Welcome to the refugees

Nicolas Tenzer, on the Poland-Belarus standoff:

The use by the criminal regime of Belarus of migrants, who were purposely brought to this country, is one of the worst abominations of recent months. Most of them are people who are persecuted by murderous regimes and are looking for the slightest opportunity to flee and should be considered as refugees. This tactic, which is an exploitation of the misery of human beings, should not make us forget—because it is also one of Lukashenka’s aims—the brutal repression of this illegitimate president against his opponents.

Read the whole article here

Zapad-2013 continues

Via http://www.tvr.by/eng/news.asp?id=10270&cid=16

Military training "Zapad-2013" continues

The large landing ships of the Northern, Baltic and Black Sea forces involved in the strategic exercises "Zapad-2013" set the course for Kaliningrad where they will disembark the Belarusian landing troops. The troops will participate in the maneuvers in anti-aircraft and anti-diversionary defense of the ship formation. According to the plan of the military training, the Belarusian military men will also participate in the final stage of "Zapad-2013" on the polygons of the Baltic fleet.

Gazeta.ru: Oslo/Belarus connection

According to Gazeta.ru, Belarusian oppositionists claim that Anders Behring Breivik has connections with Belarus which went far beyond his ostensible interest in Viking graves and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (he visited the country as a tourist in 2005). Party of Patriots leader Mikhail Reshetnikov is quoted as saying that that earlier in 2011 Breivik may have received paramilitary training from former members of the Belarusian KGB. See also this link.

Belarus bombing suspects

Both of the detained suspects in the April 11 Minsk metro bombing are native citizens of Belarus, Kommersant reports.

Update (4.14): the number of suspects has now risen to 5.

Sphere of influence

Hundreds under arrest in Belarus

Timoshenko charged

No Eastern Partner

The European Union is currently launching something called an "Eastern Partnership", which is designed to cement links with six neighbours: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus. Quite why Belarus has been included in the "reach-out" plan is something of a mystery. If Belarus accepts the invitation to attend the Eastern Partnership summit in Prague on May 7, this will grant the republic a legitimacy it clearly does not deserve, in view of the widespread repression that is still taking place within it. Now Maidan writes that one of the leaders of the Belarus opposition who is also Co-ordinator of Charter 97

has rejected an invitation to attend events connected with the EU Summit in Prague. He believes the invitation issued to Lukashenko to be a grave mistake. He names just three political prisoners - Mikalai Autukhovich, Yury Lyavonau, Uladzimir Asipenka and says that the first has been on hunger strike for more than a week demanding an open trial.

“Political repressions go on in our country, many Belarusians have had to emigrate due to political persecution, the authorities refuse to register political parties and NGOs, peaceful demonstrations are brutally dispersed and banned, we do not enjoy even minimum freedom of speech, youth activists are unlawfully drafted for military service. The authorities don’t investigate the cases of kidnapped opposition leaders and a journalist although the international community suspects them of involvement to these crimes. I think inviting Dictator Lukashenko to Prague when demands to release political prisoners and stop political repressions have not been met was a great mistake.
That’s why I have taken the decision not to go to Prague.”

Cyber attack

RFE/RL, on the mass cyber attack which peaked on Monday, hitting its broadcast services and making them inaccessible to the outside world:

The attack, which started on April 26, intially targeted the website of RFE/RL's Belarus Service, but quickly spread to other sites. Within hours, eight RFE/RL websites (Belarus, Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Tatar-Bashkir, Radio Farda, South Slavic, Russian, and Tajik) were knocked out or otherwise affected.

The "denial-of-service" (DOS) attack was intended to make the targeted website unavailable to its users, according to RFE/RL's Director of Technology Luke Springer. "The way this is normally done is by flooding the target website with fake requests to communicate, thereby using up all [the website's] free sources and rendering the site useless to all the legitimate users," Springer said.

Hardball

As the evidently manufactured “dispute” between Russia and Belarus about energy prices is played out before a credulous Europe, the Washington Post comments on the resulting disarray:

Western governments are watching Mr. Putin’s hardball tactics with concern; yesterday they called for an immediate resumption of supplies through the Belarusan pipeline. They do not, however, have a policy for countering the Russian threat. Even the members of the European Union cannot agree among themselves on whether to appease Russia — by offering new long-term contracts and capital for investment in oil and gas projects — or push back, which they could do by insisting that Mr. Putin sign an international “energy charter” that would curtail his monopolistic practices. The attack on Belarus ought to rule out the appeasement option.”

(via CH)

The Belarus of the West?

On Hogmanay, Andrew Sullivan is posting from Scotland, and has something to say about it:

20% of Scots see themselves as being primarily “British” - down from 38% in 1979. 78% of Scots now say “Scottish” “best describes” their nationality.

One example of this: the argument has moved on to what sort of Scotland we’d see post-independence. In one corner there are those like the exiled Scots historian Niall Ferguson who see a sad, shrivelled country that has abandoned even the memory of its glory years. Scotland, he quips, is “the Belarus of the west.”

Ferguson - like many Scots in exile views his native heath with great ambivalence (a sentiment not so often shared by exiles from other countries, in my experience). Certainly surveying the solidly-statist, rock-solid consensus that prevails in Scotland one’s forced to fear that there might be 20 years of appalling government before prosperity and progress returned. (The Scottish conservatives - who would fit solidly into the Democratic party in the United States - are considered dangerous radicals when, that is, anyone remembers to consider them at all.)

On the other hand, there are advantages (currently under threat) to be gained by living in Scotland, as this blog points out, quoting an op-ed article by Gerald Warner in Scotland on Sunday:

Labour proposes to use its control of Holyrood to demolish the defences of Scottish personal liberties and harmonise our laws with those of England, as in pre-devolution times. South of the Border, the DNA of 3.46 million people is stored in police records, the highest number in the world - more than in Putin’s Russia. That is an embryonic police state.

A Happy New Year to readers of A Step At A Time.