Belarus As Europe’s Sole Saddam’s Supporter :: Charter'97 :: News

Among CIS member-states one can find those that are openly supportive of the anti-Iraqi coalition and those, which do that in secret. There are also those, which are cautiously calling into question the military campaign and those, which wholeheartedly curse the warmongers. But there’s only one country – the Republic of Belarus – whose leader demonstratively upholds Saddam Hussein, wrote the journalist of the German “Frankfurter Allgemeine” Markus Vener.

“One can hardly imagine a greater divergence of views. Their attitude to the war, strange as it sounds, has little to do with the religion, professed by the CIS leaders – Islam or Orthodoxy. The main defining factors are geopolitical and economic interests of the post-Soviet countries.”

From this point of view, pro- and anti-American positions of most of the CIS state leaders look pretty motivated. For instance, Kazakhstan’s Muslim president Nazarbaev criticizes Washington, fearing great losses due to the post-war fall in oil prices. Meantime, Uzbek Muslim president Karimov, visa versa, supports coalition, having received last year from the USA $192mln of aid.

All sorts of rows rocked recently the official Minsk too. However, the Belarusian leader seems to care little about that. Today Belarus is CIS only country, which openly dares support Saddam.

“We got to do everything in our power to help Iraq out in the current complex situation,” – says the Belarusian leader in public (regardless of the fact that Washington had many times chastised Minsk over its cooperation with Hussein’s regime: both contraband shipments of arms to Baghdad and training of the Iraqi air force pilots). The Belarusian leader refers to the anti-Iraqi campaign as “the greatest most blatant and cynical aggression since the 2nd World War”.

Ahead of the war Lukashenko welcomed in Minsk a high-ranking official delegation from Iraq, headed by Baghdad’s mayor, who, among other things, took interest in the sewerage system’s organization. Russian media, however, supposed that in fact the sides negotiated on providing Saddam Hussein with a political shelter in Belarus. However, the mayor of Baghdad only passed regards from Hussein, adding that the Iraqi leader is grateful to the Belarusian nation for being the only European country to support Iraq.