Word: belarusian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2005-2005
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...walks back to prison for the night. None of that has cowed Statkevich. He meets a Time correspondent during his lunch break in a modest café routinely bugged by the local kgb. (Lukashenko's secret police expressly retained the old Soviet acronym to play on Belarusians' ingrained fears.) But the prisoner of conscience doesn't seem to care what listeners might hear. "They packed me away because I said I would run for the presidency again," he says, looking as trim as the lieutenant colonel of Soviet missile forces he once was. "They assigned me to a room with...
...owned and even private enterprises." From these proceeds Lukashenko maintains a Soviet-style welfare state providing basic medical services, education and pensions - though the payouts are meager. Yet relations with Russia remain uneasy: there is no love lost between Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin, says Andrei Sannikov, former Belarusian Deputy Foreign Minister, and the Kremlin is keen to bring Belarus back into Russia's fold. If Moscow were to shut off the oil, Lukashenko's regime would collapse. But for now, the ornery President holds off another democratic revolution on Russia's borders. Lukashenko does that the old-fashioned...
...maintain that supremacy, Lukashenko relies on raw force and on keeping Belarusians dependent on the state. No less than 80% of the population live on federal salaries, pensions, stipends and subsidies. This repressive climate has fueled rumors about the fate of those who oppose the regime. When, in 1999, Gennady Karpenko, a former member of parliament then challenging the President, died of an apparent brain hemorrhage, people were swift to suggest he had been murdered. Three more prominent opposition activists have since disappeared. And in 2000, when a Russian TV cameraman was kidnapped and murdered, some alleged he had been...