Warsaw, 30/09/2011 (Agence Europe) - The European Union will not cooperate with Belarus until the members of the opposition being held in prison are released, stated European Council Herman Van Rompuy at the Eastern Partnership summit on Friday 30 September.
“EU policy towards Belarus is clear. We can not re-engage fully with Belarus without clear progress towards democratisation and respect for human rights”, Van Rompuy said. He called for “the immediate release and rehabilitation of all political prisoners and the engagement in a genuine political dialogue with the opposition”.
On the previous day, following a meeting with the Belarusian opposition, he brandished the threat of further sanctions. “We encourage the Belarusian authorities to remedy the situation in the country in line with the EU position. We will continue to monitor the situation and we stand ready to react if necessary”, he stated.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was more radical. She called for more robust sanctions on the part of the European Union, after a meeting with the Belarusian opposition. She stressed that the regime's treatment of the opposition was absolutely unacceptable. In a statement to journalists, the spokesman for the German government specified that new sanctions should concern officials from Belarusian industry and the legal authorities involved in the crackdown on opponents, Bloomberg discloses.
Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk, for his part, proposed financial aid in favour of Belarus, in exchange for free elections and re-establishment of the amnesty for prisoners arrested during protests at the time of the last presidential elections. There should be a series of measures for a democratic Belarus prepared by European experts with the Belarusian civil society, which should include all assistance mechanisms and thus encourage Belarus, including the authorities, along the road to democracy, allowing economic reforms to be set in place, he said. Aid would amount to €9 billion with IMF participation. Tusk also advocates the creation of a fund for democracy and civil society, saying that this was the first time the EU had shown solidarity with Belarus. However, he said, strong guarantees are being requested in exchange, including the holding of elections that are neither brutal nor rigged, as was the case in December 2010.
Belarus was noticeable at the summit by its absence. A spokesman for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Marcin Bosacki, deplored the fact that Belarus had boycotted the summit, saying: “We regret that the Belarusian regime is isolating a nation of 10 million people from cooperation with Europe that would be advantageous to it”. President Alexander Lukashenko, on whom the EU has imposed a visa ban, has been declared persona non grata in Warsaw. Europeans had therefore invited his foreign minister, Sergei Martynov, to stand in for him but the latter expressed his displeasure by not attending. He denounced unprecedented discriminatory measures that, he said, represent obvious violation of the founding principles of the Eastern Partnership as decided in Prague in 2009. Without Belarus, he added, the Eastern Partnership would be devoid of meaning.
The president of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, regretted that the final resolution of the Eastern Partnership summit did not evoke the situation in Belarus. All that an annexed declaration said was that it had been impossible to come to a common position on the subject of Belarus, or even an attitude that should be adopted towards that country, Buzek concluded. (VW/CG/transl.jl)