Posts Tagged ‘lukashenko’
This Is a Terrible Time to Be a Dictator, Mr. Putin
The Moscow Times
The Kremlin and the people are headed toward a new round of conflict starting in September.
Since President Vladimir Putin assumed office in May, several laws have been passed that will clamp down on the opposition, journalists, bloggers and nongovernmental organizations. These include an extrajudicial or administrative procedure for banning specific websites and blogs as well as granting the authorities the right to prosecute anyone who disagrees with Kremlin policy.
The law on NGOs has been one of the most controversial. If foreign-funded NGOs that are deemed by the authorities to be “politically active” fail to register as “foreign agents,” their directors and other top officials within the organizations could be subject to huge fines and prison terms.
Several leading human rights organizations have declared that they will ignore the law and will not register as foreign agents. These include the Moscow Helsinki Group headed by Lyudmila Alexeyeva and the For Human Rights movement headed by Lev Ponomaryov. Both organizations are highly respected in Russia and abroad.
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Editorial: political disqualification
The West’s Olympic boycott of Lukashenko is sending a clear signal to ex-Soviet dictatorships. The West isn’t holding out hope for democratization and has started to see them as the political heirs of the Soviet regime.
The London Olympics organization committee denied accreditation to Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko who also heads the National Olympics committee. May be the International Olympic Committee can still persuade the British authorities and the organization committee to reconsider, but for now the President of Belarus has no access to to the Games for political reasons.
USA and EU didn’t recognize the election results in Belarus in December 2010 when Lukashenko was reelected for a fourth term. The confrontation between the West and Belarus worsened after the protest rallies by those unhappy with the election results were brutally scattered, and afterwards several presidential candidates were sentenced to real prison time in show trials. Now there are several economic sanctions in effect against Belarus, initiated because there are political prisoners in Belarus. Moreover, Lukashenko and several Belarussian officials have been blacklisted from entry in EU and USA. This prohibition may be the formal reason for the denial of Lukashenko’s accreditation.
The Belarussian president evidently foresaw these events. Recently, when meeting the Belarus Olympic sportemen, Lukashenko lamented about the politicization of modern olympics. “This is politics, sometimes dirty politics,” he said. Nevertheless, he ordered his sportsmen to bring as many medals home as possible. And even altered the main Olympic principle “participation is more important than winning”: “It’s winning that’s important for us, not participation,” Lukashenko said.
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