Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Aleksander Lukashenko

"LandepNews"
EU Recalls Ambassadors From Belarus
Aleksander Lukashenko
Belarus and the European Union stats continued their diplomatic spat over the calling of ambassadors, as the European Union announced on Tuesday it was recalling all its ambassadors from the former Soviet republic in response to the decision made by the authoritarian regime in Minsk to ask the EU and Polish ambassadors to leave.
The move comes after sanctions imposed on Belarus for human rights issues, and is expected to further isolate the country from Europe, and get it closer to the Russian Federation, with which it has an alliance.
Catherine Ashton, EU foreign affairs chief, announced late on Tuesday that all the EU diplomats would be leaving Minsk, hours after the foreign ministry in Belarus announced that the ambassadors from Poland and EU must go. Belarus also said that it was withdrawing its ambassadors from EU and Poland.
Ashton said that the ambassadors were been withdrawn for consultations in the capitals, and that the EU member countries would recall the Belarusian ambassadors to the foreign ministers. Minsk did not make any comment to Ashton’s announcement.
The European Union Council on Monday voted to add 21 names to a list of 200 Belarusian officials who are prevented from traveling to the EU, and face assets freeze. The move comes as a result of the persecution against the opposition in Belarus, following the elections in December 2010, which the opposition consider to have been rigged.
On that occasion, the president Aleksandr Lukashenko got a fourth term in office, and the opposition accused his regime of having tempered with the vote. Many members of the opposition were jailed by the regime.
The president of the European Parliament Martin Schulz decried the move of the Belarusian regime as an “hostile act.” In turn, the German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle said that Belarus is the last dictatorship in Europe and that it was unacceptable to see how the rights of the citizens are being violated in Europe.
The president Lukashenko has been in office since 1994, and has been ruling the country in a Soviet manner, cracking down on opposition and independent media. Though it is member of a Russia-Belarus union, Belarus accused Russia of wanting to steal its national economic assets.
Lukashenko’s double play is well known since the time he was playing the pro-European note before December 2010 in order to impress the people who were expected to vote for him. On that occasion, he succeeded in angering the president Medvedev with his accusations against Moscow.
The Union State, or the Commonwealth of Belarus and Russia, was formed in April 1996, but the union was never completed, mainly because of Lukashenko’s character and of Russia’s need not to be associated with his image.
However, this union was the base for the proposal of the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin to form a new union, the Eurasian Union, which is expected to be operational by 2015 and to include most of the states that were part of the Soviet Union.
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