Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko lashed out at the West in an interview on Tuesday, saying he has received little in return for his efforts to improve relations with the EU and the US.
“I cannot even talk about all the steps that I have taken that are very sensitive for us — and the West cast me aside,” said Lukashenko, who is under Western pressure for political reform and broader civil rights in Belarus.
“I have come to understand that there is a huge number of irresponsible politicians in the West,” he said.
In a wide-ranging interview, Lukashenko accused long-time ally Russia of tightening the screws on Belarus by scrapping preferential oil pricing, but stopped short of threatening to torpedo a nascent customs union over the dispute.
He criticized both Moscow and the West for engaging with the leaders who took power in Kyrgyzstan after a violent upheaval last month, and vowed not to hand over ousted Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who has taken refuge in Belarus.
“Russia and the West create a terrible precedent when they support an illegal government that came to power through bloodshed,” he said, adding that any appeal for Bakiyev’s extradition would be “hopeless.”
Moscow’s embrace of Kyrgyzstan’s interim government has sent a potentially alarming signal to Lukashenko, who has relied on Russian economic and political support during his 16-year rule over his landlocked, energy-poor nation of nearly 10 million.
Long shunned by the EU and the US, which accuse him of maintaining power through unfair elections and the harsh suppression of dissent, Lukashenko has sought to improve ties with the West as Moscow has decreased its backing.
But he expressed deep dissatisfaction with the West during the interview and made clear Western leaders should not demand more political reforms unless they are prepared to reciprocate by lifting sanctions and showing more respect.
“There have been some good moves, but this is a process of unrealized hopes, both in the West and on our side. We expected more from the West,” he said. “What we will not tolerate is for somebody to order us around — nobody can shove us from behind.”
“We will take exactly as many steps as the West is ready to take,” Lukashenko said.
After his government released inmates seen in the West as political prisoners and made some concessions on European demands for electoral reforms, the EU suspended travel sanctions it imposed after Lukashenko’s re-election in a 2006 vote that was not recognized by the West.
But it has not lifted the sanctions altogether or returned preferential trade conditions also denied as punishment.
Lukashenko said Western governments will not be satisfied until he is no longer president. But he strongly suggested he would seek another term in a presidential vote early next year.
He said he had not decided whether to run, but added the Belarusian people expect him to do so and that “there are no factors now that would force me to refuse to participate.”
“The West doesn’t like our course and doesn’t like the current president — that’s all there is to it. Let’s be honest,” Lukashenko said. “But the president is elected by the people, not by the West. The sooner the West understands that, the faster we will build normal relations.”
Amid disputes with the Kremlin over oil supplies and Kyrgyzstan, Lukashenko said that “maybe in Russia somebody would like to see a different president here.”
Lukashenko, who pushed though legislation in 2004 that removed presidential term limits, warned both East and West not to hope for a repeat of the Kyrgyz scenario in Belarus.
“No matter how the situation develops here, nobody will have the slightest possibility of ousting those in power here,” he said.
Lukashenko said that Russia’s insistence on charging Belarus duties on oil could jeopardize the customs union it is developing with Belarus and Kazakhstan — the most concrete step by former Soviet republics to create a strong economic alliance. However, he spoke cautiously and stopped short of a threat to withdraw.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might