05/08/2008 (Agence Europe) - In a press release published on Tuesday 5 August, the president of the EPP-ED group at the European Parliament, Joseph Daul, paid homage to the former dissident and Nobel Prize winner for literature, Alexander Solzhenitsyn who passed away on Sunday. Mr Daul said that, “his name will always remain associated with the defence of peace and freedom” and affirmed that the writer, who was stripped of his Soviet nationality in 1974 had become, “an icon of resistance to totalitarianism”. Mr Daul asserted that, “it is thanks to figures like him that the Berlin Wall, then the iron curtain, fell and that Europe was finally able to reunite. 500 million Europeans will still recognise him for this”. (A.B./trans/rh)