BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

02/08/2006

Latvia moves to expel Belarusian diplomat

Riga - The Latvian Foreign Ministry declared a senior Belarusian diplomat persona non grata on Wednesday, escalating the Baltic state's ongoing row with its eastern neighbour.

The first secretary of the Belarusian embassy is accused of 'actions inconsistent with diplomatic status,' a Foreign Ministry press release stated. The diplomat now has 24 hours to leave the country.

Neither Latvian nor Belarusian sources would comment on the ban. However, it comes barely a week after Belarusian security forces raided the residence of a Latvian diplomat in Minsk, confiscated his possessions and accused him of distributing pornography.

'Of course it's linked with the Minsk affair. It was a provocation, and the first secretary is paying for it - it's only strange that it's not the ambassador himself,' Atis Lejins of the Latvian Foreign Policy Institute told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Belarus's new ambassador to Latvia, who only presented his papers on 20 July, is already under pressure. The Latvian foreign minister refused on Tuesday to meet with him until the situation has been explained - effectively freezing the accreditation process.

Latvia has also issued a protest note accusing Belarus of breaching the 1961 Vienna Convention on the treatment of diplomats and informed the EU's presidency of the issue. Belarus has not yet replied, foreign office sources state.

The row comes at a time when the Belarusian regime is being increasingly shunned by Western democracies. Latvia and Belarus have some economic ties, but Latvia is known to support Belarusian dissidents and has criticized its neighbour's human rights record.

However, Belarus' authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko is supported by regional superpower Russia, and has so far shown no inclination to relinquish the reins of power under Western pressure.

'Belarus doesn't need ties with the West: Lukashenko has nothing to lose,' said Lejins. 'Belarus wouldn't work without Russia, but with Russian support, and the Orange Revolution going backwards in Ukraine, they might think it's time to put an end to democracy.

'It will be interesting to see what happens in the EU,' he added.

The EU itself may not wield much influence, however: Lukashenko has a long history of picking fights with Western diplomats. In the late 1990s, he threatened to evict dozens of NATO ambassadors from their residences, claiming the city sewage system needed maintenance.

More recently his pro-Moscow government ejected Polish diplomats from the country, claiming they were spies. He has also shrugged off EU sanctions banning himself and senior colleagues from travelling to the west, calling such moves 'silly.'

For the moment, therefore, Latvian diplomats are more likely to be concerned with a response from Minsk than from Brussels.

Source:

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/europe/article_1186390.php/Latvia_moves_to_expel_Belarusian_diplomat