Such euphemisms as ‘presents’, ‘brown envelopes’, ‘collateral things’, even ‘bribes’ do not describe the reality. This system of bribes is best described as medical terrorism. Bribes are what doctors receive. Terror is what the population experiences.

Janet Paine looks back on ten years of an initiative to foster democratic values in Eastern and Central Europe

The people of Lithuania, the biggest of the three Baltic states, are the first former Soviet subjects to vote to join the European Union.

Marijana Longin was 17 in 1991 when her country, Croatia, declared independence from Yugoslavia. Until then, Serbs, Croats and people from other ethnic minorities had lived peacefully together in her town, Zadar. They even celebrated each other's religious festivals. Now, with the propaganda from all sides stirring up hate and fear, many of the Serbs fled to Yugoslavia.

Over the last seven years, hundreds of young people have taken part in courses on the values which undergird true freedom, run by MRA's Foundations for Freedom programme. Anna Christine Christensen from Denmark first took part in 1994. She caught up with participants new and old at the first of this summer's conferences in Caux, Switzerland.

Mike Lowe revisits Poland, ten years after its return to democracy.

Analysing the war in the Balkans, as well as the student massacre in Colombine High School and racist attacks in Britain, William Rees-Mogg wrote in The Times of London recently about 'the racism that threatens the world's future'.

Ten years after the fall of the Wall, Michael Smith visits Berlin and meets the woman charged with bringing down the barriers between the city's multi-racial communities:

Elvyra Kucinskaite is Chief Editor of the Lithuanian Catholic monthly magazine, 'Sandora'

Grim realism has replaced the euphoria of 1991 in Ukraine, as in most countries of the former Soviet Union. On a recent visit to Ukraine, Mike Lowe discovered that democracy must start at the grassroots