Washington-based think tank Freedom House was unimpressed by liberalization recently declared by Belarusian authorities. Fair enough - Belarus does not have a single TV or radio station which would be critical of the its government. Poland did a good job in supporting Belsat, the only independent TV station broadcasting to Belarus, but its influence is still marginal.
Is Belarus sliding into the realm of notoriously corrupt Third World states? New scandal in Vienna involved Belarusian leader and resembled exploits of corrupt politicians from some African and Asian states.
On 26 April 1986, a human error and the Soviet equipment caused the Chernobyl disaster - the largest technological catastrophe ever. For many days Soviet authorities attempted to conceal the scale of the disaster. The Soviet Union admitted that an accident had occurred only after radiation levels set off alarms at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden.
The world has recently witnessed the overthrown Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev descend from the ominous volcanic clouds in Mink, ending the rumors over his whereabouts and further damaging Belarus’ international image. Ousted in an April 7 uprising, Bakiev first fled to Kazakhstan and on April 19 was safely delivered to the Belarusian capital by Alyaksandr Lukashenka's personal security services.
The ousted leader of Kyrgyzstan said Wednesday from exile in Belarus that he is still president of his Central Asian country. Kurmanbek Bakiyev was deposed in an April 7 uprising that left 85 people dead in the Kyrgyz capital. He fled last week to neighboring Kazakhstan and arrived in the Belarusian capital earlier this week.
Below is an overview of position of Belarus in various international rankings. The overview suggests that although human potential of the country is relatively good, the country has serious problems with freedom. As a result, the realization of this potential is blocked.
Efficiency of official gatherings is often reversely proportional to the number of people invited. This rule held true even for the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC Apr. 12-13. Hosting 47 nations without singling out any of them was a feat accomplished not only at the expense of traffic disruptions inconveniencing DC residents, but also at the expense of meaningful and binding commitments.
Kurmanbek Bakiev, the ousted President of Kyrgystan, declined the offer of political asylum in Belarus. Speaking to his supporters in the south of his country Bakiyev shared his decision and the news that President Lukashenka was on his side.
Today Belarus is the only country in the region that has not declared a day of national mourning following the death of the Polish president in a plane crash Apr. 10. Lithuania, Ukraine, Czech Republic, and Russia have all declared mourning, and events in Lech Kaczynski’s memory will be held by the EU official bodies.
Like its native country, the discipline of political science in Belarus will take decades to outgrow its Soviet past. After all, most of the country’s contemporary social science luminaries were brought up on the volumes of scientific communism, memorizing the blessings of the socialist revolution and the proletarian dictatorship, and today force-feed their own students with courses like the “Ideology of the Belarusian State.” As a result, the spectre of communist past still haunts the Belarusian academia.
In September 2009, the President of Poland Kaczy
Just as Belarus Digest had
The German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung began its article on Boris Kit's 100th anniversary with a scene from revolutionary Petrograd: