BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

16/05/2006

Interpol stung by EU boycott of Belarus meeting

By Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent

BERLIN (Reuters) - The head of Interpol on Monday criticised as "unfathomable" and "outrageous" a European Union boycott of a meeting of the world police body in Belarus.

Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said he would press ahead with this week's European regional conference despite the boycott, part of the EU's drive to isolate Belarus after condemning March's presidential elections there as flawed.

But he said only about a dozen of Interpol's 46 European members had so far said they would attend.

Several agenda points had been dropped, including a briefing on security arrangements at next month's soccer World Cup in Germany and, ironically, a discussion on opening an Interpol office inside the Brussels-based EU.

The EU decision was "unfathomable to me from a law enforcement perspective", Noble said in a telephone interview, saying the 25-nation bloc could have found other ways to make a political protest.

"Why use an apolitical organisation, a meeting of police professionals, to send a political message, when the vehicles they usually have for sending a political message -- calling your ambassadors back, closing your embassies, sanctions -- are not being sent?" he said.

"If you can have an embassy there without endorsing the practices of a government, why can't you have a police meeting?"

An EU official in Brussels said the decision was taken last week to remain consistent with the bloc's policy towards Belarus, after Interpol declined to move the meeting elsewhere.

The EU has already imposed a visa ban on some 30 officials including President Alexander Lukashenko, described by the United States as Europe's last dictator, and said on Monday it may impose an asset freeze in the next few days.

Noble was particularly aggrieved that Interpol's four European regional vice-presidents, all from EU countries, were prevented from attending its own meeting.

"That is outrageous from my perspective because it violates our constitution and is an attempt to influence our independence," he said.

He declined to comment on last month's jailing of the main Belarussian opposition leader for two weeks, or a two-year forced labour sentence imposed on an opposition activist last week for spraying graffiti on walls.

"The holding of a meeting by an international organisation is by no means an endorsement of the politics or politics of the government where the meeting is being held," he said.

He said countries that will attend include eight former Soviet republics, Iceland, Norway and Serbia and Montenegro.

(Additional reporting by Ingrid Melander in Brussels)

Source:

http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-05-16T070622Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-249402-1.xml&archived=False