Condoleezza Rice, President George W Bush's nominee for secretary of state, has hinted at the direction of future US foreign policy by identifying six "outposts of tyranny" around the world.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4187361.stmSo why is it an outpost of tyranny?
Less bizarre than it seemsThe landslide in Belarus reflects its demonised leader's refusal to back market fundamentalism
Mark Almond in Minsk
Tuesday March 21, 2006
The Guardian
After the death of Slobodan Milosevic, the west did not need to look far to find another bogeyman. Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus was on hand and facing re-election.
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No communist-era throwback, Belarus has an evolving market economy. But the market is orientated towards serving the needs of the bulk of the population, not a tiny class of nouveaux riches and their western advisers and money launderers. Unlike in Georgia or Ukraine, officials are not getting richer as ordinary folk get poorer. The absence of endemic corruption among civil servants and police is one reason why the wave of so-called "coloured revolutions" stopped before Minsk.
But even if the government in Minsk is not corroded by corruption, its opposition depends upon support from abroad. If people resent anyone for getting rich quick undeservedly they resent the opposition types who receive lavish subsidies from the west to promote civil society and flaunt the latest iPod.
The irony of the west preaching civil society and shock therapy at the same time is that you cannot have both. Western advisers made economic transformation a priority, but wherever their advice was followed it was poverty, not pluralism, that resulted. Across the old communist bloc "shock therapy" enriched a few dozen oligarchs and their foreign economic advisers, but the mass unemployment it caused and the collapse of public spending it demanded smashed the foundations of the civil society emerging under Gorbachev.
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Belarus is far from perfect, but it is a country where masses of ordinary people are getting on with life and getting a bit better off. That is why Lukashenko inspires fear and loathing in the thinktanks and foreign ministries of the west. By saving Belarus from mass unemployment he set a terrible example. What if the neighbours tried to copy it?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1735464,00.html