John Kampfner: Who will fight Europe's last dictator?
[John Kampfner is chief executive ofIndex on Censorship and author of'Freedom for Sale'.]
On the morning after elections were rigged in Europe's last dictatorship and KGB thugs beat up and arrested presidential candidates, the home page of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website led with a tribute to Brian Hanrahan and a warning about the weather.
Hanrahan was an excellent journalist and lovely man. Snow was certainly causing havoc at our hapless airports. But the fact that these two stories were given greater prominence than an act of thuggery in Belarus, a country on the doorstep of the European Union, says everything one needs to know about the priorities of British foreign policy.
Later in the day, the Europe minister, David Liddington, put out a proforma statement of rebuke. Forty-eight hours after that, William Hague finally mustered the energy to express his "extremely serious concerns" at "what appear to be forced recantations". The Foreign Secretary offered no view about the rigged elections, even though OSCE monitors declared the honesty of the outcome to be either "bad" or "very bad" in half of Belarus's polling stations. Hague's mild statement was sandwiched between departmental praise for improved relations with the Netherlands and a five-year strategy for South Georgia and the South Sandwich islands.
Compare this to his language in 2006, when President Alexander Lukashenko last stole the elections. It was time, the then shadow Foreign Secretary declared, to support the people of Belarus "and take a harder line against a government that is forfeiting its legitimacy, and it is certainly time for more European governments to say so".
Everywhere one looks, authoritarian regimes have never had it so good. Democracy promotion is as good as dead – not that it really functioned as a coherent philosophy. A number of facts have caused its demise...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
On the morning after elections were rigged in Europe's last dictatorship and KGB thugs beat up and arrested presidential candidates, the home page of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website led with a tribute to Brian Hanrahan and a warning about the weather.
Hanrahan was an excellent journalist and lovely man. Snow was certainly causing havoc at our hapless airports. But the fact that these two stories were given greater prominence than an act of thuggery in Belarus, a country on the doorstep of the European Union, says everything one needs to know about the priorities of British foreign policy.
Later in the day, the Europe minister, David Liddington, put out a proforma statement of rebuke. Forty-eight hours after that, William Hague finally mustered the energy to express his "extremely serious concerns" at "what appear to be forced recantations". The Foreign Secretary offered no view about the rigged elections, even though OSCE monitors declared the honesty of the outcome to be either "bad" or "very bad" in half of Belarus's polling stations. Hague's mild statement was sandwiched between departmental praise for improved relations with the Netherlands and a five-year strategy for South Georgia and the South Sandwich islands.
Compare this to his language in 2006, when President Alexander Lukashenko last stole the elections. It was time, the then shadow Foreign Secretary declared, to support the people of Belarus "and take a harder line against a government that is forfeiting its legitimacy, and it is certainly time for more European governments to say so".
Everywhere one looks, authoritarian regimes have never had it so good. Democracy promotion is as good as dead – not that it really functioned as a coherent philosophy. A number of facts have caused its demise...