Last Word: Natan Sharansky

Few people know more about dissidence than Natan Sharansky. Charged with treason in the Soviet Union in 1978—he denied the accusations of spying for the United States—he served nine years in a gulag. In 1988, he was elected president of the Zionist Forum, a group of former Soviet dissidents. Even as an authority figure—he became a member of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel

Sharon's cabinet in 2003—Sharansky remained defiant, resigning in 2005 over its withdrawal plans from Gaza. Now he has adopted a new controversial role as a key neoconservative ideologue—President George W. Bush called Sharansky's 2004 book, "The Case for Democracy," "part of my presidential DNA." This week, Sharansky is hosting a conference in Prague dubbed "The Davos of Dissidents." Among the dozens of democracy advocates from Iran to North Korea will be cohosts Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president, former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar and a VIP visitor, Bush himself. (The U.S. president is slated to stop by and address the conference on his way to the G8 summit in Germany.) With the Bush administration's democracy drive in the Middle East failing to win hearts and minds, NEWSWEEK's Zvika Krieger quizzed Sharansky on the concept of democracy promotion. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: How does the current struggle of dissidents around the world compare to the fight of those who fought communism?
SHARANSKY: The debate that is going on in the West now is almost the same. Our message as dissidents was that you cannot impose democracy. Nobody can force anybody to be free. But you don't have to help impose dictatorship on these people by cooperating with [dictators] and financing these efforts. Today, the debate is more or less the same. There are those who believe democracy is not for everybody, and that when it comes to the Arab world, there are no democratic regimes, and that it is wishful thinking to try to push for it, so let's have good relations with dictators who help bring stability. There are dissidents in those countries who are very upset with the free world. They are not saying, "Go and fight," but saying, "Stop supporting them."

Many dissidents in the Middle East have made it clear that they don't want U.S. support. Appearing pro-Western can be the kiss of death for them.
I've heard this argument all my life and I don't know one dissident who believes it. Dissidents are risking their lives and the lives of their families, risking everything in order to speak the truth, and their only way of survival—the best guarantee of a chance to succeed—is that the authorities know that the free world is watching them, and that they will have to pay a big price for persecuting them.

It is true, government support is often not the best way. You can always find an effective way to do it. But often the State Department doesn't want to upset the leaders of Egypt or Saudi Arabia or some other countries, and that's why they are very cautious and noncreative in their efforts to support dissidents.

How do you rate the success of Bush's democracy drive?
When this policy was applied consistently, there were results. Where it was applied hesitantly, there were no results. I give a lot of credit to President Bush for putting democracy back on the world agenda. But of course this agenda has to be promoted on a nonpartisan level, and that is one problem with this administration. The Soviet Union was defeated only when human-rights activists on the left and security hawks on the right realized this was both their own cause. This doesn't happen today. It's very unfortunate. People say that if we speak too strongly on Iran, it will look like we're supporting Bush. That is ridiculous.

I appreciate that Bush liked my book, but there are some of my ideas he doesn't share. He was very firm in pushing for immediate elections, a concept I was very critical of. Free elections have to follow the building of civil society. This, unfortunately, was ignored, and pushing for immediate elections paved the road for Hamas.

Now that Iraq has descended into a bloody civil war, are you upset that your book was used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion?
If you read my book, nowhere do I say that the way to bring democracy is to declare more wars. But what I do say is that appeasing dictators for a long time will make them stronger so that in the end we'll have to fight with them. That is what happened with Saddam Hussein. But America wasn't prepared for the Shia-Sunni conflict that followed— not enough thought was put into it.

Does the success of Islamist groups like Hamas, Hizbullah and the Muslim Brotherhood contradict your claims that democracy is the best way to secure freedom and human rights?
When there are elections during or after many years of corrupt dictatorship, people choose candidates who are taking care of immediate needs. People kept asking why Christian villages voted for Hamas. It's because Hamas was protecting them from the gangs of Fatah.