A private foundation is planning a memorial to millions of people around the world who have been killed during decades of communist rule with a statue on Capitol Hill modeled on the "Goddess of Democracy" erected by students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
The nonprofit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation wants to erect the 10-foot bronze statue in a small, triangular park near the U.S. Supreme Court.
"Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a number of us in town thought it would be appropriate to have a memorial to the victims," said foundation chairman Lee Edwards, a fellow in conservative thought at the Heritage Foundation.
The wall's collapse on Nov. 9, 1989, became a symbol of the end of the Cold War as the Soviet Union's grip on Eastern and Central Europe was broken.
Edwards said the memorial would be dedicated to an estimated 100 million victims of communist regimes -- a figure that comes from the foundation's own research and other, outside studies.
Under the 1993 legislation authorizing the foundation to erect the memorial, the federal government provided the land, but the foundation has to raise the $500,000 to build and maintain the memorial. So far, it has about $300,000, Edwards said, and expects more when proceeds from the foundation's annual fund-raising dinner, held last night at the Embassy of the Czech Republic, are tallied.
The quarter-acre site in Northeast Washington -- bounded by Maryland Avenue, Constitution Avenue and Third Street -- was approved by the National Capital Memorial Advisory Commission this summer. It is opposite the Veterans of Foreign Wars headquarters.
"A number of people in my single district are opposed" to the memorial, said Karen Wirt, Advisory Neighborhood Commission representative for District 6C08, whose 2,000 constituents live near the park.
The memorial "has nothing to do with our neighborhood," she said, noting that the foundation's advisory board "has people from Poland [and] Romania."
The foundation's international advisory council includes Lech Walesa, former Solidarity leader and later president of Poland, and dignitaries from several other former Soviet bloc states in Eastern Europe.
Wirt said the neighbors are worried about losing two large, 50-year-old oak trees on the site; about traffic congestion if tourist buses regularly visit the memorial, and about the loss of green space to concrete.
"I think they resent [having] their public space taken away," Wirt said of her constituents. "They've used it for many years. . . . There's too little green space in our area, and we don't need a statue there."
Bill Line, spokesman for the National Park Service's National Capital Region, said the process required to build the memorial is still in its early stages. "The design stage is even quite preliminary," Line said.
Foundation representatives are scheduled to present the memorial's proposed design to the subcommittee of planning and zoning of ANC 6C on the first Wednesday in January.
