BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS
DATE:
18/03/2008
British PR maestro may work for Belarus
LONDON (Reuters) - A British PR maestro who helped Margaret Thatcher win three elections is preparing to work for Belarus, dubbed by U.S. officials "the last dictatorship in Europe".
Timothy Bell visited the former Soviet state last week and met President Alexander Lukashenko, who is accused by the West of trampling on human rights and rigging polls, including his re-election to a third term in 2006.
"I have been asked to make a proposal to improve the external reputation of Belarus," Lord Bell told Reuters in London on Tuesday. "Lukashenko thinks it's a pity that to make friends with some countries, you need to be an enemy of others."
After the United States and the European Union banned him from entry and a gas row with Russia last year, Lukashenko has cultivated friendships and energy deals with states with poor relations with the West, like Venezuela and Iran.
Belarus has made an effort to improve ties with the EU and has released some opposition activists. The EU has cautiously praised Minsk for this and said relations may improve as the country gears up for a September parliamentary election.
And investors' interests were piqued last year after Standard & Poor's and Moody's assigned the nation of 10 million its maiden ratings. Lukashenko signalled that the Soviet-style control over the economy would be loosened.
But two opposition activists, including Alexander Kozulin who ran against Lukashenko in the 2006 election, are still in jail. Last week U.S. ambassador Karen Stewart left the country temporarily following requests from the authorities that she leave.
Bell was behind the campaign to publicise the poisoning of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, a case that badly strained relations between Britain and Russia.
He stressed that the object of any public relations campaign would be the country of Belarus rather than its leader and that he had not yet been hired by Lukashenko. But the president was warm towards him last week.
"I think it will be pleasant for you to work in our country, with authorities which are persecuted -- perhaps less so by Europe, than by the United States," he told Bell.
(Reporting by Kate Kelland in London and Andrei Makhovsky in Minsk; writing by Sabina Zawadzki; editing by Andrew Roche)
Source:
Archive
