Mike Danielyan, ARMENIA

As usual, the Centers for Pluralism meeting was held at exactly the right time and in exactly the right place. Two days before my departure for Minsk, Agasi Arshakian, chairman of the Andrei Sakharov Human Rights Fund ( he uses the name of the late human rights hero against the wishes of Elena Bonner, Sakharov's widow) and co-chairman of the People's Initiative to Make Armenia Part of the Belarus-Russia Union, gave an interview in which he criticized me bitterly for calling any attempt to join Armenia with Lukashenko's totalitarian state "immoral".

The situation in Belarus proved as distressing and diffucult as I had supposed. The meeting organizers were able to find space for our activities only at the last minute and several participants had problems getting visas to enter the country. The Cuban poet and dissident, Ernesto Diaz Rodriguez, was denied entry by the Belarusan KGB and was forced to enter the country through a different border crossing. While Belarus presented us with these various difficulties, Arshakian's "democratic forces" in Armenia collected 1 million signatures supporting a union with Lukashenko's "great land."

Despite all of the hardships, the meeting organizers, the Supolnasc Center and the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe, did their best. The presentations, formal and informal discussions, and workshops stressed the importance of common effort in achieving democracy, human rights and freedom of expression. None of these can take place in an isolated country. When the representatives of the Belarusan NGO's spoke with us about their situation and problems, it became clear that they need our help as much as we need theirs.

I have nothing but praise for the "Non-Governmental Organizations, Information, and Mass Media" workshop conducted by Luminita Petrescu. Most of us took part in the Chernobyl March, which was organized by the democratic opposition on the anniversary of the disaster.The march itself went very well, but I was disappointed to see that the meeting afterward was cancelled when the KGB stole the amplifiers. The participants had worked together so much by that time, that we could easily have overcome this last setback from Lukashenko together.

Mike Danielyan, ARMENIA