BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

17/04/2009

Belarus leader to travel to Italy, meet pope

ROME, April 17 (Reuters) - Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko -- long shunned by the West -- will travel to Italy and meet the pope later this month, Italy's foreign minister and the Vatican told Reuters on Friday.

News of Lukashenko's trip to Italy came ahead of an announcement in Minsk that Belarus was also invited to an EU summit with ex-Soviet states in Prague next month, in another possible sign of thawing relations with the West.

Lukashenko, long accused of crushing fundamental rights in his former Soviet republic, faced an EU travel ban until last year. His last official trip to a Western nation was a visit to France in 1995, though he has since attended U.N. events in New York and made unofficial trips to some European countries.

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said in an interview that he intended to receive Lukashenko when he comes to Italy on April 26, principally for a visit to the Vatican.

"I think that our protocol people are still organising. Certainly, I'll see him. I don't know the agenda of the (Italian) president or prime minister," Frattini added.

The Vatican said Lukashenko, who describes himself as an "Orthodox atheist", would meet Pope Benedict during the trip, possibly on April 27.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, made a landmark trip to Belarus last year and met Lukashenko there. He was the first senior Vatican official to visit Belarus, where the Orthodox Church is predominant but Roman Catholics account for one in seven of the 10 million residents.

U.S. officials for years described Belarus as "the last dictatorship in Europe" and Lukashenko, in power since 1994, faced Western accusations of stamping out opposition by jailing activists, muzzling the media and rigging elections. But Belarus has taken steps to appeal to the EU, such as releasing political prisoners last year, allowing independent media to publish and holding an election with improved procedures, though short of international standards.

In response, the EU suspended its travel ban on Lukashenko and about 40 other officials last year and extended the suspension in March for a further nine months.

He now faces a delicate balancing act, with Russia pressing Minsk to recognise the separatist Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a step which the EU opposes.

Frattini also said he supported inviting Belarus to a summit in Prague in May between the European Union and six ex-Soviet states -- the Eastern Partnership -- seen as vital to EU hopes of weaning itself off Russian energy.

Frattini said he believed "the correct answer must be that of inviting the countries to the Eastern Partnership. Then, every country decides what is the level of participation.

Source:

http://www.kyivpost.com/world/39815

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