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December 29, 2005
A New Iron Curtain, 'Tween Minsk And Warsaw?
Compare and contrast: Poland and Belarus. Hot on the high heels of Alexander Lukashenko's embargo on non-Belarussian models comes a dour and lumbering autocratic attack on Johns Hopkins graduate student Iryna Vidanava's Student Thought, "perhaps the most edgy and professional publication left in Belarus:"
"We don't know why this issue became a target," Vidanava says, holding one of the few remaining copies of the magazine's most recent publication. The government claimed it was printed with "dangerous ink," she says, with a sardonic laugh. The cover story is about shoplifting and shows an attractive young woman with various purloined goods stuffed into the top of a pair of long, sexy stockings. It's a typical cover, and fairly racy for Belarus, where state media manage to be both dull and paranoid, and rarely deal with serious social issues. Vidanava assumes that the crackdown is election-related.
While Lukashenko's lumpen tyranny confronts dangerous ink, the Polish government faces up to other dangers:
"This is a very difficult decision," Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz told reporters, "but we take into consideration the fact that the mandate of U.N. stabilization forces has been extended to the whole of 2006 and, secondly, strong requests of Iraqi authorities that we stay there."
Will Lukashenko's regime leach its disordered illiberty across regional borders, poisoning Eastern Europe in the cradle of its freedom?
Posted by James G. Poulos at December 29, 2005 08:58 PM
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