AFPC Senior Associate Wayne Merry participated in a major conference on “Asia-Pacific Realities, Perspectives, Projects: XXI Century” at Russia’s Far Eastern State University in Vladivostok, from November 29th to the 31st, 2002.
Since last year’s presidential crisis in Ukraine, the importance of U.S.-Ukrainian relations has taken on a new significance. Not only is Ukraine delicately balanced between East and West it is also one of the five largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid. Yet the country is too often considered only in the shadow of her Russian neighbor.
In September 2002, AFPC was pleased to host the Washington meeting of the World Anticrime and Antiterrorism Forum
The American Foreign Policy Council traveled to Prague, Czechoslovakia this past July to co-sponsor the “Peaceful Road to Democracy” conference. The three day event was initiated at the request of President Vaclav Havel, in coordination with his group, Charter 77, and was directed by the American Foundation for Resistance International.
The central theme of the “Peaceful Road to Democracy” conference, sponsored in Prague by Resistance International and the American Foreign Policy Council, addressed the difficult task of transition: How do we build a free-market economy and a democratic society “from under the rubble” (in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase)? “Mr. Gorbachev is turning the Soviet Union into one giant Beirut,” said Vladimir Bukovsky in his opening remarks at the conference. “State structures remain the greatest obstacle to human freedom, and…socialism cannot be restructured or reformed: it can only be eliminated.”