WILL THE US BOMB MINSK?

By Arnold Schoelzel

[This article published in: Junge Welt, 6/21/2006 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web,  http://www.jungewelt.de/2006/06-21/047.php?print=1.]


In the style of that world ruler who collapsed militarily before Moscow, US president George W. Bush declared to Belarus in an executive order published on Monday in Washington: “There is simply no place for a regime like this in a free Europe.” After similar threats in Washington, US-NATO bombs fell in different locations of the world in the last decades, intensifying in the last years.

On May 18, the European Union reinforced its sanctions against the government of Belarus president Alexander Lukaschenko. His bank accounts and the bank accounts of 35 other persons are frozen. Lukaschenko resigned remarking that whoever finds his foreign account could keep it. The EU imposed a prohibition on money transfers with Belarus. On April 10, the European Union foreign ministry issued a travel ban for 31 persons from Belarus. Switzerland joined this ban. The reason was the March 19 election in the eastern European country where Lukaschenko was reelected president with 82.6 percent of the votes. This result was unpopular in the West.

Unconcerned like the EU about international law or civilized norms in international relations, Bush on the eve of the EU-US summit followed the Brussels pattern and froze the accounts of Lukaschenko and nine others from Belarus. In his leadership role in the free world, the US president rhetorically admonished Europeans. The Texan made the 2000 election winner by decision of a US governor related to him and a friendly court charges that some members of the government of Belarus and others “undermine Belarus’ democratic processes and institutions.”

The US initiator of illegal wars with hundreds of thousands of dead, the inventor of “torture light” that from his view agrees with the Geneva Convention and of “extraordinary rendition,” worldwide kidnapping by US authorities, criticizes Lukaschenko and others for “fundamentally undemocratic elections,” violations of human rights by political repression including imprisonments and disappearances of persons, corruption etc. All this is an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” Belarus is so dangerous that the US president declared a “national emergency” and in a message to Congress denies the Belarus government’s right to exist and the sovereignty of the state. There is “simply” no place for “this regime.”

Two weeks ago Belarus reacted to the travel ban of the EU and the US with corresponding counter-measures. European and US politicians can no longer travel there, a foreign minister spokesperson declared in Minsk on June 8 without naming any names. “The list includes the most sinister political figures who are intent on doing no good to our country.”