunk. Not true.
I’m grateful for the good there is, and grateful for my readers, whether longstanding — it’s been damn near 30 years — or shortstanding. See you later.
If you would like to receive Impromptus by email — links to new columns — write to jnordlinger@nationalreview.com.