Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------------------------US adopts 'Contras policy' in communist Belarus
FROM ALICE LAGNADO IN MOSCOW
THE US Embassy in Belarus has admitted that it is pursuing a policy similar
to that in 1980s Nicaragua, in which anti-government Contra rebels were
funded and supported. President Lukashenko, a dictatorial Communist, is
heading for victory in presidential elections on Sunday. In an unusual
admission, Michael Kozak, the US Ambassador to Belarus, said in a letter to a
British newspaper that America’s “objective and to some degree methodology
are the same” in Belarus as in Nicaragua, where the US backed the Contras
against the left-wing Sandinista Government in a war that claimed at least
30,000 lives. Mr Kozak was not available for comment. Washington said
recently that allegations of state-sanctioned death squads operating in
Belarus, Europe’s last bastion of communism, were “credible”. Two former
state prosecutors, who have been granted political asylum in America, have
said that victims were murdered with a special pistol and buried in a
cemetery in Minsk. The ambassador’s disclosure has coincided with moves by
the Bush Administration to gain increased political influence in Eastern
Europe and the Balkans and with reports in several European newspapers, which
said that former US servicemen believed to be working for the CIA were
escorted with Albanian guerrillas from a village in the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia earlier this year. Earlier in his career, Mr Kozak
served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs
under Presidents Reagan and Bush, working in Panama, Nicaragua and El
Salvador, and was Ambassador to Cuba. While Mr Kozak was serving in
Nicaragua, Mr Reagan famously compared the Contras to the French Resistance
fighters. President Lukashenko is popular and most Belarussians fear that a
new, pro-Western leader would bring the poverty experienced by many Russians
and Ukrainians after the transition to a market economy. A spokesman for the
US Embassy in Minsk told The Times that the embassy helped to fund 300
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including non-state media, but did not
fund political parties, since that is banned by law. He admitted that some of
the NGOs were linked to those who were “seeking political change”.
Click here: The Times
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