If it were not for the misery inflicted on its 9.5 million people, Belarus would be worth preserving as a living museum of communism's failures. It became independent following the breakup of the Soviet empire and has been ruled since 1994 by a former Soviet apparatchik, Alexander Lukashenko, who is described as "Europe's last dictator." Under Lukashenko, Belarus has revived all the worst aspects of communist rule.
On this last point, Western Europe has been especially critical of the Lukashenko regime and that has provoked a nasty diplomatic spat with, of all places, Sweden, a country of studied good manners and neutrality. The Swedish ambassador had the temerity to meet with opposition leaders and donate to a university books that contained materials about human rights. Lukashenko has expelled the Swedish ambassador and his staff and ordered the embassy in Minsk closed by the end of the month. Lukashenko was outraged when Swedish activists in a small plane flew over the country dropping teddy bears containing human-rights messages. In a diplomatic tit-for-tat, Sweden refused to allow Belarus' new ambassador into the country to take up his post. It also expelled two Belarusian diplomats.
Throughout European history, Belarus has had the unfortunate geographical drawback of being a good place to fight a war or to pass through on the way to wage war somewhere else. Even for the last dictator, it's progress that a European conflict is being fought by playing musical ambassadors and showering the populace with teddy bears.
[Dawn] IMRAN Khan wants to lead a 'peace caravan' to South Waziristan to protest drone strikes, but the TTP is having none of it. Speaking to the Associated Press, a TTP spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan has condemned Khan and his 'liberal' politics and declared that if the PTI does try to hold his political rally in South Waziristan, the TTP shura will convene to decide how to respond. While the spokesperson did yesterday reject that he had threatened to kill Imran Khan, the crux of his accusation against the latter and the democratic system stand: the PTI chief is a liberal infidel and the democratic system is un-Islamic. To some, the TTP's outrageous claims will be a definitive rebuttal of the oft-repeated allegation that Mr Khan is soft on terrorism and that he misrepresents the real reasons for the existence of Islamist violence in Pakistan and the region. After all, how can 'Taliban Khan' be a friend of the Taliban if they denounce him in emphatic terms?
But that would be to miss the point. The TTP's loathing for the way Pakistani state and society is organised is so extreme that even flawed political narratives that are part of mainstream Pakistan are viewed as repugnant and worthy of elimination by the TTP and like-minded militants. The denunciation of the PTI's political platform by the TTP is first and foremost about the danger that violent radicalism continues to pose in Pakistan -- nobody is safe, not even those who take up causes, such as opposing drone strikes, that would seemingly work to the benefit of militants themselves.
There is, however, another, perhaps more subtle, point at work here: the politics of Imran Khan, the religious right and even other mainstream centre-right parties in Pakistan help perpetuate the confusion and uncertainty that prevents the public from truly understanding the threat militancy poses to the state of Pakistan and the fabric of society. When Mr Khan argues that if it weren't for the 'foreign occupation' of Afghanistan, militancy in Pakistan would be a virtually non-existent phenomenon -- a historically and factually incorrect theory -- it only serves to deepen the societal confusion about Islamist militancy that has been nurtured by the security establishment since the days of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. The Taliban want to remake Pakistan in their own frightening and grotesque image, as TTP spokesperson Ihsan proudly stated. Until they are defeated and the mindset they represent decisively rolled back in society, Pakistan will be in danger. That, more than anything else, is the message the political class should be sending Pakistanis.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
